LCANZI is thoughtful about its carbon footprint and seeks to reduce it where possible. Some of the things we do are meet online rather than in person, and minimise air travel (and buy carbon offsets when we do travel by air). We would encourage all lawyers to do the same.
We have also attempted to quantify our carbon footprint. For more information on how to approach this see the GHG Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard which provides a step-by-step guide for companies to use in quantifying and reporting their GHG emissions.
This proved to be a difficult question conceptually, but we decided to adopt a proxy to figure out our footprint. We estimated our footprint by saying conservatively we were responsible for no more than an average New Zealand household worth of emissions. This amounts to 2.0 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2-e) per capita or 8.0 tonnes per family of four (inclusive of 1-2 return flights a year between Auckland and Wellington at 124 kg CO2 per round trip).
Overall, we want to demonstrate the importance of understanding your organisation’s carbon footprint. However, we believe that systemic change is the most important way to solve climate change.