How to make your business carbon literate?

Carbon literacy is an environmental accreditation that an individual can achieve by attending a competency course. They will have an awareness of the carbon costs and impacts of everyday activities, and the ability and motivation to reduce these emissions on an individual, community, and organisational basis.

A carbon literate citizen will understand how their own actions - and the actions of humanity at large - are impacting the planet, but someone who’s carbon literate will also have the skills and desire to go out and do something about these impacts. After someone has been on a carbon literacy course, they can apply to become a Carbon Literate Citizen and receive a carbon literacy certificate, a nationally and increasingly internationally recognised accreditation which demonstrates successful completion of a day’s climate change training.

The concept of carbon literacy stems from Manchester’s 2009 Climate Action Plan, which aims to create a low carbon culture in the city. There was a kind of acknowledgement that a key barrier to climate action was knowledge - people not being on the same page about the causes of climate change. From here, the concept of carbon literacy was formed, and a working group established to outline the Carbon Literacy Standard, the framework underpinning all our work as a charity

Carbon literacy courses have been delivered in a variety of sectors across the UK and the world - but we’re not a training provider. We can better be understood as an accreditation body and provider of the framework from which an organisation can develop their own carbon literacy course which will be tailored to specific organisations audience. This audience might be an organisation’s stakeholders, trustees, or community members. It will be sector specific and maybe geographically specific.

The idea is that carbon literacy courses shouldn’t be generic, so encourage them to be as relevant as possible to the audience receiving the training to have the greatest impact and so the content entails advice and knowledge that will help them make a difference. We have courses for museums, the NHS, and councils, social housing bodies - and if you are from any of these organisations you can go to our website and have a look at the Toolkits.

Most of the time an organisation that wants to engage with carbon literacy will develop their own course which can be embedded as part of their internal training and sustainability programme. We have resources such as slide packs and resource links that can be incorporated so they are not starting from scratch. Once the course has been developed, it will be sent to us for accreditation as a carbon literacy course.

The Carbon Literacy Standard is a framework underpinning the work we do. The first element is knowledge: all courses must include the science of climate change, why it’s happening, and how we know humans are causing it. It must also include the international, national, and local impacts of climate change, and cover what some of the solutions might beboth generally but also within the sector being considered.

There is specific information to be covered, but it’s also a flexible framework with room to include information that might be relevant to a specific audience. We’ve accredited courses including biodiversity, climate justice, degrowth, and welding - so there’s room for creativity within the process as well.

The next element is the learning method: all courses must be one day’s worth of learning, the amount we feel is the minimum time needed for someone to come away feeling empowered, knowledgeable, and able to make a difference.

Then we have peer to peer delivery: we encourage organisations to roll outcarbon literacy internally with staff members training each other rather than through external facilitators. Our colleagues and peers understand the specific challenges and issues each organisation or sector faces, and we trust our community. We find the training to be more effective, leading to more effective communication, with the planning that comes from it then incorporated into an organisation’s strategy.

We encourage course writers to focus on positivity: highlighting ideas that can be done and not what can’t be done.

There are values key to carbon literacy that we encouraged to be embedded within any course:

- Climate action can and should help us create a better world. We are trying to reconfigure some key elements of society and we think fairness should be embedded within this process.

- We think that individual behaviour change is important. The Committee for Climate Change stated that almost 60% of emissions reductions that must occur for the UK to meet the 2035 Net Zero target will include some degree of individual behaviour change, so carbon literacy can lay the groundwork for to help people get on board with these changes that are going to have to take place.

- We know there’s massive value in working together to achieve change.

- At the end of every course, each learner will create two actions to reduce their carbon footprints - one individual action and one group action that they might do with a colleague or team. We hope that these actions are undertaken by the learner to create organisational culture shifts.

We worked with the construction company Jacobs UK, who have estimate 5-15% emission savings per person after having taken a course. We estimate that 160,000 tonnes of emissions have been saved due to the 44,000 citizens that have undertaken carbon literacy training. This impact is only going to grow.

Carbon literacy training can help ensure everyone within an organisation has the same level of clarity, knowledge, and carbon emissions knowledge. Having everyone in an organisation on board helps to address big issues the organisation or sector might be facing, for example waste, energy usage, or procurement. You begin to discuss these solutions more effectively when there’s a consistent level of knowledge across the organisation. Because carbon emissions are often coupled with energy or resource usage, financial savings come along as well. It is also empowering to provide staff with an opportunity to make decisions about their roles and give people confidence to speak up about climate change - especially considering how anxiety inducing climate change can be.

It’s also demonstrates to stakeholders, shareholders, and customers that an organisation is committed to reducing emissions. And this is something that obviously a lot more observations are being done that way as well.

It’s also something fun and great for wellbeing through an opportunity to engage and connect with one other and consider solutions to problems together.

Jack Rhodes-Worden

Jack is the Museums Coordinator at The Carbon Literacy Project, and supports museums and other cultural organisations to engage with Carbon Literacy and take carbon emission reducing action.