Carbon Curious? How we measure your carbon emissions and plan how to reduce them.
Here’s our step-by-step guide to carbon reduction planning.
- Set the Baseline Year. This is the year against which all other years are measured. Usually financial year or calendar year. This measurement period does not usually change.
- Set the ‘Carbon Intensity Metric’. These reflect the fact that businesses grow or shrink over time and are a normalizing factor. They can be things like carbon per employee, carbon per sq.m., per £m turnover etc. It’s perfectly possible to use multiple. These are generally a more insightful measure of carbon performance than the totals.
- We come to you to understand your business and your premises. We need to understand how you use energy, generate waste, etc, and how your process works. We always identify energy and waste savings during our visits.
- Collect raw Data. We will ask you to provide, for the period set, raw data on energy, fuel, waste, water, staff commuting, consumables, major purchased services and for manufacturers, major inputs and outputs. This will in in kWh, litres, tonnes, miles etc. It can also be in £ spent for certain inputs.
- Data analysis. We take the raw data and calculate the carbon equivalent, using the most up-to-date data sets. This will produce a table and a graph like these:
| 2024-25 | |
| Road Fuel |
19.11 |
| Electricity |
2.52 |
| Air Travel |
12.63 |
| Rail travel |
0.04 |
| Office consumables |
0.03 |
| Homeworking |
2.31 |
| Equipment |
236.22 |
| Sub contractors |
10.50 |
| Staff Commuting |
2.49 |
| TOTAL |
285.85 |
- Reduction Planning. This is our magic sauce. Using the wisdom of whole careers in sustainability, we analyse each area of emission and determine how, when, how easily it can be reduced and how long it might take. For example:
- For example, we might say that a vehicle fleet could be decarbonised over ten years, starting in the current year, and year on year, emissions from fuel use will fall by X tonnes.
- We might recommend that replacing a boiler, or installing solar PV might be undertaken with say five years, and have an immediate carbon reduction of Y tonnes.
- We use industry insight to predict how input emissions might fall thanks to technology change.
By doing this for all areas of emission, we can produce a trajectory of how emissions will fall over the next 25 years.
- Action Plan and Targets. Taking the above, we devise an Action Plan, with short, medium and long term actions, each quantified for impact and savings. Our customers know exactly what is the priority, and in which order to do things and when to start.
- Review and Feedback. Our customers must have ownership of targets and plans, so we go through each individual action. Do they want to move faster? Is the pace too fast because of other priorities. Either is fine.
- Support Our customers usually benefit from additional support in delivering their carbon reduction plans. Be that advice and support on technology implementation, staff training, researching alternative materials. We don’t want our clients to feel that their alone on their journey.
- Repeat Carbon reporting isn’t a one-time thing. Best practice is to go through the same process annually in order that progress can be tracked. If you don’t measure, you can’t manage.
Result
The result is an action plan on carbon with SMART objectives that the business has ownership of and is committed to. It has taken away the mystery and uncertainty around acting on carbon to ensure that the business is doing the rights things and in the right order. What’s more, we are always there to provide support, advice and mentoring.