By Anya Krawczyk and Dom Stephen
In response to Earth Day and Earth Week, Scene has committed itself to begin offsetting our emissions and become carbon neutral by the end of 2021. Earth Day 2021 is an annual three-day event celebrated across the globe, with a mission to raise awareness around climate change and to encourage effective and socially inclusive opportunities to help address it. First celebrated in 1970, the movement now boasts more than 1 billion followers from over 75,000 partners.
Carbon Auditing at Scene
We conducted a carbon audit in order to inform the company’s first ever net-zero carbon emissions strategy. With the need for radical action on climate change becoming increasingly urgent, SMEs like us must contribute to the UK’s and Scotland’s climate targets. While Scene as a business is focused on supporting the community energy sector, up till now we did not know the emissions of our company activity, or the savings from our investments in the sector.
We researched and then developed a bespoke modelling tool from the most up to date best practice and data references - which can be used for any SME’s activities. With help from colleagues, in particular our office manager (thanks Prem!), we gathered data on Scene’s historic activities. The tool accounts for emissions associated with: equipment; commuting; project travel; office/home energy consumption; and company investments.
The audit then aggregated this data, and explored methods to offset the associated emissions.
Between 2017 and 2020, Scene’s net carbon footprint has amounted to 105.6 tonnes of CO2e emissions. We’re continuing to work backwards through our company’s history to its founding in 2011, to understand total lifetime emissions.
As the company has grown, so too have our carbon emissions. But our increasing focus on supporting energy access, working with communities which currently have no electricity, has led to a sharp increase in emissions from travel. For example, flying to Rwanda to conduct community engagement workshops and site visits, where we are now installing a micro-grid in a remote village to bring renewable energy to a place which previously had no power - accounted for the greatest single contribution to the company’s carbon footprint. Project travel is responsible for approximately 78% percent of the company’s total emissions. We also found that an average 10% of our emissions are embedded within purchases of computing equipment throughout their lifecycle, and just 3% was emitted across all staff members’ commuting habits.
Project travel is responsible for approximately 78% percent of the company’s total emissions.
Our Path to Net-Zero
Progress so far
As part of its company mission, Scene invests a portion of its profits into community energy projects across the UK. Scene has invested in 12 community energy schemes since 2014, offsetting 13.3 tonnes of carbon emissions.
Scene has offset over 13 tonne CO2e emissions through investing in community renewable energy schemes since 2014.
Year on year, our emissions offsets from our investments in operational community energy projects reduce, as the grid carbon intensity of the wider grid reduces. With the removal of Feed-in-Tariffs and other subsidies, the community energy sector slowed along with opportunities to invest, but we are always on the lookout for chances for impact investment to help the sector.
Through our consultancy workstreams Scene has also contributed to the offsetting of over 36,000 tonnes CO2e emissions since 2014, across six different built projects comprising rooftop solar,hydro, wind, electric storage and electric vehicles. We don’t claim these emissions reductions for ourselves, although we do take responsibility for the emissions generated in helping deliver them!
What is our plan?
We are committed to making a real, positive contribution to the planet’s climate.
Scene has committed to offsetting its carbon emissions in 2021 and then operating as a carbon negative company thereafter. After accounting for its investments, we need to offset previous carbon emissions to retroactively achieve net-zero for our activities since 2017 - roughly 27 tonnes for each year. Once we have taken into account the figures from 2011 to 2016, the figure will inevitably be higher.
We will continue our investments in community energy projects, and we will consider opportunities to meaningfully offset emissions through activities such as woodland restoration - but only where these contribute to wider environmental goals such as habitat restoration, biodiversity creation and/or improvements to water quality and surface water attenuation.
By our tenth anniversary later this year, we aim through accredited schemes to become net-carbon neutral over our lifetime. Thereafter, we will continue with annual carbon emissions audits to keep our emissions as low as possible, and explore further opportunities to go beyond to carbon negative.
Through this blog post, we also hope to inspire other SMEs to follow suit and to join us on our pathway to net-zero. With our new carbon audit reporting tool, we can provide a bespoke environmental assessment of other organisation’s carbon footprint as part of our research and consultancy services, and suggest a customised net-zero pathway to neutralise the carbon footprint of other SMEs like us.
The next steps for our carbon auditing process include the assessment of our contribution to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.