How has the boom in Zoom changed your digital carbon footprint?
Just like everyone else, Team London Bridge has had to adapt to totally new ways of working during the pandemic. Whilst we were still able to deliver most of our services, such keeping the area clean, safe and green; a lot of other projects had to become digitally accessed from all over the country. Our rich annual calendar of events and cultural interventions got moved online, and we made the most of the early days to experiment and see what works. We assumed that this would change our carbon footprint but were interested to find out how and by what degree?
Despite the dramatic disruption to our regular way of life, TLB and our partners hosted 117 events online with over 1,500 attendees - we’re very grateful to all of you who joined us on this journey. We added this number to an estimate of how many one-hour team meetings we’ve had in the year, and sent the data to Ugne at Climate Partner UK to help us work out our digital carbon emissions. This figure would then be used to calculate a suggested donation to compensate for emissions generated by our online activity. Ours came to £ 109.76 for the year, which suggests that offsetting digital carbon is an affordable practice that we can all consider moving forward.
Once that was done we had to choose a sustainable project that this funding should go towards. We learnt from Ugne’s talk at one of our previous London Bridge Green Network webinars that it’s important to select a project recognised by the international standards such as VCS and Gold Standard and addressing several UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We chose UK nationwide afforestation because, as well as being the closest one geographically to London Bridge, it also addresses an impressive 5 SDGs simultaneously. Offsetting, however, is only one of the solution when it comes to tackling carbon emissions (especially those that cannot be avoided) and we will also be looking into how we can reduce the carbon footprint of our events in the future.
If you’re curious to find out more, here are some useful resources that helped us along the way:
What is a digital carbon footprint? https://www.wholegraindigital.com/digitaldeclutter/ In partnership with Business Declares, this is a toolkit that can help you measure and reduce the digital carbon emissions of your business.
Have a look at Climate Partner UK’s handy map/list of offset projects: https://www.climatepartner.com/en/climatemap/offset-projects
This might only be a small, first step on our collective journey to address our carbon consumption, but it’s one we can all attempt to do. If your business is based in London Bridge we look forward to working with you to reduce our neighbourhood’s carbon emissions together. Watch this space for more to come!