Karys Staddon, Production, Data & Insight Analyst shares a follow up from her previous ‘Our Environmental Journey’ blog.

Following on from my recent blog about our environmental sustainability journey, I wanted to share more about how we calculated our organisation carbon footprint and what we learnt…

By 2100, scientific models show us heading for between 2 and 8 degrees of global warming – 8 degrees is unlikely, which is good news because that is considered an extinction level event (FutureLearn). Unfortunately, our current action indicates that the likely outcome will be a 2.8oC rise which is well above the Paris Agreement target of 1.5oC.

The global impact of this will be enormous, with effects not just limited to the extreme weather conditions we are seeing globally, but a likely rise in pollution-related deaths, armed conflict, climate refugees, and devastating effects on biodiversity.

It's easy to feel paralysed by the enormity of this issue and not know where to begin, but the important thing is just to start – start understanding where your organisation is now, to understand where you can take action.

What we did

I started my journey by going in search of some data, specifically how I could calculate our organisation’s carbon footprint. I blocked out some time in my diary and got stuck into this free online course via Futurelearn, recommended by our website developers Supercool. As well as providing a basic understanding about what contributes to a carbon footprint, the course came with a handy template that – once we had dug out the figures – we could populate and view an estimate of our carbon footprint. I could also track back our carbon footprint over the last 4 years to pre-pandemic working and see the impact of our changing working practices.

What we found out

Here’s what happened:

• We reduced the number of desk spaces we were using as our staff team went fully home- and hybrid-working. This reduced our office emissions (gas and electricity) by 74%.
• Our increase in home-working reduced our commute emissions by c.80-90%. Homeworker emissions initially increased by 100% in 2020/21, but have since reduced due to improved accuracy of our calculation for 22/23 data.
• Our in-work travel has reduced: train emissions by 38% and car emissions by 42% since 2019/20. This has been made possible due to new ways of working (e.g. Zoom meetings).
• The equivalent mileage saved by our producer team attending meetings online rather than in person in 22/23 was 31,888 car miles and 14,243 train miles – that’s the equivalent of 8.38 tonnes CO2e. (We wouldn’t expect them to have actually travelled to all of these meetings, but the calculation is indicative of how these new ways of working have kept us in touch without the need to meet in person.)

What next?

The nature of the carbon calculator I used means that only our operational activity (office and home working, travel and supplied services) can be incorporated. This leaves all our project activity – a shared carbon footprint with our activity partners – not accounted for. We’ll need to spend some time considering how we can best begin to understand and address the environmental impact of our projects, hopefully in discussion with our partners.

We’ll continue to monitor our organisational carbon footprint on an annual basis and look for opportunities to reduce it. In the short term I expect this will increase over the next year as we are bringing 4 new members of staff on board over the summer. In addition to the total carbon footprint figure, the carbon calculator provides an ‘intensity value’ (CO2 emissions per person) – so that can provide some context to how our carbon footprint is increasing proportionally to the size of the team.

We will continue to share our learning as we go, and look forward to collaborating with our partners in this area as we move forward.