Green Impact spotlight: Centre for Health Economics
Read about the Centre for Health Economics team who have been awarded silver in this year's Green Impact Awards for their project on sustainable work travel.
We’re excited to share another Green Impact team project with you this week. The Centre for Health Economics (CHE) have recently been awarded silver in this year’s Green Impact Awards for their project on sustainable work travel.
We asked the team to share more about their project. Read their story below to find out more.
Tell us a bit about your Green Impact project.
The Centre for Health Economics' (CHE) Green Impact project focused on working "Towards transparency and accountability in carbon emissions from work travel". The project aimed to estimate the total carbon emissions and cost of carbon offsets for departmental business travel, focusing on air travel from the year 2019 (before the COVID-19 distortion in travel patterns).
The project also contributed to two UN Sustainable Development Goals: “Climate Action” and “Responsible Consumption and Production”.
Tell us about your project outcomes.
Outcomes of the project included compiling data on air travel from the year 2019 and creating a report, including suggestions for potential actions to repeat and expand this exercise going forward in order to support continued carbon impact calculations and monitoring (e.g. travel, facilities and computation).
The results of the report were presented to CHE’s Department Management Team (DMT) for review. The Green Impact team received positive feedback from the DMT, who expressed interest in continuing to calculate travel-related carbon emissions and assessing how these emissions could be offset in future.
What does your team hope to do in the future?
Looking to the future, the DMT has committed to work closely with the CHE Green Impact team to use the collated data to create a set of principles for CHE, and explore tools to improve the monitoring of travel data going forwards to help inform carbon offsetting in the future.
CHE will continue to scrutinise departmental travel, especially around international conference attendance, and has agreed to pay an annual carbon offsetting sum (based on the 2019 estimate), whilst also exploring and implementing additional measures at University and CHE level.
Well done to the Centre for Health Economics team for everything they have achieved so far to try and minimise unnecessary work travel. We look forward to seeing the team's progress in the coming year!