We’ve taken another meaningful step forward in our commitment to environmental responsibility, reporting a reduction in our operational carbon footprint for 2024/25. The total emissions for the year came in at 25.7 tonnes of CO2 e —a drop from the previous year’s 30 tonnes. More importantly, our emissions intensity per staff member is now at its lowest since we began tracking our footprint, reflecting a steady downward trend even as the team has grown.

Operational Changes Driving Impact

Our progress is the result of deliberate choices we’ve made across several areas of our operations. Staff and trustee travel has seen a marked shift, with car travel emissions down by 35%, other travel emissions reduced by 65%, and hotel stays cut nearly in half. Train travel nudged up slightly, but this was in line with our expanded team.

Operational costs have also played a role. Emissions linked to paid-for goods and services fell by 9%, largely due to reduced expenditure. Office energy use remained stable, while homeworking emissions rose by 15%—a reflection of our growing team and the realities of hybrid work.

A Lighter Digital Footprint

Alongside these operational changes, our digital sustainability journey has continued to evolve. It began in 2022 with a peer learning project in collaboration with Supercool, the Arts Marketing Association, and the WOW Foundation.

As part of that initiative, we carried out a content audit of our website to really understand our digital carbon footprint for the first time and identify areas for improvement. Although we discovered that our website’s footprint was relatively light, the audit revealed opportunities to make it even leaner. When we repeated the audit 18 months later, the results were striking—the website’s carbon footprint had been cut by more than half.

To ensure these gains are sustained, we’re introduced a set of green website guidelines that now inform day-to-day decisions. These include limiting the use of heavy content, using lighter image files, and regularly removing old content.

Our digital sustainability pledge publicly commits us to these practices, balancing environmental goals with accessibility and revisiting the pledge regularly to ensure it remains relevant.

Looking Ahead

We continue to explore new ways to reduce our carbon footprint further. We are exploring a whole new area with the environmental impact of AI tools, as data becomes available. We are also continuing to look at how we can make project-based carbon calculations to better understand the footprint of our co-produced activity.

Following discussions with the staff team reviewing the operational carbon footprint results for 24/25, we will undertake a digital clean up exercise to review and delete unnecessary files and documents stored online to help reduce our digital carbon footprint. This will take place later in the year as part of an organisation-wide systems and processes internal audit.

These steps are part of our organisational commitment to keep environmental sustainability at the forefront of our work, as well as demonstrating models of best practice for the sector.