Our 2023 – 2024 Impact Report

Welcome to our environmental Impact Report for our 2023-2024 financial year (2023). This report provides a review of our carbon emissions, our total impact since we became Climate Positive, and some news from around the globe featuring some positive stories. This is our third Impact Report and we put these together as we want to be transparent about our emissions and encourage others to get involved and help create a more sustainable industry.

We believe every company, big or small, has their part to play in keeping our world as sustainable as possible. The climate emergency is affecting everyone, everywhere and this is an issue that needs to be tackled head-on, taking immediate and decisive action.

We know publishing this report alone isn’t enough and there is always room for improvement. We’re not perfect, we’ve never claimed to be and we never will. But we hope these reports will inspire others among the industry to even start the conversations about taking real action.

2023 has been confirmed by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as the hottest year on record, 0.17°C higher than the previous record of 2016, with records being broken for ocean temperature, sea level rise, ocean acidification, and glacier retreat. 2023 also marks the first time ever, every day of the year was at least 1°C higher than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial levels, with 50% of the days more than 1.5°C.

Positivity

While there is a lot to be worried about when it comes to climate change, we must not lose hope. The media has an important role to play in combatting ‘climate doom’, and we’ve listed below just some of the many positive stories from the last 12 months to show that there is hope.

• In April 2023 the EU passed a groundbreaking law to help stop deforestation
• In June, the United Nations members agreed on the first-ever treaty to protect ocean life in the high seas
• Africa News reported that 600,000km² of landfill was restored to mangroves
• Denmark announced a pledge to donate $22 million to Brazil’s Amazon Fund to help fight deforestation
• The world’s largest offshore wind farm, located off the North-East coast in England, started generating energy
• The UK’s reliance on fossil fuels fell to it’s lowest point since 1957

One of the key measures for our impact is our carbon footprint and at SRL Publishing we’re focusing on carbon dioxide emissions (CO2). CO2 is released into the atmosphere in a number of ways with human activity causing a huge increase in the world’s emissions through the burning of fossil fuels.

Scope 1 and 2 – Our direct emissions

When we measure our carbon emissions, we count all of it meaning our footprint includes the manufacture of our products as well as our direct impacts such as the energy we use, employee travel, and our internet and data usage. We believe this is the only way to understand our true environmental impact.

As technology advances and creates more accurate carbon calculations, our reporting improves to capture more robust and accurate carbon data. This is why we add 15% to our emissions data to give our organisation some headroom in terms of accurate reporting.

Our internet and data usage

Included in our scope 2 calculations is our data and internet usage. We’re all aware of the environmental impact the airline industry, or deforestation has on our natural world, but not often do we see companies taking into consideration their data usage. We have calculated the C02 emissions from our website’s bandwidth usage, our email usage, and also the emissions from every single time someone has viewed our website.

Our website hosting provider uses green energy to power our servers with our website being certified green by the Green Web Foundation.

Scope 3 – Our indirect emissions

Scope 3 emissions often represent the majority of an organisations total Greenhouse Gas emissions and are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the organisation. Scope 3 emissions include all sources not within the Scope 1 and 2 boundary, although the Scope 3 emissions for one organisation could be the Scope 1 or 2 emissions of another.

Our scope 1, 2, and 3 total emissions emitted in 2023 equal 11.51T of C02. In the same year, through the projects we have supported, we have reduced 12.68T of C02. Since June 2020, we have been responsible for 82.5T of C02, having reduced over 155T in the same timeframe.

Tree Planting

We know that planting trees is an excellent way to restore the planet, especially in our industry. But, when applying tree-planting as a climate solution, organisations have to take steps to ensure that the work is being done properly. Our tree planting partner plants trees with Eden Reforestation Projects, which aims to reduce extreme poverty and restore healthy forests by employing local people to plant millions of trees every year. We also don’t take the carbon sequestered by our trees into account when we measure and account for our own emissions.

Not only do we plant trees, we calculate the number of trees ‘used’ for our books on a monthly, and yearly basis, and plant accordingly meaning we will always plant more trees than have been used for our products.

In 2023, we planted 773 trees in countries around the world including Madagascar, Kenya, Brazil, and Nicaragua. In total, we have planted more than 6,700 trees. Whilst we keep track of how many trees have been funded for planting, it always takes a little while before the trees we’ve funded are planted – depending on planting seasons and local conditions.

Carbon Offsetting

The carbon offset projects we fund to offset our footprint rotate each month between top-quality projects that avoid Greenhouse Gases from entering the atmosphere (such as renewable energy projects which displace existing fossil fuel energy). Our partner only funds projects which meet the highest verification standards, such as Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard.

Until they are several years old, our baby trees are not mature enough to sequester carbon in large quantities – and those verification programmes which do exist often will not verify carbon removal from trees until they are around 10 years old. That’s why we do not count our trees as contributing towards offsetting our footprint – and only offset using verified carbon credits. Of course – our trees are still out there removing carbon.

UN Sustainable Goals

The projects we support through our carbon offsetting support the United Nations SDG goals. Every single project we support contributes to SDG number 13 – Climate Action, but we also look at which other SDGs our projects contribute toward.

On average each project we supported and funded between April 2023 and March 2024, contributed to an average of 4 Sustainable Development Goals.

Aside from SDG goal 13 (Climate Action), the most common SDG among our projects this year was SDG 8 (Decent work and economic growth), followed by SDG 3(Good health and well-being).

The projects supported since 2020 and their respective locations can be found on our Mission page page and is updated regularly.

Climate Positive

Since June 2020 we’ve been officially climate positive. This means we basically reduce more carbon from our atmosphere than we emit. Every single month we use our sales data to total the number of pages for each individual book, times the number of sales, total this up and use this figure to then calculate the number of trees’ worth of paper used for our products. We then fund the planting of trees accordingly. On average, one tree can produce around 16,000 pages. Of course, not all trees are the same size so these are average figures.

Since June 2020, we’ve planted 6,700 trees and reduced over 155 tonnes of C02.

Every single company, big or small, has their part to play in ensuring the world reaches net zero. The climate emergency is for everyone, everywhere. It’s become clear that, to tackle the crisis head-on, we need to take immediate and decisive action and not just use the climate crisis for PR purposes without taking no real action.

We know this alone isn’t enough, and there is always room for improvement. Our core value is to make every aspect of our business more sustainable, be transparent about our emissions, and to hopefully inspire others to do the same. We’re a small business, so as we continue to grow, so does our impact, meaning we regularly monitor our emissions data and increase our funding if required.