What's your church's carbon footprint?
9 January 2020
The Research and Statistics team have been working on creating a tool that will inform churches of their carbon footprint based on their energy usage. This tool will be made available to all Church of England churches using the Online Parish Returns System.

We are aiming to streamline information from our own data sources to pre-populate the majority of the tool, so that churches will only be asked for additional information if it is not available to us elsewhere.
Each church will receive the amount of carbon produced by their church annually. There will then be two efficiency scores (Please see Figure 2 for an example), one for energy efficiency based on building size and one for attendance. There will also be some helpful tips to reduce carbon emissions. In the future there will be opportunity to see how churches progress over time as well as the ability to compare with other churches within their diocese and other similar-sized churches nationally.
If you would like to know more, please email: fnz.ahaarl@puhepubsratynaq.bet

Figure 1. The Online Parish System, with the Energy Tool included

Figure 2. An example results page for the Energy Tool. This will be adapted before the pilot to simplify the results and provide a ‘what next’ list of links for things that could help energy efficiency
There is a video with instructions on how to use this tool below.