Education aBc
164 Old Road,
Oxford OX3 8SY, U.K.

Tel: Int + 44
(0)7779 021464
Hello@EducationABC.co.uk

The environmental impact of all of our activities is now something which is of concern to all of us. We need to balance making a good, positive contribution to the future with living in a way which is as sustainable as possible, reducing our Carbon Footprint wherever we can.

Balance

It would be wrong to stop all activities. There is enormous benefit in travel and in education - developing the minds of the future, opening the door to cultural understanding, making new opportunities available to all our students: children and adults alike. However, we have to ensure that what we are doing is as environmentally friendly as possible.

Carbon Footprint

In England today, we use the term 'Carbon Footprint', to describe the environmental our activities. We should try to reduce the 'size' of our Carbon Footprint wherever possible, to reduce the negative impact we have on the environment. This involves reducing international flights wherever we can, for example; it involves walking or cycling when we can rather than using a car or even a bus; it involves switching lights off, of course, but in winter it might also involve putting an extra sweater on rather than turning up the heating, or in summer it might involve opening a window rather than turning on the air conditioning.

At Education aBc, we work on a number of fronts. Certainly, we try to reduce our Carbon Footprint in everything we do:

• In our activities running our courses: for example, we try to reduce photocopies used in teaching where we can - using the data projector in class instead, if that is equally good educationally, or encouraging students to use computers rather than paper (for example, exercises on Blogging).
• In the content of what we do: for example, we offer courses in International Global Citizenship, where environmental awareness is a key part, or encourage our teachers to include environmental issues in their normal teaching, where appropriate educationally.
• In the preparation of what we do: we try to keep our own flights to a minimum, only travelling where we have to meet people personally, conducting most of our business electronically, or by phone.
• In the nature of other projects we take on: reducing the Carbon Footprint which would have been incurred by others (see below).

Reducing our Carbon Footprint

Apart from all of the day to day activities and changes we try to make in our lifestyles, there are also opportunities sometimes to make large changes in our Carbon Footprints, or in the Carbon Footprints of work which we might do with partners.

Our current Immersion Project in Russia is an example of this. We are working with an international company in Russia, providing English language immersion courses on three of their sites, to make it possible for the Russian staff to communicate with the rest of the company overseas. We provide 8 teachers in total, who fly out twice a year to provide the immersion courses locally.

Flying teachers out? That doesn't sound like much of an improvement in our Carbon Footprint!

Well, actually, it is. You see, what was happenning before was that the company was planning to train 184 students locally with Russian teachers of English for three years, and then because that was not going to take them far enough quickly enough, to fly all 184 students to the UK for an immersion course. In fact, they were also doing other inefficient things as well, but let's just focus on the flight comparison only!

So, if we have 184 students who would each have made a flight to the UK over three years, that would have been a Carbon Footprint of nearly 132 tonnes of CO2, or nearly 44 tonnes of CO2 per year.

Of course all this is not saving, as the flights of our teachers out there should be set against this. Sending out 8 teachers twice a year has a carbon footprint of nearly 11.5 tonnes of CO2. However, that means that there is a net NEGATIVE CARBON FOOTPRINT of 32.5 tonnes of CO2 per year on this project.

In fact, even if we include all the other flights which we have to make for our work (which in 2008 also includes the travel we have had to make to Morocco and Norway, in setting up our new Conflict Resolution programme: Talk Together), Education aBc has a NEGATIVE CARBON FOOTPRINT (at least in terms of flights) of just under 20 tonnes of CO2 per year!

We realise that flights are not the only contributors to our Carbon Footprint, and we continue to work on other ways of decreasing our overall Carbon Footprint. But, it's a good start!