Climate Action Boost and Carbon Accounting
How can we know where to go, if we don’t know where we are?
Carbon Accounting is a way of measuring how much carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are released into the Earths biosphere as a result of various activities. Quantifying and measuring carbon emissions can help us make informed decisions to take steps to reduce that volume and impact.
In November 2020, The National Lottery Community Fund released funding to support community groups to act on climate change through its Climate Action Boost. Aber Food Surplus was one of 35 groups in Wales given funding to cover a variety of environmental reduction activities.
We are an organisation which hopes to lead by example, showcase actions to reduce environmental impact, and act as Ambassadors for sustainability. One of the ways we were keen to utilise this funding, was by using it to help us to try to apply carbon accounting principles to measure the impact of our activities.
At the start of the process, the idea of carbon accounting existed purely as a conceptual idea, the vocabulary vaguely familiar, and the process slightly mystifying.
Thankfully, we had the support of a Renew Wales mentor, to work with us to undertake a scoping study for a Carbon Accounting system. David Thorpe, Founder/Patron of the One Planet Council is an author, journalist, consultant, project manager and inspirational speaker in the fields of rural and urban sustainability, energy efficiency, buildings and renewable energy.
Explaining the differences between Scope 1-3; helping us to determine what items we should consider including; furnishing us with conversion calculations, and sample spreadsheets which we could consider using; whilst cautioning us against the dangers of taking such a deep dive that we used more time and created more carbon emissions trying to calculate the carbon emissions than we could feasibly save by actioning procedural changes in those areas.
First step was in identifying our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions of greenhouse gasses
Scope 1 covers direct emissions (fuel consumed in cars and on site).
Scope 2 covers indirect emissions (electricity used on site for heating and cooling etc).
Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in a value chain (communications such as phone calls, texts, emails, zoom and video streaming; water consumption)
Staff members and volunteers met with each other and with our mentor to collectively determine the specifics of the scoping factors, and then our mentor provided conversion figures within a spreadsheet (from a variety of different sources, referenced in the spreadsheet). These meetings were both illuminating and empowering, and our mentor was patient and generous in sharing his experience and expertise.
Easy wins
The concept of easy wins is where you examine the inputted figures, and use this to identify any ways which as an organisation you can easily reduce or offset carbon emissions. For example, by selecting an environmentally conscious electricity provider for our community hub, our electricity figure in that context is zero; we did try to reduce all of our carbon emissions for electricity in this way, however, as yet, we haven’t been able to convince our current office landlords to switch providers - we haven’t given up though!
Maintaining integrity when looking for easy wins led to some curious questions. When we started considering bringing in a delivery service during lockdown, we imposed a 5 mile cut off to limit our negative environmental impact; we did however operate some delivery routes outside of our self-imposed 5 mile radius, in these cases the delivery routes are the usual journey to the hub which our volunteers took from their home to the hub.
By cancelling all out-of-town deliveries, and restricting ourselves to deliveries which could be made by foot or bike, we could make our impact appear to be significantly less, but our volunteers would still travel to the hub; equally, we could switch to collections only - but then rather than one car making a journey, potentially, multiple cars would be making the same journey. This also led us to question - at the moment we only log journeys made on our behalf, but should we be considering how each of our volunteers makes their way to the hub?
Aber Food Surplus carbon accounting
Once the carbon accounting information existed in the form of a spreadsheet, our confidence in the process grew, it was as though we had a common language to communicate. Using past experience of manipulating and developing complex spreadsheets, progress accelerated. As a team, we set about making use of the document more intuitive. The spreadsheet was re-structured, separating out the conversion figures, so that they could stand separate from the information if/when the conversion figures were refined or re-defined in the future, we would be able to update this information once, and have change simultaneously apply across the document. We also created monthly logging pages so that the volume of information wasn’t overwhelming, and then that date was automatically fed into an overview sheet.
Once we had the structure in place, we were faced with the task of populating it, we chose to look retrospectively over our lockdown activities, so that we could later compare this to our activities outside of lockdown, and also as a point of consideration when thinking which of our lockdown-specific activities we might like to continue forward with.
Sourcing this data was sometimes challenging, for example, many of our volunteers have been reticent about submitting travel claim forms; they didn’t want to reclaim fuel, as they considered this to be a contribution to the efforts of the organisation, so we had to work hard to get them to buy in to this new process. We also occupy a serviced office space, and have not been able to secure accurate information relating to energy usage in the shared building.
Once we have completed the activity of retrospectively entering this information for the period March 2020 to February 2021; identifying any issues with the spreadsheet we will establish an updated document to cover March 2021 to February.
Interesting side benefits
Whilst we aren’t at this time breaking down the carbon accounting figure attributed to the specific food we re-distribute; we are excited to apply the conversion figures to a sample Surplus Selection box, or one of our takeaway meals. We hope that sharing this information will help to further contextualise the impact producing these specific foods which (if we hadn’t intervened) would otherwise have been wasted.
We are also excited to get to the point (once we feel we have minimised our carbon emissions), that we will consider how we might evidence offsetting carbon emissions, perhaps through a future growing project!