The Wildlife Trusts: charities, tech, and the climate | Webinar

hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar my name is Kiara simonswood and I am the events planning and marketing coordinator here at charity digital I'm going to be your host for today's session and would like to give you all a very warm welcome so today's session on Charities Tech and the climate is led by Alice and Rachel from The Wildlife trust and they will impart their practical insights on using digital technology and Tack tackling the climate crisis from exploring how Tech has helped to deepen its impact to remembering the importance of non-digital strategies just before handing over Alice and Rachel I just want to share a few house rules and pointers for today's session so the session is currently being recorded and will be uploaded to watch On Demand within a week's time the slides and other resources will also be made available to you by the end of the day and Clos captions are available and I will shortly show in the chat how to enable these during the webinar please ask lots of questions in the Q&A section for Alice and Rachel to address at the end of their presentation and feel free to share any other comments experiences or top tips in the chat section if there is a particular question in the Q&A section that you would like answered you can also up vote questions for them to be answered first finally if you encounter any sound or image issues please let me know in the chat and I'll do my very best to get the session back to normal as soon as I can and without further Ado let me hand over to Alice Hello uh lovely to be with you all today um we're going to be talking about Charities Tech and the climate St and uh spoilers Tech won't save us I'm sorry to get that out of the way first but I thought it was worth just in case you were thinking we had a really wizzy digital solution I'll manage your expectations all that to say you're probably wondering who we are so I thought I would do a quick introduction to myself and I'm going to hand to my colleague Rachel just to say a little bit about who we are and where we come from so so um if you could just go to the next slide Rachel which has a picture of us which feels a bit pointless because you can see my face but um hello I'm Alice kosher I am the head of digital transformation and I work on behalf of the wildlife trust to help them make the most of digital and to help us deliver on our 2030 strategy Ambitions of which you will hear a bit during this session about what that is and how it all links together so I'm just going to hand briefly to Rachel and then I'm going to talk you through a bit around that thanks yep hi everyone I'm Rachel Hall I'm our climate change manager at the wildlife Trust and that means I support um and help the wildlife tress all 46 of them to accelerate our work on climate change mitigation and adaptation as part of our mission to restore nature I also advocate for the role of nature-based solutions playing a central and valued role to address many of the world's local to Global issues so that's me excellent thank you and if we could go to the next slide because well I wanted to show you the kind of framing device that we had while thinking about this particular presentation so just after we said yep we'd be very happy to come and talk about this um charity digital centers this report which said um you know what is the UK charity sector thinking about in terms of climate change so there are three themes that we thought were quite interesting and we're going to kind of pick up on throughout this presentation which is one that Charities are concerned about climate change but have yet to take action uh first thing you're not alone and you'll see some of the stuff we're going to talk to about that secondly there is no Universal understanding of environmental sustainability in the UK charity sector and thirdly Charities are unclear about the importance of environmental sustainability within their organization so we kind of took from that that people are really interested in this they know it's important but they don't quite know where to go where to start or what might be kind of guiding those thoughts principles and approaches so we're going to talk to you a little bit about that but first and next slide please going to talk about where we've come from so you might think you well you may well know what the wildlife trusts are um but we a Grassroots uk-wide Federation well UK and the Crown dependencies wide Federation of 46 independent trusts we are um all independent Charities including the Royal SCI of wildlife trust which is where myself and Rachel work which is the 47th and we help The Wider Federation to make the most of lots of different things and deliver on our strategy I've put this picture in because we're a bit like a murmuration so we work towards a shared 2030 strategy and we're going to talk a little bit about what that is and how that links to digital and the climate but we are all independent char and that's really important to how we work we know our local context we work on the ground we manage reserves but we are all collectively working together like a beautiful mation of Starlings or a sh of Herring I've heard many metaphors uh that we could use could we go to the next slide please and this is what we're working on I just wanted to show you this because this has been co-created across the wildlife trust Federation and it brings together our big Ambitions to deliver strategy 2030 which is around bringing nature back now in order to do this we've identified kind of three key goals that we want supported by five Transformations and five what are called enabling priorities now if we could go to the next slide one of our Transformations is what is um the one that I work to coordinate facilitate and help which is transformation 4 which is undergoing a root and Branch digital transformation also pretty nice because that's a good ecological metaphor but basically we're trying to embrace a digital culture we are going to be making the most of digital tools and Technologies to help us deliver The Wider digital The Wider kind of strategic transformation we need it runs through everything whether it's a digital way of working whether it's responding to new technologies new risks New Opportunities Horizon scanning for things that might support and help us digital does go through a lot of different areas of our strategy and therefore we need to look at what is the actual impact of digital as well it's not just something that is a kind of neutral it has its own cost and that's something that we start to think about but it also Al has the benefits and opportunities where we can use digital to really address some of the challenges that we are facing so I'm going to P to Rachel who's going to talk about another area of our strategy that links to this and ties into how we start to think about tech and climate intersecting so underpinning those big Transformations and our kind of our core headline strategic goals we absolutely are clear that we've got a Bedrock of uh sustainability and getting our Basics right so getting our own heal in order and yes that absolutely covers sustainability both environmental social governance but also thinking more about our use of chemicals um our safeguarding aspects things we're govern by as Charities and making sure that we've just before we get excited about the new and the shiny we're actually making sure that we've got our own house in order at the basic level and that enables us then to think about those more ambitious programs be that CL clim change mitigation reducing emissions um and how we're going to drive decarbonization really quickly as well as thinking about fundamentally our risk um from climate changes as organizations and how we need to address that to make sure we are resilient to its impacts as well but really reflecting on the the charity digital report and thinking about the fact that a lot of Charities and our employees we're absolutely engaged and we want to act but we just don't know where to start and fundamentally well no wonder given that we often fall through the gaps of what is an incredibly complex and wide- ranging area and if we take kind of climate mitigation or Net Zero targets um and carbon accounting for example there are absolutely numerous and fast expanding uh test standards best practice guidance individual uh isos that kind of thing that really capture this area and we often fall through the gaps of all of them as Charities now you could say that's actually quite a good thing because fundamentally these are all targeted at um addressing those top- down big emitters first and we have to remember as Charities typically being at the smaller end of things we are impact and our emissions and I'll come on to that in a second is pretty small in the context of our country's emissions and often it's on a voluntary basis for example we don't typically often uh tip into the the requirements for carbon accounting and things are developing so such a pace in this space that actually the resource to to keep on top of that is quite significant but the challenge has been for us for example at the wildlife trust we have spent quite an uh quite a significant amount of time thinking about what is a credible approach for us to take in this space to make sure that we are acting um to reduce our emissions um within line on with our Net Zero Target but at the same time being pragmatic to the fact that we don't have that much resource to put to it so how can we do it smartly efficiently and effectively and for us it's probably quite um front of mind that we are facing both a joint nature and climate crisis and we cannot see the carbon and the reducing emissions issue in isolation so it's very much for us about taking a holistic approach to that so what does that look like for us across the wildlife trusts well we spent a great deal of time discussing actually how the wildlife Trust wanted to engage in the climate agenda and the climate space in the UK and that that covered kind of two years actually of discussions um and webinars and upskilling across our staff within the movement and we reached a a collective position as you will on climate action and how we want it to be which you can see and is set out on our website and that covers several core areas from the role that we want to play in reducing emissions um and as well as kind of adapting to climate change also the role that nature has to play specifically and how we want to engage with that and promote it externally and then thirdly around expire inspiring others um to act um with us as well so it covers the full breadth essentially of our strategic goals and how we want to be seen and act in this space and that breaks down into several key work strands and particularly for for my team is the mitigation and the adaptation work plans so you can see in the center here this is our latest um greenhouse gas inventory for the 2021 2022 year so our mitigation work plan is very much founded upon our carbon accounting approach and it's something we embarked upon together as a collective Federation back in 2019 so we undertake uh a collective approach consistent right across all 47 organizations and I think it's fair to say and really useful kind of thinking about here is that actually it's been a big Journey for us and our accounting approach is nowhere near perfect it's nowhere near complete but fun fundamentally it's about getting started starting to understand where your emissions are in what categories what areas and then using that information to help you figure out where you want to prioritize reducing those emissions in future we did have that externally audited last year actually and we're working with a consultant again to think about what are the biggest areas that we can be we can be addressing um through our work to 20130 to our Net Zero Target but that that's a big area and it's something that our staff weren't actually skilled in before we started working in this area particularly so it's been a massive upscaling effort for all of us and we're all learning as we go so it's just about dipping the toe in and bit by bit getting there learning more um and figuring out what it is but I think fundamentally not letting the the complexity of it stop you from getting in at all the the recent um addition for us is really been and the big focus is around our adaptation work plan so back in 2022 we actually produced our first climate change risk assessment and submitted that to government under their reporting power of the climate change act as well now this report of course looks at the risks that climate change poses to nature but actually also and I think this is really important when we're thinking about the charity charity sector as a whole it looks at our risks and and the vulnerability and exposures we have as organizations to climate change ourselves and that's really pertinent because it covers things like our the impact from flooding overheating wildfires and drought and when we think about that in the context of our operations we run many vend visitor centers across the UK we are employers of a large number of Staff that's really important for our visitor welfare our staff welfare thinking about the safety um and the E economic Prosperity essentially of our sites and our organizations so for us adapting to climate change isn't just about and contributing to our core Strat strategic aims of bringing nature back it's actually making sure that our organizations are sustainable into the future as well to continue delivering on our strategic goals and I think that's a really key point to make but ultimately none of these work programs would be in place without the people that sit behind them and I think we really cannot underestimate the value of our people here whatever Tech data we're using and monopolizing to to make these work plans happen for example the climate change risk indicators produced by the metto office the conversion factors for the greenhouse gas inventory that we use published by government um all the platforms that we're using to help us uh estimate emissions for our landbased um greenhouse gases as well it's the people behind them and their knowledge that's really driving this forward and so when we've taken that into actually tangible actions around reducing emissions for example we cannot underestimate enough the value that our people bring to this the culture change and importantly the leadership and the role that leadership plays in driving um sustainability and climate action forward and we are getting on with actions that are typically no regrets so where we know that they're going to have a positive influence or impact on reducing emissions but also are unlikely to have any adverse negative impacts as well so that's been things fundamentally where solar for example we can include we've been transitioning to using battery electric powered chainsaws which has been really interesting because of a safety element with volunteers as well and the fumes has been a fantastic double win but really it's it's those things that you don't think about so yes some of this looks like the big and the shiny and the capital expenditure but I think the big learning for us through all of this has been actually fundamentally taking a step back and understanding the basics so getting those Basics right for example on your energy use do you know how you're using energy across your your buildings both in space so where in the building you're using the most energy and over time so in that 24-hour period and then coming back to people have you got someone who's looking at that data and analyzing it and then using that to inform what actions you might be able to take and Alice is going to touch on this further because as Charities we all know the challenge we're under in terms of uh efficiently spending our resources well now we're here thinking about the small wins easy wins that we can make without spending significant amounts of money that actually incrementally can make a big difference so bit by bit it's all it all makes a difference and again it's a journey don't try and take by off I think we've we've kind of leared the the most complex actions first and of course we would say this being the wildlife trist it's very front of our minds but we cannot see the carbon issue in isolation so we can't just think about climate as purely carbon and Emissions you know we are in that climate and nature crisis and fund Mally we cannot tackle one without the other Nature has this incredible role to play Just naturally capturing storing carbon emissions out of the atmosphere but actually as climate change worsens those emissions the ability of car of nature to do that is going to deplete and actually it starts to flip and and basically contribute emissions back to the atmosphere and at the same time Nature has this amazing ability to also help us buffer the impacts of climate change as well and cope with it better ourselves be that cooling our office spaces helping us to reduce flooding and and manage water in times of drought and also improve our health and well-being and air quality you name it so many benefits of nature alongside just restoring nature for Nature's sake so for us that's really important and digital has and technology has a fantastic role for us to play here in really en champing the role of nature actuallyy so it in terms of efficiently measuring monitoring and understanding the impact that some of these Solutions can have it's really important so we're thinking about it in that way of how we can think about nature alongside where we we absolutely need them hard engineered removals but something to think about for you you know we all have office spaces we all have um areas that we we might not use so much and just how can you be bringing nature into those spaces and think about the role that it can play for you too so really useful because for example if you've got trees shading your office that red rces the need for you to then put the airon on in hot conditions again having a knock on impact on and a benefit to reducing your emissions as well but I'm now going to hand back to Alice as she takes you through a bit more on the digital Journey great thank you so the next thing to kind of keep making the point is that we take kind of a holistic approach to this stuff so we're talking about um climate change but we're also talking about that link to Nature and nature-based solutions and how we kind of work together and Rachel's already said it's several times people this is about people and how do we help people to make and take meaningful actions for nature so this is a photo from a project we have running at the moment called Next Door nature um which is one of the latest initiatives in the wildlife trust to inspire and support one in4 people to take meaningful action for nature which is one of our key goals that we're trying to do and we know that like companies and like the research that charity digital have done people don't always know what actions they want to take so next door Nature has a whole range of actions that benefit nature in local communities and this includes things like making streets Wilder planting new trees it might be Community Gardens it might be creating accessible walking trails so more people can get out into nature it might be looking at where your pollinator corridors are and making the most of that now we knew that this was something where previously people had kind of come to us but we want to empower communities to be able to make their own decisions about nature in their local areas so all is to say because you thinking none of that is digital no no you're quite right none of that is digital uh but what we wanted to do was to find a way to support communities to take action so we've trained new community organizers who are out in all of the wildlife trusts across the UK um and the CR dependencies to help support this but we also brought together What's called the digital um Nextdoor nature Hub which I'm just going to post into the chat in fact um so the next door nature Hub is a digital tool which helps people find out what other community groups have been doing and to share their stories we knew from some of our research that we did that this is what people wanted and this is how we'll share the kind of actions that really are going to make a difference for nature and how do we Empower people to do that how do we support it well it might not be a digital tool the thing you might want to do might be entirely analog and offline but if we can use digital technology to help bring together some of those ideas and actions and there's also a page on the wildlife Trust website about actions fin nature you might want to take then they all to the good we can use use digital in a way that really starts to support local communities with what they need so if you go to the next slide I'll show you a little bit of um how we know what's currently happening so we ran a survey this year called the great big nature survey which I constantly want to call the Great British nature survey but it's not about cakes um and effectively we spoke to 18,000 different people from across um the UK and the crown dependencies members of the wildlife trust supporters the general public and one of the things that we asked them about amongst a number of other things was the actions that they were taking for nature so if we go to the next slide we know that people don't know what actions are most impactful what we did find interesting is that if you support an environmental um non-governmental organization or an environmental charity you're much more likely to take a wider variety of actions and part of that is because you're quite likely to be bombarded by People Like Us with things that you can do so you're actually connected into big networks because when you look at this so it's a it's a bit of a complex slide don't worry about it we'll circulate them afterwards but what it's showing you is um of the members and supporters of the wildlife trust which is the column on the left down there if you're looking at me um there is a huge range of actions being taken by a lot of people but on the other side of the slide we have non-go supporting public and they're effectively only taking a few actions you can see recycling absolutely dwarfs the rest of them and that's great please recycle it's a great thing but when you look at all of the other things that are going on in the wildlife trust like supporters side you've got growing pollinator friendly plants you've got sustainable shopping you've got taking action in terms of signing petitions or writing to MP you're creating habitats these are impactful actions that support climate and support nature that people are just not taking because and part of that will be a lack of awareness but I also just wanted to flag it of just the kind of things that people are doing so this gives an example of kind of what you might come across if you're involved with a kind of wildlife related charity that might encourage you to take more actions and please do these are some of the wins you can take as a company as an individual that will support that you may not come across if you are not so engaged with some of these sectors so I just wanted to flag that and if you go to the next slide you can see it quite starkly um the top blue line is the general public um a number of actions taken for nature which was um a couple and then moving to the number of actions taken for nature that people who are members and supporters of wildlife trust we taking and you can see it's considerably higher so we know that one of the things we need to do is keep sharing the kind of actions that you might want to take so all that to do with actions where's the bit about technology so if we come to the next slide I just wanted to flag the delightful hype cycle because I think this relates to how do we think about what actions we want to take using technology and in some cases the actions we might be considering might be very based on what's being hyped up at the moment yes we've got all this way into a presentation without saying the word AI but if you then this is the current up-to-date version of the Gartner hype cycle AI is right at the top of it the idea is that things are become very exciting we all get very excited about it um and you know we kind of see it rising and we all talk about it and start to do things with it and if you're an early adopter you really start to kind of pick up on this and then it kind of falls off a bit of a cliff and we kind of go oh actually are we bit over that is it dangerous is it going to take over the world um in the case of AI and then it will grad you come up and there will be some kind of general adoption of some of it if it makes it back up the hype cycle again and it's quite often quite hard to tell what's actually on like the top of the hype cycle and which is on the second bump but the um research is showing you know AI is right at the top of that one so we're all thinking about these kind of new disruptive exciting shiny Technologies and we're thinking right that's going to solve our problems but it's probably worth just having a note of caution um and thinking about what are the practical daytoday things we can do as Charities as Rachel said we don't always have a lot of cash we're rarely the early adopters not not always sometimes we do um early adopt stuff and that's great but it's often quite unlikely just because of the lack of kind of resource that we often have available to us um so these things are coming they're interesting there's definitely going to be a place for them but what can we do now so if go to the next slide um my very uh uncatch list of things that you can do now um basic technology can be really helpful we have technology that is out there digital solutions that are out there that can help us in probably three if not more ways of how we deal with digital and the climate so one is recording it Rachel's mentioned this how do we actually record what we're using keep an eye on what's out there what are we using what are we spending on digital what are we spending in terms of the electricity use of the digital Technologies we're using we can use it you know you can just have a simple Excel sheets you can use different Technologies to kind of record what we're actually using and get a bit of a sense of our Baseline and where we are now the other one is we can reduce stuff so fundamentally like real Basics like if you're sending someone a monster document maybe don't maybe just send them a link to your monster document and then you're not duplicating it you're not sending it twice that means that you don't have to you know that doesn't live in two different places it just stays in one place it's not doubling the amount of storage energy that it uses so just like little things use it to like reduce your overall use of um kind of carbon within your infrastructure and the other one is replacing you can use digital to replace things so we know that using video technology for example like the stuff we're using now is quite a high level of carbon compared to if I was to write all this down in an email to you and email it to you all individually but the benefit is no the alternative to that might be that we all got you know got in our cars drove somewhere and Rachel and I stood in front of you and gave this presentation in real life which might be really fun we'd probably have biscuits But ultimately technology is enabling us to replace that kind of fossil fuel transportation with something else so it's thinking about balancing it off that there will always be a cost to everything we're doing but how are we balancing that out with the benefit so if you could go to the next slide please I just wanted to flag getting the basics right turns up in all our documents as well it's part of our approach here and we've made the point it's called getting our house in order it's not called building a new house um and so this is something that is from uh our greenhouse gas report that Rachel shared earlier but I just wanted to flag there's a real bit in here about the fundamentals which is all having a carbon reduction strategy so this is some stuff that you may want to think about have a carbon reduction strategy and have a program of carbon reduction activities that linked to what your strategy says have a look at calculating your greenhouse gas emissions monitor it and then evaluate that progress to inform those action plans change those actions based on what seems to be working and what doesn't and also a suggestion here is is what we have in the wildlife trust which is a carbon reduction Champion so someone who feeds back drives forward the action it's not their full-time job in the majority in think all cases um but effectively this is someone who's really going to Champion this and keep you kind of thinking about it on a day-to-day basis and that can be really useful they can Horizon scan see what's out there feed it back come to sessions like this um and basically act as the kind of the person who's going to keep telling you about this so you don't forget about it because that's something you know we've all got day jobs to do as well that's something that this role can be really valuable for so I'm going to give you just a quick um number of slides that actually Rachel and I delivered to uh well a much bigger version of this to our internal working group we have a carbon group made up of those Champions um and they come along and we talk about different things but one of them was on digital and technology so we provided just some quick here are some things you might want to think about um we know for example uh cloud computing so data centers data centers are a huge huge source of energy um and they will make up a much bigger Demand by 2030 which is when our strategy goes to so it's just going to keep going up so we're moving to Cloud that is often a lot better than having stuff as they say in it on the tin uh sat in your offices because you have the benefit of scale and also some of these big cloud compute areas are moving to be more kind of carbon efficient carbon friendly places which can be really useful definitely don't not move to the cloud but it is somewhere that we know is a kind of rising level of things that are needed however if you go to the next slide um It's actually kind of there's some research that shows it's dwarfed by the actual manufacture use and disposal of devices that we use every day which is my excuse for having an absolutely terrible old phone um but basically the big significant impact is going is in a lot of cases it's the technology that you're buying it's the physical like Hardware that you've got so you know the build of these the creation of them the shipping of them across the world and then the disposal of these things um is a real problem but something we have a little bit more control about it's quite hard to tell the carbon footprint of some of the our Cloud um systems although you can get technology for that but basically hold on to your devices as long as they still work like you will need to update them obviously but really do try and replace them as less often as you need to as Charities this is not usually a problem but I'll put it out there anyway and the other one is uh recycle them uh and dispose of them carefully I know curries do a recycling um kind of scheme and that's where I've taken old stuff to and then at least it's not going into landfill it's not going somewhere else so whilst we get all the kind of big scary numbers about things like Cloud AI what's the compute power of these things there are some things we can do which is just make sure that you are not getting new shiny things for the sake of it this often happens with project grants rather than anything else but I'll just put it out there it's one of the things we might want to avoid so um next slide is to show a quick win around energy demand um so this is from the excellent work done by by Hampshire and AR of white Wildlife trust who wanted to get a bit of a sense of how much energy they were using within their offices um and so they got a heat camera and had a little look around um and they basically found which will probably be the same for a few of you um that they had some real big areas of heat wastage so the one of them that you can see at the left side here is the uninsulated pipes so just having their pipes insulated was going to save them loads of energy um and you can see it's coming up as big red lines on that heat scan but it's worth look even if you haven't done a heat survey of your officers are your pipes lagged is it worth insulating some of this stuff um and they also found that the walls were really losing a lot of heat as well so putting insulation on the inside of their walls was quite cost-effective for them and it was doable quite quickly um and then another one was you can see in the image um sorry just go back to the F the other one was um the radiator heat panels as well so uh the radiator's giving out a lot heat but it's not reflecting into the room particularly well it's another quick when you often see it with um tin foil in the back so you might just want to consider some stuff like that around your office um which enables you to uh save electricity but the next picture is um a pretty pretty good one instead of uh getting rid of you know the last one was like let's modify let's not get rid of stuff let's modify what we have we don't need to move officers do anything drastic uh this was something they did get rid of and a truly excellent slide I enjoyed it immensely when I first saw it um which is the uh when they ran the um heat so like survey over their office the phones stood out like this and the reason for that is their landlines had a significant standby consumption so they estimated that actually for every phone they had they were saving um well they were losing until they got rid of the landlines uh 30 kilograms of carbon for each phone which was about 150 quid a year in terms of electricity costs that they were spending keeping their phones warm which was not something that they ever realized was a problem until they started to have a look so if you have landline phones still um in this St age might be worth checking out how warm they are because if you're heating your phone then you are definitely wasting electricity and so they've swapped saved some cash uh and they'll be transitioning to mobiles which even though there is also the issue around handsets and the use of those will be saving them electricity in the long run and saving on their carbon and not something that anyone expected to find so this is where you can use a digital tool like a heat sensor to find things that you may not have expected but there's also some big wins in there and the ones that they would as well so um just kind of I mean I just wanted to have the slide just said don't just buy an app there's loads of stuff out there I've seen them all myself and Rachel have been pitched them all if you have come across a carbon accounting type app we've probably been pitched it um but our whole point is it's about the people it's not about the app you need to kind of build in that kind of culture change that behavior change that approach of like how do you ensure that the actions people are taking are kind of become second nature embedded in your day-to-day so technology is and kind of the apps that you might see could be part of the solution but they're only going to work if people are really bought into it and have a sense of what kind of actions make the most sense for them to do so I'm gonna um then pass back to Rachel who's going to talk to us a little bit about Partners yeah and this is just a brilliant example I think we have to remember this is a often a new area for all of us and we're not automatically going to have all of the skills expertise that we might want or need or the capacity indeed to actually be delivering a lot of this stuff so it's really about finding the right Partners the right networks to tap into to mutually support each other so for example we've been part of and are active in the fit for the future network um which is a network of sustainability professionals uh in multiple different areas so Charities public sector all sorts and lots of different types of Charities for example example as well which is really useful because everyone's coming at it from different angles but we're fundamentally all tackling the same problems so how can we do it smartly efficiently and learn from each other as well and that extends into corporates and businesses who typically have and a lot of the bigger ones have more resource fundamentally to put to all of this and are typically further on as well because it's been a requirement for them for for a significant number of years and we're finding examples of that for example with our corporate partnership with Seamans where we're really kind of working together so previously Seamans have come on a lot of our wild work days uh and that was where our corporate relationship really um cemented but during coid where staff couldn't come along to our wild work days actually we we took a different tax and Sean actually supported us on a fantastic piece of work looking at EV charging infrastructure um looking at two specific sites um to really drill down as case studies to think about what was the requirements for for EV charging looking at the visitor and site usage models for then targeting the design of those EV charging systems and how they might operate and also whether there was opportunities for solar on the site that would enable them to be more efficiently um supplied with energy essentially and that was brilliant and a lot of the trusts then took that as a model to think about okay well how how does that work for me in my place what opportunities have I got there and what model do I actually want to run how am I going to use EV do I want to offer it to visitors to the site for example we then took that a bit further with Seamans and this year I've worked on what you can see here on the screen which is a pre- energy strategy support so that was looking at the the energy consumption actually across the entire Federation of wildlife dresss which is is relatively low but we do occupy a large number of old buildings um lots of efficient heating many kind of off-grid as well so we are still seeing gas and oil use quite significantly I think gas and oil make up about 6% of our our footprint emissions overall so for us that is an absolute priority to get off fossil fuels and that's where we're seeing our Focus so our work with seens was really to look at the opportunities for Renewables at our sites but really interestingly they took us through the entire Journey on that and that wasn't just about getting to that really complex end of the big the shiny getting the heat pumps in the wind or the significant power purchase agreements you name it it was fundamentally have you got monitoring and metering in place at your buildings is someone looking at that and an analyzing it and then going around and thinking about what appliances you've got thinking back to the phone okay from there okay what's the the next stage thing on and and those increments were really important to to demonstrate to trusts and to use ourselves that actually sometimes the most cost effect the most costly actually um implementations wouldn't actually have the biggest impact and again it's a lot about behaviors and how staff visitors um were using sites that would inform then the measures that we wanted to take so that was really key and the expertise and the skills from Seamans wasn't ever something that we were ever going to be able to either buy inhouse or have permanently as a staff base and I think that's crucial there as well that skill sharing across organization is something that we really do need to to make more of so I will pass back to um to Alice on that because I think the key thing there is that we've often found some of this the tech and the cost of access to it is such a a big barrier for us but how we find ways around that is is the important part yeah so I mean it kind of says it on this slide which is basically yeah the cost and access to digital expertise are significant barriers so we rely on our partners and we have the benefit of we work across a federation So within the over 3,000 staff that form part of the wildlife trust Federation there is a lot of expertise but we don't have the ability to draw in it all the time for this kind of work and that does limit our development and limits our impact so being able to find Partners like seens who can work with us on things like this is really critical to us moving forward at a kind of strategic level on some of it so there is a kind of a pay and a skilled wall to some of this and I can see and some of the questions that have come up that's definitely um reflected here and we saw it reflected in the charity digital report as well we do have an issue with some of the stuff that we see I mentioned the kind of apps that we kind of get pitched you see a lot of free online calculators for example but do we have the skills to know what they're saying do we understand enough about the methodology that they're meant to be using to be able to know that they're making meaningful kind of outputs for us for example some might be overly simplistic and they might not be detailed enough or they might take too long to be useful to us or some which are kind of the more business facing tools can be really expensive I mean we would love to be able to access a number of like new technologies that we see so we have some projects working on Earth observation and satellite based work but being able to do that at scale you know we are one of the largest landholders in the UK we can have a huge number of reserves more reserves than the ra McDonald's or prets so there you go that many reserves um and we would love to be able to use kind of satellite technology on those kind of soil based Technologies but that's not in use across the entire Federation but that kind of stuff would really help us um in terms of what we're trying to do so we look for opportunities to work with academics to create projects and to work with partners that help to bring in some of this expertise so we can benefit from it as I said with the kind of um Gardner hype cycle we're not usually early adopters so hopefully you can find people who've already got mature versions of this that we can then tailor to our needs so go to the next slide I just wanted to kind of summarize how we think about about it um because this is from the internal document that myself and Rachel created to share with our Wildlife trust colleagues um which was kind of this is our kind of approach which is like digital Tech can play a central role in helping us reduce Global Greenhouse emissions it does help us cut down on loads of physical resources but it requires energy and carbon to manufacture it to power it to cool it and to kind of and to kind of deal with this level of technology and it does add up and what does that mean so the next slide is um is more law so some of you I'm sure have come across Mo's law but if you haven't uh golden Moore came up with this in 1965 which predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years which leads to a rapid advancement in computing power which similarly leads to a rapid advancement in what is being used so effectively the rapid change that we're seeing and it is really coming up now you may have seen some of the um research around you know each AI search uses a certain number of um bottles of water in order to cool it down for example is that this has started to really make people concerned about digital and around the environmental impact specifically of digital tools and of using digital now the demand is only going to become higher because the compute power is becoming higher as we're kind of going the ability to analyze data at scale the ability to deal with very big kind of data sets image sets those kind of things is only going to get larger so there are some efforts within the industry to start to look at some of this um and some companies are actively looking at kind of more energy efficient design some are looking at more alternative materials different processes and there is a kind of push from consumers around data centers and how we make sure and you know if you have you know where are you hosting your computers what your kind of cloud computing where are you hosting your data put pressure on people that you are your hosts to see are they actually going Greener you know Google Microsoft Amazon web servers all have information online about how green they have a little look at that does that meet with what you would expect and what you would want to see so there is a push and it will be moving towards more renewable use of data centers because we're just going to run out but at the moment we're at a bit of a transition point where we need to kind of think about this in terms of those computers that we're using that computing power we're using needs to make a difference to what we're trying to deliver and we have to kind of balance that out doesn't mean don't use it that stuff is really beneficial but it does mean it's a consideration and especially for someone like the wildlife trust it's a real consideration to us so uh to go to the next slide just in case you forgotten what we were saying it's about people um because we're just we realized when putting the slide de together we are making the same point but um effectively we want to think about the technology just not not just how we use it how we engage with it but this is the same for anything not just the kind of carbon usage but what are we using it for what needs is it responding to what are the benefits but also what are the behaviors we need in order to make the most of the technology we're bringing in you know for example we might do better to kind of instead of bringing a new tool to report on things maybe we want to you know have behaviors that reduce energy demands so do you promote sustainable transport use with your staff do you encourage use of public transport of EV Vehicles like as um described earlier more hybrid working where you may not need to kind of commute so much and not be in the office so much sustainable Supply chains for things that you're buying um making sure that you do recycle you know loads of people are doing it seems pretty popular but do have the ability to do that and just basic stuff like composting within your offices so it's thinking about all these different things and making sure they're in place before you jump to the Big Shiny thing being the solution so if I go to the next one um just because I like the picture of the uh the Microsoft Beaver icon basically um but we basically want to make sure that our digital activities are cutting carbon not adding to them but that doesn't mean that we are kind of not going to use digital for things where digital is the best solution and we also need to make sure that it's sustainable not just in terms of carbon but in terms of usability of how we engage with people and so if you go to the next slide um I'm just going to show you a couple of quick things which is design it in this is the thing with digital if you're building new digital Technologies you can start to design it in now so the way we design buy and build software um how we and the digital tools we use and the platforms we use can really help us be more energy efficient and this is summed up pretty well in the next slide which is good design is as little design as possible don't over complicate stuff if you are designing things like new web pages new digital tools new apps keep it simple it'll be more accessible it'll be easier to use and it'll also be more environmentally friendly if you are making sure that people aren't clicking around they don't have loads of stuff that's loading up that means that they don't know where they are it responds to their needs they can go to your online digital tool or website find what they need quickly that is going to save you electricity and save you on being frustrated visiting your site so like there's loads of tips out there this one's probably the best if we go to the next slide quickly I can show you another one which from climate action. Tech well worth having a look at that page for obvious reasons um they've got some good tips on there too and we will we always keep an eye out for what we think are good tips so delete stuff that's not essential don't hold on stuff don't digitally hoard you're just backing it up in loads of different places now um so make sure you're not hoarding stuff sign out of newsletters that you don't want anymore I know you've hoarded them into that little folder where you think you'll look at it you're not going to sign out of them if you're not opening them um have a look and make sure that you haven't got images where you don't need them make sure they're adding value once again make sure you send links to things rather than send people monster documents they don't want them like that you're just wasting carbon don't do that look at whether you can go to a green hosting of your website and cash stuff which is basically like don't keep serving up the big things over and over again make sure that they're held in kind of more local spaces so you don't have to do that and then if you go to the next slide um I really like there's a book called how bad are bananas by uh Mike berners Lee and in it he has this great quote um which is basically around uh you know is it better to read stuff online or read things in a book and he said both reading online or in paper format is a good thing to do if the content helps you become aware of the world the climate crisis and what we can do about it and reading itself is a low carbon activity because it is hard to shop or drive while you read so the ultimate point of this is we are using this technology to try and ultimately make the world better that's the point but going to read a good book and learning about what you should be doing probably balances it all out thought was a great point for Mike if we go to the next and last slide which we've hopefully tried to make the point here is there are loads of things you can do but action is better than no action do something something is better than nothing Rachel I'm going to pass to you is anything you want to add on this one yeah I mean I think for us you know the the climate crisis is in such a dire State at the moment let's be honest um so for us everything is about a can do positive attitude how we can all make a difference and bringing it back to every single role that we play both in our professional and our personal lives it's core to the training that we're supporting Wildlife trust with is how every role is a role related to climate change no matter what it is that you're doing and that everyone feels empowered to be part of that and that is in your you know thinking about Community thinking about nature thinking about your role at work fundamentally how you can use technology and harness it for the better and reduce don't sweat the small stuff but reduce what you can um those little little actions make a big difference brilliant thank you ever so much great thank you sorry I forgot to unmute myself um thank you so much for that presentation I found it really interesting and especially the statistic on how much energy and heat tech can use even when it's just on standby is definitely something that I'm going to be keeping in mind now we've had a few questions come in already but if anyone has any other questions feel free to add them in now or upvote the existing questions as I will be addressing these with the most upvoted first so let's dive straight in um with a question from Louise who asked have you ever looked at digital tech for fundraising do you mean in terms of our how we fund raise um so I'm going to assume that is what you're after so I mean we have online kind of approaches to fundraising we have if you go for example I was at down at um London Wildlife stre Street uh London Wildlife trusts Camy Street yesterday and they have for example QR codes that you can put in on site that help to raise money for like looking after that particular Reserve so there's quite a lot of digital Tech that's kind of in some use it's interesting we um do find that on some of our reserves we don't have great signal so we don't have great Wi-Fi signal so technology is often not the solution there it might be the actually you know good old um you know kind of donation box or something might work better or having a reserves manager who can talk to you that's certainly one so we do use um digital technology for our fundraising it tends to be online rather than on reserve although like I say we do have some that do use that great thank you and yeah Louise just said that that's exactly what she was asking so perfect um the next question is from an anonymous attendee asking how do I get around having very limited finances to make these changes or take action I think that's a really really important one and yeah it's something that we're all grappling with and fun fundamentally for us that's been about understanding our carbon emissions across the whole so measuring them in the first instance and actually not trying to go after everything at once so the way that we've triaged it is thinking about getting off fossil fuels is our absolute priority and what we can do there um fundamentally that means taking getting away from oil and gas um and thinking about our our travel particularly now that's a really interesting one because we manage reserves we have a lot of 4x4 vehicles for example now the EV Market in 4x4s is kind of in its infancy and where there are EVS on the market they are kind of 60 Grand plus um and actually don't fulfill the role for us at the moment so I think it's being cautious and kind of cognizant that actually sometimes it's putting it in the plan for 5 years down the road and being okay with that and saying we we're focusing on this stuff now which we absolutely can do and the technolog is there and we've got the capital to fund it versus let's put it in the budget plan for a few years down the road because the technolog is going to be there the servicing the backup everything like that so I wouldn't let the finance be the barrier think about what you can do through people and the behavior change element to reduce consumption because that will often save you money and interestingly on the energy point and we we will have all been hit by the energy cost um recently and moving away from those oil gas elements has been really crucial for several trusts and saving a lot of money so far even with electricity prices going up so again something to really think about there that's great thank you and yeah I really love the kind of forward-looking element of it which ties in very nicely to another question we've had um asking how can I encourage my senior leadership team and The Wider organization to focus on the quick quins oh great great question you know I think we've we've worked a lot with the the leaders across the movement and I think in part that's been looking more from a risk perspective necessarily than a reducing emissions perspective particularly when we're looking at the impacts of climate change on us as organizations and our responsibility as employers our response to emergency um events I think as land owners we've experienced firsthand quite a lot of the impacts of wildfires particularly last year we had significant numbers over a thousand hectares of land burnt by wildfires and so we had a lot of emergency responses we're now looking at coordinating that across the Federation in terms of sharing of equipment resources planning all of that side of things but I had take some learning from so go away and have a look at the task force on climate related Financial disclosures related nature disclosures because that really kind of highlights and brings to the for some of the risks and exposure you bring to your organization if you're not thinking about this stuff as kind of an underpinning to everyone's everyone's business great thank you and another question we've had come in um about um do you have any tips for Heritage building

2023-11-18 17:21

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