Monitoring your carbon footprint

Calculating your organisation’s carbon footprint is an important way to facilitate meaningful decisions about how you adapt your working practices to have less impact on the environment, and contribute positively in the journey to net zero. Whilst we can of course make changes at any point, until you know what your ‘baseline’ is, it can be difficult to make informed decisions.  

At the same time, it is important to do so in a way that suits your organisation and the scale at which you are working. Whilst there is inevitably some extra work involved, it shouldn’t become something that feels burdensome, and we hope some of the events and resources we have planned as part of the This Is Not A Rehearsal campaign will help make life easier.  

Photo by Evie S. on Unsplash 

The average carbon footprint per person in the UK is approximately 6.2 tonnes per year (Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research). However, indicative targets for carbon emissions per person globally to become compatible with the 1.5 °C target suggest that these need to be reduced to 2.5 tonnes by 2030, and even further by 2050 (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies). That’s a drastic reduction, but the best place to start as an organisation is by measuring your current emissions, and identifying where you can make reductions. 

You might want to structure how you do this by integrating carbon recording and reporting into existing processes such as for booking travel or claiming expenses, or when putting together annual budgets and calculating energy costs for buildings.

How can you calculate your carbon footprint? 

Julie’s Bicycle has created Creative Climate Tools, a free carbon calculator designed to help organisations record, measure and understand the impacts of their venue, office, tour, project, event or festival. They allow users to track a range of different impact areas including energy use, water consumption, waste, travel, freight and materials. This was designed for Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs) and Investment Principle Support Organisations (IPSOs), so we’ll be using it for our own reporting at Music Mark, and it should be useful for your music hub or service too. 

Whilst not everything in the resource may be relevant to your organisation, you might find it helpful as a template to base your reporting on. 

Creative Carbon Scotland also has a collection of tools designed for carbon management. These resources are separated out, unlike Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Climate Tools, so they can be helpful for measuring specific actions; it just depends what might be best for your organisation and how you work. They may also be useful to individuals and freelancers, as well as organisations.  

Creative Carbon Scotland uses up to date carbon conversion factors from the UK government and are available to all organisations, but organisations outside of Scotland may have to pay a small fee for some resources. 

If you’re interested in monitoring your individual carbon emissions too, WWF’s ‘My Footprint’ app can help you to calculate your impact and identify which parts of your lifestyle contribute the most to your score. 

How often should it be monitored and recalculated? 

Ideally, your organisation should monitor its carbon footprint on an ongoing basis, alongside annual formal reporting in other areas. It may be useful to mirror the financial year of your organisation, so it can easily be included in annual reports and can be aligned with Action Plans and strategic planning. Depending on your organisation, you may want to review your emissions quarterly or every six months to track progress.  

Here’s a suggestion for a process your organisation could implement: 

1. Agree on a Sustainability Policy that sets out what your organisation can or can’t do
2. Start measuring at the beginning of your financial year
3. Produce a short report or do a ‘status-check’ at six months to gauge how policy is being implemented
4. Towards the end of the year review the policy
5. After the year end, collate your data and produce a ‘report’
6. The report dictates things that need to be worked on and produces the Action Plan for the coming year, including any possible changes to policy
7. Repeat this each year

Don’t forget to visit the This Is Not A Rehearsal webpage to explore more news, training & events, resources and research to support you on your sustainability journey. If you’d like to stay up to date with training and resources related to the climate crisis within the music education sector, click here to sign up for our ‘This Is Not A Rehearsal’ monthly newsletter.