Government Sustainability

As in many other organisations, the influence of climate change and the threat it poses to life on Earth is increasingly being felt in the way the Forestry Commission does business. We've long enjoyed a reputation as an exemplar of sustainable forest management, becoming the first state forest service in the world to have its entire forest estate certified as complying with the standards of the independent, international Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). However, the need to play our part in reducing global carbon emissions and act as an exemplar of best practice caused us to take a hard look at the environmental performance of our other activities. And we had to admit that we were in the "could do better" category for items such as energy and water consumption, travel and transport, building and waste management, and procurement.

Sustainability programme
We therefore established an in-house corporate sustainability programme called 'Greenerways' to respond to the government's climate change targets. Like many other organisations, we identified energy consumption and travel as key areas that required attention.
    
We then soon found that one of the most challenging parts of putting in place a corporate sustainability programme for improving our performance is the start: having made the decision, what next?
    
On the basis that it's difficult to make and measure reductions in your emissions if you don't know how much you’re emitting in the first place, the starting point, clearly, was to establish baseline information – find out how much we're currently emitting. Then we had to figure out how we were going to measure future emissions in order to report whether and by how much we're achieving reductions. With 3,300 staff working from dozens of sites across Great Britain and using a wide variety of transport for business, the task was easier said than done.
    
The multitude of systems and processes involved in managing our travel meant the process was not simple. Furthermore, it is not just a matter of identifying the method of travel used (i.e. air, rail, road or sea) and the number of miles involved, but also of identifying the output of the particular vehicle used. All miles travelled need to be converted to CO2 emissions, because that's the figure we're trying to reduce.
    
Although in general terms we wanted to reduce miles travelled overall, it was acknowledged that this might not be possible in all areas of our business. So where that was the case, we would try to reduce emissions by using more energy-efficient vehicles.
    
A high level of detail is required to allow these management strategies to be developed and managed, but we wanted to ensure that we could meet those objectives without greatly increasing the administrative burden. Following is an outline of how we tackled this.

Stage 1 – Identify Sources of Travel Data
We first identified all our systems that involved travel-related data input, which were: our electronic employee expenses management system (EEM). This is used to reimburse staff for 18 different types of business travel expense, from car, bicycle and motorcycle mileage to refunds of air, rail, bus, taxi and ferry fares; our government procurement card (GPC) reconciliation system. This is populated by a monthly electronic transaction file from the bank, which is loaded into an Oracle database for reconciliation by the cardholder. Many GPC transactions relate to travel fares; our corporate financial system, through which purchase invoices are processed; our vehicle and machinery management package, called Drive. This has an inventory of all in-house cars, vans and other equipment; and car hire and taxi usage data from our corporate contracts.

Stage 2 – Agree requirements for a Greenerways Travel Summary Database
We needed to identify a dataset that could be extracted monthly from the source systems and stored in a summary database to provide our corporate usage by cost centre and period. This included the following data:  SOURCE - EEM, GPC, DRIVE etc; CATEGORY - air, rail, road, sea; TYPE - Specific within category, e.g. road: personal mileage; bicycle miles; CC - cost centre; PERIOD - Date of extraction from source system; MILES - Total miles; and CO2 - estimated CO2 output in kilograms for the summary transaction.

Stage 3 - Enhancing the Source Data
This was not a simple case of extracting the data from each of the source systems and exporting it to the summary database. We identified a need to add facilities to the source systems to collect additional data in order to meet the requirements of the summary database. This resulted in the following outcomes:
    
EEM – For all vehicle mileage we added a facility to collect the make, model and official CO2 emissions of the vehicles involved. The emissions figure was assessed from the official figures published by the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency (www.vcacarfueldata.org.uk). This required a one-off change to our standing data, but meant we were able to get an accurate figure for all official car mileage. In addition we added an estimated mileage for all other travel expenses claimed, such as train or bus fares. It was obviously impractical to use specific CO2 figures for trains ­or buses, so we decided to use the official output figures for each mode of transport published by Defra(www.defra.gov.uk/environment/business/envrp/conversion-factors.htm).
    
GPC – It was difficult to identify travel-related GPC transactions from the thousands of others sent by the bank each month. We therefore decided to utilise suppliers' Merchant Category Code (MCC) data, which indicates the business area that the service provider is involved in. These were identified to the cardholder as part of the reconciliation process, and cardholders were then required to enter an estimated mileage for each travel-related transaction when confirming their statements. We applied the standard Defra figures referred to above to each mode of travel to get the CO2 emissions.
    
Financial system – Again, it was difficult to isolate the travel-related transactions in this data source. However, analysis indicated that in fact very few travel-related transactions were paid through the corporate financial system, because most were paid by GPC or EEM. We therefore instructed our users not to use the financial system to pay travel invoices, and this effectively removed this source from the process.
    
DRIVE – Our fleet managers were able to assess the mileage and CO2 emissions from the detailed data held in the DRIVE system as part of their fleet management activities. One of the issues identified was the availability of mileage data, and we are looking to increase the frequency of odometer readings by utilising data submitted electronically through our fuel card system. This will give us more up-to-date output of usage from this source.
    
Car Hire – Our corporate supplier provides us with the miles travelled by each car, and we use the Defra figures to calculate the emissions.
    
Taxi – Although this is a relatively small source of emissions, we wanted to include everything to demonstrate that we are taking the issue seriously. It was not practical to get taxi companies to supply the precise mileage for each journey, nor the vehicle used, so we've estimated the distance based on the fares charged, and applied a standard emission output based on the Defra figures.   

Stage 4 – Provide Output from the Travel Database
The creation of the travel database enables us to provide managers with data on miles travelled and CO2 emitted, as well as the source of the data and the type of travel involved. This can be used to monitor future usage, and assess whether the target reductions in CO2 emissions and miles (if applicable) have been achieved. It should be stressed that our Greenerways travel database is not intended to replace the source systems. It is merely a means of electronically bringing together the relevant data from the source systems; they were designed to perform specific management functions, and continue to do so.   

Conclusions
We believe our approach strikes a balance between the need to address our climate change requirements and the need to minimise the administrative burden. Three key factors assisted in this. First, we had already replaced our manual systems with electronic ones for efficiency reasons, but access to electronic data has reduced the administrative effort we would have had if manual systems for expenses, procurement cards and fleet management were still being used.
    
Second, we have taken full advantage of the data available from suppliers on centralised contracts such as energy supply, procurement cards, car hire, taxis etc. Central procurement therefore has a potentially positive role, not only in economies of scale, but also in gathering relevant information.
    
Third, through Greenerways we have raised staff awareness of the importance of responding to climate change, and believe that this has minimised resistance to what some might see as unnecessary bureaucracy. It is likely that public-sector organisations will be required to publish what they're doing in response to climate change as part of the corporate governance process. We believe, therefore, that we've ensured that we have the systems and processes in place to meet this challenge and help us to meet the reduction targets.