What’s Carnegie UK doing to tackle climate change? 

“The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts now and for thousands of years.” (IPCC) 

My initial reaction to this quote was panic. A decade doesn’t feel a long time. Carnegie UK has been working to improve wellbeing for people across the UK and Ireland for over a century.

It feels overwhelming to think that what we do in this short amount of time will impact future generations long after we are gone. 

But a more hopeful outlook is that this warning gives us a window of opportunity.

The statement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the changes we and others make now to protect our planet could have an impact which lasts over ten times the duration Carnegie UK has existed.  

This underlines the importance of the work we’ve put in to embed environmental wellbeing and environmental practice into our strategy. And it provides real motivation for continuing this approach. 

Last year, we reflected on the changes we had made to respond to the urgent threat of the climate and nature crises. Now, we’re reporting on our progress as a signatory on the Funder Commitment on Climate Change for the second time.

We’ve also undertaken an ‘eco-audit’ to assess how well we’ve implemented the recommendations from a year ago. This process revealed that we’ve made progress: 

• Our total operational carbon emissions have reduced from 78.6 tons in 2020, to 15.8 tons in 2022 
• We’ve reduced our number of flights by 96% 
• We’ve reduced our electricity consumption by 46% and switched to a green tariff, meaning we are now net zero for energy consumption 
• We’ve progressed on putting environmental consciousness into our organisational culture, with guidance on green travel, purchasing and events now available 
• We’ve strengthened our statement of investment policy, which now excludes any company that derives more than 5% of its revenue from the extraction and refinement of fossil fuels  

We’re proud of the difference we’ve made, but the real motivation for sharing this is to show that change is possible. And urgent messages like the IPCC’s remind us that we must all do more. Next steps identified for Carnegie UK include : 

• To carry out a review of where we put our money, from our pensions to our banking arrangements, incorporating environmental considerations as a key part of this process 
• Continuing to integrate environmental wellbeing into all our programme work, as explained in our previous blog 

However, for me, the recommendation that stood out was for us to continue to share our progress and learn from others.  

This decade is a window of opportunity for us to prevent the worst effects of climate change on future generations. If you are working on your own organisational approach to this, or if you think you might have something to share that could influence our work, we’d love to hear from you.