How can businesses, organisations and community groups take action?
Declaring a climate emergency
Make climate change a priority for your organisation and set up a group to discuss ideas and initiatives. You may wish to formally declare a climate emergency. You can find more information about doing this on the Climate Emergency website.
You can also find our lots of information and actions you could take at the UK Business Climate Hub.
Calculating your carbon footprint
The carbon footprint of your organisation is a measure of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the activities of your organisation. A detailed guide to carbon footprinting can be downloaded from the Carbon Trust.
Calculating your carbon footprint will help you see where you can make the most difference to the emissions your organisation is responsible for. Calculate and report your carbon footprint annually to show the improvements you are making.
The basic approach is to:
- Scope - decide what emissions you want to calculate. For a simple approach, include emissions from gas, oil or other fuel used in buildings, vehicles or other equipment owned or under your control, (known as Scope 1); and emissions from the production of electricity purchased by your organisation, (known as Scope 2), and don’t include emissions from the production of goods and services you purchase, for example those not under your direct control (known as Scope 3).
- Collect data - you will need to collect data, such as kWh of energy used or amount of fuel purchased. This is usually the most challenging part of producing a carbon footprint.
- Calculate - the data collected will need to be converted into carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) using carbon conversion factors from Gov.UK . These are provided by government and are updated annually. This will calculate your gross carbon emissions.
- Report - noting any actions you have undertaken that save carbon, you can then report both your gross and net carbon footprints (by subtracting your savings from your gross emissions).
For Parish Councils, IMPACT is an online community carbon calculator that can be used to estimate your Parish's own carbon footprint. It is available at impact-tool.org.uk.
Example carbon footprint
Activity |
Activity data (A) |
Activity data units |
Carbon conversion factors* (B) |
Carbon footprint in kg CO2e (A x B) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Electricity |
2,900 |
kWh |
0.2556 |
741 |
Gas |
12,565 |
kWh |
0.18385 |
2,310 |
Business travel (assuming medium sized conventional car) |
562 |
miles |
0.27459 |
154 |
Total |
- |
- |
- |
3,205 kg CO2e =3.205 tonnes CO2e |