Our environmental impact

In December 2006, we decided we should go CarbonNeutral® across all our offices from May 2007 to minimise our impact on the environment. We then began to collect the data to enable us to do so.

We appointed The CarbonNeutral Company and the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management to help us measure our greenhouse gas emissions – these are the gases that contribute to climate change. They estimated our emissions to be 19,066 tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2005/6, and 19,635 in 2006/7, the year we went CarbonNeutral®. When normalised by the number of people who work here we actually saw a decrease of around 2.5 per cent per person between 2005/6 and 2006/7, although there was an overall increase in carbon emissions. We hope to see a continued decrease of carbon emissions per person to meet our 10 per cent target by April 2008.

Our priorities

The Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management has recommended that air travel and electricity are where we need to make the most significant reductions, as they contribute 33 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively. In 2006/7, 108 tonnes of CO2 equivalent were already offset by the Radio Taxi Group.

Reducing air travel will be difficult for us because so much client contact depends on it and we have an international network of offices; this requires us to change the way we work. However, we do have a policy in place for all long and short journeys that asks our people to use air travel only when there is a clear business and/or client need and to consider using video and telephone conferencing facilities. We have also introduced a system with our travel agents to encourage more use of Eurostar train travel between London, Brussels and Paris.

To maximise engagement in the process of becoming CarbonNeutral®, we invited all our people to vote on how we should offset our greenhouse gas emissions and have set up green teams to help us to carry through our commitments.

Measurement

To establish the tonnes of CO2 equivalent emitted, the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management used a full set of geographically relevant and up to date emissions factors, including The Greenhouse Gas Protocol published by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (2004); Environmental Reporting: Guidelines for Company Reporting on Greenhouse Gas Emissions published by the UK government (Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, 2005 and 2007); and guidelines by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2006 and 1996).

Breakdown of total greenhouse gas emissions by general activity	2005/6 (per cent)	2006/7 (per cent)
Premises (electricity, gas, heating oil and district heating consumption, back-up generator fuel use, refrigerant gas loss, fire extinguishers and waste disposal)	59	55
Business travel (including hire cars, employee owned cars, taxis, air, rail and hotel night stays)	38	41
Company-owned vehicles	2	2
Deliveries by third parties	1	2
Total tonnes of CO2 equivalent	19,066	19,635

On average, emissions per employee have reduced by around 2.5 per cent between 2006/7 and 2005/6.

Breakdown of emissions by region and employee	Emissions per employee (Tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year) 2005/6	Emissions per employee (Tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year) 2006/7
London	2.4	2.1
Mainland Europe	4.6	4.1
Asia and Middle East	6.9	6.3
US	4.8	8.2

For further information on our approach to corporate social responsibility reporting, please see our Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

All data provided on this page has been independently reviewed by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management.