Let's look at this with some quick and easy calculations. I'm not going to claim that this is authoritative robust research, but it might give us an indication of the scale of the sector's contribution to climate change.
One way of estimating the sector's carbon footprint might be to look at emissions per employee. The voluntary sector undertakes a wide range of activities, running residential homes, village halls, youth centres, charity shops, and a wide range of different workplaces.
Undertaking a comprehensive audit of all these workplaces and their carbon footprint could provide us with an accurate recrd of the sector's carbon footprint. However in the absence of such an audit, I'm going to assume that the emissions per employee are roughly equivalent to that of a mainly office-based company.
A report by Chris Goodall at www.lowcarbonlife.net from 2007 looked at the energy use of a range of companies, taken from their annual reports and corporate social responsibility statements. The office-based energy usage for different types of companies are shown in the table below.
| Sector | Energy use per employee (kWh) | CO2 output per employee (tonnes) |
| The domestic home (for comparison) | 9,600 | 2.21 |
| Office-based service companies | 6.360 | 2.26 |
| Offices, combined with some retail | | |
| Financial | 8,180 | 2.88 |
| Mobile Phone | 6,120 | 2.35 |
| Non-grocery retailing | 14,060 | 5.54 |
| Grocery retailers | 12,350 | 4.72 |
| Entertainment and media companies | 15,130 | 5.37 |
Let's assume that charities are closest to office-based service companies. This is probably an underestimate of the carbon output of the sector, as it ignores higher-carbon workplaces such as shops or care homes and ignores the equivalent work hours of volunteers. If we take the CO2 output per employee (2.26 tonnes) and multiply it by the number of voluntary sector employees (634,000 - from the UK Civil Society Almanac 2009), we get an estimated total of 1.4 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Comparing this to the total UK figure for 2007 of 542.6 million tonnes (from the Department for Energy and Climate Change), our estimate of office energy for employees in the voluntary sector makes up about one quarter of one per cent (0.26%) of total UK emissions. This very rough figure will probably underestimate the total, as it doesn't take into account the varying workplaces and activities of organisations, their travel activities (such as flights) or the steps they take to reduce their emissions.
For comparison, the voluntary sector workforce makes up about 2% of the total UK workforce.
Having said all the above, I think the much more vital question to answer is "what impact can civil society have on climate change?" Emissions are an unimportant part of the answer to this question - much more important is the social contribution of these organisations and volunteers. NCVO's civil society framework sets out the key ways in which organisations can and do contribute to this area, including:
representing those who feel the effects of climate change,
mobilising and encouraging popular support for initiatives,
acting as a leader and showing best practice in the area,
campaigning for change.
[This blog is a belated contribution to Blog Action Day 2009 - I slightly missed the actual day!]
Comments
I think it's important to maintain positivity around this issue, as you have here Dave, and think about what we can do as opposed to drowning in gloomy predictions and negative statistics. That approach tends to be overwhelming and often results in people feeling powerless in the face of such global problems as climate change.
As well as setting out the key ways in which organisations can tackle this issue, NCVO walk the walk themselves. We are also providing the secretariat for the Third Sector Task Force on Climate Change, alongside Green Alliance. Even though we are not an 'environmental organisation' in the typical way, it just goes to show that everyone can contribute.