The climate crisis is never far from my mind. It influences a lot of decisions I make in my life and as one half of All Things Equal. From the clothes I buy to the sustainability of our website projects, every action we take has an impact, positive or negative.
So when I was invited to attend a series of webinars from Communities Prepared and Groundwork South as part of my role as a trustee of Battle Scars, needless to say I was keen to see what was achievable. The webinars covered the climate and the changes we can make as organisations to lessen our impact.
The good news is that the UK was the first major economy to halve its emissions by 2024 (CCC’s 2025 progress report), and initiatives all over the world are speeding up changes in how we operate as a society and take care of our planet. Despite that, the data shows global greenhouse emissions continued to increase in 2025 (State of the Climate 2025). Unless we take further, sustained action, the trends all point to this continuing.
Given the enormous scale of the problem, I, like many others, can easily feel overwhelmed and question how much impact I, or the organisations I’m involved with, can have. But the Groundwork South webinars explained the benefits of individual, cumulative action and provided methods to:
- understand our impact
- explore ways to reduce our impact
- use our position in our communities to grow a movement of change makers.
Understanding our impact
Ah, the carbon footprint: the term BP popularised in the early 2000s, which some critics argue was a calculated move to shift responsibility onto individuals. However, the principle still rings true as a way to measure your or your organisation’s impact, especially if you include indirect contributors as well as direct ones. Groundwork South explained this by categorising activities into three scopes and challenged us to audit our carbon footprint against them. That helps us understand both our direct and indirect impact, and what we can do to lessen each.
For Battle Scars, these will likely be around the building itself, minimising energy use or switching to green providers, as well as purchasing, such as food, IT equipment, stationery and first aid kits, and how to make those small decisions more sustainable. For All Things Equal, one of our largest contributors is the websites we build and host for our clients. Every visitor to every website causes energy consumption, so every interaction, media file and piece of uploaded content has an impact and is an opportunity to reduce emissions.
Reducing our impact
Before the webinars, I was familiar with the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle hierarchy. There is also a specific reduction hierarchy for emissions which offers a more robust framework to follow:
Eliminate (highest priority):
removing a source of emissions entirely by not doing the activity, or by designing it out from the start. E.g. can we remove autoplay videos from a website so energy is only used when a visitor chooses to play the video, rather than on every page load?
Reduce (second priority):
cutting the emissions that remain by doing the necessary activity more efficiently or at a smaller scale. E.g. can we further optimise our codebase and media files to limit the size of our websites, and therefore their energy consumption?
Substitute (third priority):
swapping a necessary activity for a lower-carbon one that does the same job. E.g. are there alternative partners, tools or platforms that meet our requirements and have greener credentials?
Compensate (lowest priority):
funding projects outside our own operations to make up for emissions we’re unable to remove. E.g. for emissions we can’t eliminate, reduce or substitute, such as unavoidable travel, can we offset them through credible, verified projects
An ongoing process
So what are we doing to reduce our environmental impact at All Things Equal? We’re already eliminating and reducing where possible as part of our website projects, with our sites being built as leanly as possible and media files compressed as standard. But there’s always more we can do, and over the next few months we plan to:
- audit our carbon emissions more fully to understand our impact on the planet
- identify opportunities to reduce that impact where possible
- consider the carbon footprint as part of the aims and objectives of our ongoing and future projects.
Thanks to Groundwork South and Communities Prepared for the webinars, and for their continued commitment to improving the sustainability of organisations everywhere.