Environment

Our mission is to “Make data work harder to deliver our Net Zero Future”

Icebreaker One (IB1) focuses on data sharing and sustainability. We convene organisations and governments to design and deliver data infrastructure required to share environmental & financial data at market scale. Data infrastructure is essential to the monitoring, assessing, considering or reporting of climate/environment data. Through connecting policy, strategy, risk management and investment to real-world data, we enable climate-ready financial instruments and climate-aware risk management/adaptation.

IB1 work aims to enable environmental principles by enabling decision-makers and investors to access the data required when making key investments or decisions to support the UK’s net-zero and Environmental Improvement Plan policies (including improving environmental quality, efficient resource use, and climate change mitigation). 

How we minimise our environmental impacts

We ensure that Icebreaker One aligns to robust environmental principles through the advice we issue, adopt whole lifecycle design principles and assure the advice we give, we:

• Incorporate environmental standards to ensure advice adheres to recognised standards and frameworks such as ISO140001 
• Operate a procurement process, in which we encourage organisations to publish their corporate ESG and related policies publicly https://ib1.org/terms/procurement
• Work remotely, reducing emissions from offices and commuting. When we do meet in-person, we team members take public transport/trains by default
• Support clients on compliance with relevant laws and regulations wherever they may interact with recommendations made 
• Encourage practices that go beyond compliance, advocating for more practice measures, including openly publishing the Icebreaker Principles which we ask suppliers and collaborators to align to https://ib1.org/icebreaker-principles and https://ib1.org/collaboration 
• We openly publish and adopt Standard Operating Procedures https://ib1.org/sops 
• Our technical services are built to support efficient operations, such as:
  • by being on-demand rather than always-on wherever possible
  • by using the minimum possible resources for deployments
  • by using techniques such as lambdas, data compression and server-side caching to minimise computational effort and data retrievals
  • by periodically auditing for, and discontinuing, unused or redundant resources
  • by monitoring for, and blocking, unwanted bot activity that wastes resources
• Example of how these are put into practice include
  • Our main website (ib1.org) is hosted at a provider that uses 100% renewable energy for their operations, and that minimises water use for cooling https://scaleway.com/en/environmental-leadership 
  • this service is rated green by the Green Web Foundation: https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/green-web-check/?url=perseus-demo-authentication.ib1.org
  • Our open source net-zero data discovery system, https://opennetzero.org, currently rates better than 80% of the web https://www.websitecarbon.com/website/opennetzero-org