Barrow Cadbury Trust Climate Change Action Plan 2022-23

We have reviewed opportunities to mitigate climate change across all our areas of operations, considering what we can do ourselves, and what we can help others to do.  Over the coming year we will undertake the following actions.

• To educate ourselves we will:
  • Establish a climate group within our staff team that will take responsibility for ensuring climate change mitigation is a live issue in the Trust.
  • Enable representatives from the climate group to attend training on climate change and carbon literacy and cascade learning to the rest of the team
  • Include discussion of the Trust’s actions to mitigate climate change in our annual cycle of Board meetings
  • Explore the carbon footprint of the technology we use including video calls, emails, web hosting etc. and identify how we can make carbon savings.
  • Participate in funder networks to learn what others are doing and share our experience

• To reduce the climate impact of our own operations we will:
  • Move to premises with a lower carbon footprint and explore how we can reduce the carbon costs incurred during working at home.
  • Maintain the habit we acquired during the last two years of a virtually paperless office as we return to hybrid working.
  • Stop printing bespoke stationary, and fund the printing of reports produced by our partners by exception only.
  • Minimise air travel and use public transport, walking or cycling to attend events wherever possible. In arranging meetings and events we will weigh up whether the climate costs of meeting in person override the value of face to face interactions and use virtual meetings (or phone calls, which are less carbon-heavy) where possible.
  • Examine our catering supply chains, avoiding suppliers and foodstuffs that have a high carbon footprint and/or have other negative environmental impact such as excessive use of packaging.  We will minimise food waste through careful ordering and monitoring how much we use.
  • Recycle our decommissioned IT items, mobile phones and other hardware.
  • Calculate our carbon footprint and offset it through contribution to a carbon offsetting project.  We note that carbon offsetting can be used to “greenwash” lack of action on carbon-heavy practices.  We will aim to reduce our carbon footprint year on year to ensure this does not happen.

• We will use our investments to address climate change through engaging with companies, regulators and other investors.  In particular we will continue to:
  •  Work with other investors through our networks, including the Charity Responsible Investment Network and the Church Investor Group.
  • Align our investment portfolio with the Climate Active approach of Sarasin & Partners, our investment manager.
  • Engage with companies through letters, meetings, shareholder resolutions and AGMs to ensure that the companies adopt a strategic and operational approach in line with the Paris Climate agreement. 
  • Support the Investor Decarbonisation Initiative (IDI), managed by ShareAction, which engages with companies to address different aspects of their activities which affect climate change.
  • Engage with public policy makers with the aim of creating a structural and regulatory environment that supports the transition to a low carbon economy.
  • Invest in companies which have a positive environmental impact, subject to the availability and suitability of such investments.
  • Support letters to the media regarding climate active and biodiversity issues, using other networks and coalitions such as the IIGCC (International Investor Group on Climate Change).
    
• To support our partners to reduce their own climate impact we will:
  • Continue to encourage them, through our application and reporting procedures, to consider their climate mitigation actions.  We will be mindful of imposing additional work on our partners so be proportionate in our processes.
  • Offer carbon literacy training to all those we fund.
  • Offer to pay for carbon audits, where they are available locally, to the smaller organisations we fund, and to build a resource bank of other sources of support such as peer learning or mentoring.
  • Convene the funded partners in each of our policy areas (economic justice, criminal justice, migration and social investment) to discuss how climate change intersects with that policy area with a view to helping them and us integrate climate considerations into our programmatic work.