Carbon Footprint
Tackling Climate Change & Carbon Footprint
The Leonardo Project partners are all concerned with Carbon Stewardship. All the organisations have similar philosophies, but different priorities at any point in time.
The National Trust ...
believes in sustainability, not sustainable development, which depends on growth. Its priorities are to use less (estimate energy leakage from buildings and convert listed buildings with energy-saving technology), de-centralise and go local (no central utilities billing, for example), sustain and grow carbon in land and buildings, and aim for its properties to be self-reliant ‘islands’. The NT has assessed carbon emissions from all its major activities.
In the Conservatoire du Littoral ...
and Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux the priority is to help area and ground staff with an Environmental Management System. The system is described in a booklet Guide Méthodlogique Mis en place d’un système de management environmental sur un site naturel.
Natuurmonumenten ...
aims to be carbon-neutral without compensation by 2020. The main strands of work are a behaviour campaign for staff, modifications to buildings, and production of natural energy (25% now produced). Adaptation methods (migration zones, climate buffers and changing the nature policy) and mitigation (the climate-neutral policy, biomass and planting more forests) are developed. Natuurmonumenten is also keen on getting the public to spend money on trees, peat, natural carbon stores, etc. and this is a way to engage them.
The RSPB ...
has a corporate target for a 3% reduction in emissions per year. Priorities include staff business travel, building improvement and corporate energy use. There are savings to make on Information Technology servers, which use a lot of energy. The whole RSPB carbon footprint is under investigation.
The NABU ...
NABU has developed internal guidelines for reducing its ecological footprint: The federal head quarters offers free public transport, bicycles and CO2-efficient cars to its employees. Air travel is only allowed for international project work. Related emissions are offset by Atmosfair Gold standard. Offices are equiped with an efficient lighting system which is reduced automatically according to available daylight.
NABU purchase of office products has to meet environmental standards, e.g. use of recycled materials or low energy use. Daily waste is separated into paper, bio-degradable and packages. The overall consumption of energy and ressources has to be monitored in terms of cost and CO2-emissions. An analysis of data for the recent years should be the basis to define mitigation goals and actions for 2015/2020.
The project's carbon footprint
was calculated [634 KB]
. The participants of the study visits travelled in total 12,000 km by cars (incl. coaches and car pool), 68,475 km by plane (incl. 20,625 km for St. Helena), 22,983 km by train and 5,885 km by North sea ferries. By all the travelling 56 tons of CO2-emission were produced in total.
To compensate this Leonardo project each of the partners will implement 14,000 kg of CO2 emission in its own climate program! Thanks to this, the Leonardo climate program in fact is Climate neutral.
The project started in 2010 and was finished in 2012.