Climate Impact Calculator
for Quaker meetings

Introduction

This calculator helps you to estimate the climate impact of your meeting.

It looks at emissions in five main categories: transport to meetings; energy used in your meeting house; materials and waste; building construction; and other goods and services. At the end you'll be able to see which has the biggest impact.

The accuracy of estimation varies between categories: don’t regard the results as precise, but rather as a useful starting point for thinking about how your meeting might reduce its climate impact. The Sustainability Toolkit will help with this.

It's good to work on the calculator as a group, so you can discuss your findings as you go along. Before you get started, let your meeting know that it is going to happen, so that anyone who is interested can get involved. There are plenty of different tasks to take on, and they need different skills to carry them out.

You don’t need to do it all at once! Perhaps start with one section and see how you go.

About

Calculations are made in tonnes of CO₂-equivalent gases per year. Some activities emit gases (e.g. methane, nitrous oxide) that have a much higher impact per kg than CO₂, and this is taken into account. As far as possible the calculations account for the total impact of activities in each category, which may mean that the numbers differ from other calculators. A few notes are given under each section.

For more details see 'Calculating Emissions' guide at www.livingwitness.org.uk

This calculator has been produced by Britain Yearly Meeting and Living Witness based on calculations by Living Witness. See www.quaker.org.uk and www.livingwitness.org.uk. A paper version of this calculator is available at www.quaker.org.uk/sustainability.

Travel to meeting

This section accounts for CO₂ from energy use by vehicles, other exhaust emissions, emissions in vehicle manufacture and disposal, and road building.

The best way to find out how Friends travel to and from meeting is probably by doing a simple survey using the transport categories below. Find out how many miles each Friend travels each week going to and from Meeting, and the mode of transport they use. Add up the total miles in each category.

Energy use

Greenhouse gas emissions come from the fossil fuels used directly in your meeting house or to generate the electricity that you use. The main uses in a meeting are usually heating, lighting, refrigerator/freezer and water heater.

Utility bills are probably stored with your treasurer or clerk. Try and find bills with actual meter readings (rather than estimates) taken a year apart. Or, take your own readings.

If your meeting house is often hired to other users you might want to consider what proportion of energy is used for Quaker purposes. If you don’t have a meeting house, your use of another building will consume energy. Discuss with whoever manages the building how much should be allocated to your meeting

If you generate renewable energy (for instance, from a photovoltaic array) it produces very little CO₂. So if you use it yourself, it gives very low emissions, and if you export some to the grid, it cuts the use of fossil-fuelled electricity (and thus CO₂ emissions) elsewhere.

Waste

This section accounts for the greenhouse gas emissions associated with production of the materials that end up in your regular meeting house waste, and building waste, and also the emissions associated with disposal of this waste.

The easiest way to collect this information is to weigh all your waste one week!

This table is based on entering a weeks' worth of waste - it will estimate your yearly impact from that.

Building and extending your meeting house

The energy and cement used to provide materials and construct a building produce substantial emissions. There's no 'right' way to share these out over the lifetime of a building. We'll simply assume that the share decreases linearly over the first 50 years of the building's use, and is zero after that.

Note: use one row per build.

Add a new line

Other goods and services

Greenhouse gases are emitted in the production and distribution of the goods that your Meeting buys, such as furniture and library books. They are also emitted through the services that you buy, such as decorating and caretaking. It is very difficult to work out these emissions. As a very rough estimate, each £ spent results in the emission of about 0.5kg of C0₂ on average.