Traditionally, ‘environmental impact assessments’ (EIA) are understood as a process or activity usually conducted before moving forward with a plan. You can think of it like a risk assessment, where the risk is focussed on the environment: what will the consequences for the environment be? This might be used before building a new building or moving to a new data server, for example.
There are also other ways that we use the term environmental impact assessment. These can be conducted in parallel with other impact research (e.g. network creation) to assess the positive or negative impact of an activity on the environment, before or after the activity took place. This is how we are approaching environmental impact assessment in the Europeana Playbook.
Work into understanding Europeana’s broader environmental impact started back in 2018 when, during a hack week, a team set the goal to better understand the carbon footprint of Europeana’s digital services. Since then, we have moved forward to also assess the impact of our annual conferences in 2019, 2020 and 2021, whether online or in person.
Methodologies for calculating environmental impact are beginning to mature. Here we share the approach that we have taken as an option for you to take a similar approach yourself.
The environmental impact of Europeana’s digital services
📚 Case study - the carbon footprint of Europeana over 2020
A carbon footprint was calculated for the Europeana Foundation over the year 2020. In the calculation we identified three main areas that contributed to the total footprint;
working from home or the office;
the digital services Europeana Foundation provides;
business travel.
Not included in the calculation was daily commutes, manufacturing or disposal of computer devices, and overnight stays during business trips. We took a pessimistic view when analysing results, so the outcomes are more likely to be an overestimate than an underestimate.
Resources
We estimated that in 2020 the following resources were consumed:
Resource | Total usage | From renewable resources (CO2 neutral) |
Electricity | 198,400 kWh | 136,700 kWh |
Natural gas | 16,700 m3 | 170 m3 |
Water | 360 m3 |
Table 1: resources consumed by working from home or the office and for providing Europeana’s digital services
About 73% of all electricity was used to power Europeana’s digital services, the rest was consumed by working from home or the office. Almost 69% of all electricity and 1% of all heating energy came from renewable resources.
Carbon footprint
In total the carbon footprint of Europeana Foundation was estimated to be 87,300 kg CO2e. The use of renewable energy sources made sure that about 65,000 kg CO2e of emissions was avoided. Around 1460 kg worth of CO2e was compensated with carbon offsetting.
Resource | Carbon footprint (in kg CO2e) | Avoided emissions (in kg CO2e) |
Electricity | 42,000 | 64,700 |
Natural gas | 31,100 | 300 |
Water | 110 | 0 |
Petrol (business travel) | 14,000 | 0 |
Table 2: carbon footprint per resource
Europeana Foundation rents its office space and does not own any vehicles. This means that all emissions are scope 3.
The carbon footprint of working from home or the office was estimated to be 34,400 kg CO2e. The lack of precise energy consumption data at the office as well as a standardised methodology for calculating the carbon footprint of working from home, make this part of the calculations imprecise. Nevertheless, we feel that the methodology presented in this report can be used to get a good indication in what areas the organisation can improve and how its carbon footprint is progressing over time.
The digital services carbon footprint was estimated to be 38,900 kg CO2 which makes it the largest category contributing to the organisation’s total carbon footprint.
For business travel in 2020 we estimated the carbon footprint to be 14,000 kg CO2e. Of this footprint 87% can be attributed to the Europeana Foundation, the rest to ENA members. Due to Covid-19 restrictions about 70% less business trips were made compared to 2018.
Conclusions
In 2019 we received confirmation that all electricity used at the office and by our biggest hosting provider comes from 100% renewable resources. During our footprint calculations done in 2018 we did not have this confirmation yet, so all consumed electricity was counted as grey. Consequently the total footprint of Europeana Foundation in 2020 is much lower (about 69%) compared to calculations done in 2018. However compared to the rough estimate done in 2019, the organisation’s carbon footprint did increase in 2020.
The activities with the biggest impact in terms of used resources in 2020 were using rented computer servers and working at the office. The largest contributors to the carbon footprint were powering computer servers hosted by PSNC and IBM Cloud, and heating workspaces. On average heating home workspaces costs about 18% more energy than heating office workspace.
Due to Covid the footprint of business travel was much reduced in 2020. Expectations are that this will increase again in the future. Travelling by train generally has the lowest impact, but selecting the best mode of transport is usually a trade off between travel time, costs and carbon footprint.
Inspiration: Digital Cleanup Day movement
Our digital files, photos, videos, apps, etc, all create a digital carbon footprint. The Digital Cleanup Day encourages people worldwide to do some ‘spring cleaning’ of our digital trash, that is, the duplicates that we forget about, the apps we don’t use, the files we don’t need.
The environmental cost of data is growing in parallel with the digital transformation of the world around us. We can each do our bit to reduce our data carbon footprint.
Find out more at the Digital Cleanup Day homepage https://www.digitalcleanupday.org/
The carbon footprint of convening the sector
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