News
10.07.2020

Our contribution to climate protection

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. This challenge can only be mastered if companies act sustainably. This requires, in particular, that CO2 emissions be reduced to a minimum and unavoidable emissions be compensated for in climate protection projects.

Martens Rechtsanwälte takes this social responsibility very seriously. Long before the COVID-19 crisis, we were already trying to reduce travelling and paper consumption as much as possible, in particular by using electronic file management and modern means of communication as far as possible.

A good example for this is the Basketball Arbitral Tribunal, which we developed and have been administering since 2007 and which can be considered a pioneer in international arbitration regarding sustainable conduct of proceedings. Communication in proceedings has always taken place almost exclusively by electronic means, which has not only saved large amounts of paper in almost 1600 proceedings thus far, but has also prevented many trips due to numerous telephone and video conferences instead of personal meetings.

Furthermore, we have always endeavoured to replace travelling by plane and car with travelling by train as far as possible.

In order to contribute even more to climate protection in the future, we decided at the beginning of this year to compensate for all CO2 emissions that are caused by our business operations. This not only takes into account business trips, but also the energy consumption required for our office premises, the travel to and from work of our individual employees, catering, working materials and any waste created. The CO2 value calculated from these factors is compensated by a payment to climate protection projects.

For the year 2020, we recently made a corresponding payment to atmosfair. Atmosfair has received many awards for sustainable CO2 compensation projects (Atmosfair Test and Comparative Studies).

According to the certificate issued by atmosfair, 24,130 kg of CO2 greenhouse gases have been compensated by our payment. Business trips to be undertaken in the second half of 2020, along with any other unforeseen emissions, will be compensated separately at the end of this year.