What is your position at City Science?
I wear two main hats at City Science:
As Programme Manager, I’m effectively chief plate spinner – I oversee the operations of all of our commercial contracts and R&D projects. That means making sure that we’re achieving all our milestones, that our customers, clients, and research partners are all happy, that we’ve got the resources we need to deliver our projects and contracts, and that everything is running efficiently. At the moment we have 20 different projects, so it’s quite full on.
However, I’m also City Science’s Senior Carbon Accountant. This evolved out of my frustration that the existing ways of calculating carbon footprints lacked the rigour I would expect as an accountant and auditor. Ultimately, we have ended up building a framework for our own carbon accounting – and for others to follow too.
How did you come to be working at City Science?
My background is as a chartered accountant. I was an audit manager in Manchester, working for one of the top 5 consultancy firms (BDO). Then, in 2016, I moved to the Falkland Islands for a three-year contract as the Financial Controller for the Falkland Islands Tourist Board and Development Corporation.
It was a remote place to have lived for three years – it made it really obvious what an impact people are having on our planet. We’d go to the beach and any rubbish or plastic was so stark against such a wild backdrop. When we returned to the UK it really brought home that we have a big job on our hands with the climate emergency, so it needs to be all hands-on deck. There’s so much industry, so much waste. We have a huge challenge persuading so many people to change.
So when that contract came to an end, we decided we wanted to live in the South West because it’s where all my family are from. I worked for a while as a Finance Appraiser for FIH plc, but when I saw a job advertised at City Science, I was intrigued – sustainability is non-negotiable for me, and the chance to work in a start-up focussed on decarbonisation felt like a fantastic opportunity.
I was offered a role as Project Manager and started the week before lockdown. So, I had a week in our traditional office – thankfully including a poker night to get to know people – before we all got sent home to work remotely.
Can you tell us more about the carbon accounting model you have developed?
We signed up to Race To Zero ahead of COP 26, which is a United Nations-led, global campaign to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 at the latest. We’ve chosen to set a target of 2024. Businesses, cities, regions, investors, and financial and educational institutions are getting involved by pledging to be Net Zero by their designated date. As an SME and as leaders in the field, we want to be carbon negative thereafter to really help show what can be done.
However, in order for us to make this claim, we needed to know where we were starting from, whether it was really possible and how much it would cost. I looked online and there are lots of websites that, once provided with your details, claim to calculate your carbon footprint. But the auditor in me just asked, ‘How do I know that’s definitely right? What assumptions have been made?’. I needed to see the nuts and bolts.
So I went back to basics, looking at the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions protocol and the ISO 14064-7 guidance. I read all the pages of text on what is required and I created a spreadsheet to pull all the information together. It covers what you need to incorporate, how you should go about deciding your company boundaries, the GHG Protocol’s emission scopes 1 (direct emissions from owned or controlled sources), 2 (indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by the reporting company) and 3 (all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain), and how this all applies to your company. Then it calculates the carbon emissions that would be attributed to the various policies and activities.
Thinking about City Science as essentially a tech company, our Scopes 1 and 2 are restricted to what it costs us emissions-wise to run our office and our company travel; we’re not a very consumptive business. But Scope 3 does open up a world of other things, especially with remote working and everyone being at home, where we all use energy – be that having the heating on for eight extra hours a day or boiling the kettle several times.
So I built this spreadsheet with the intention of making it easy to really understand a company’s carbon footprint, letting you see exactly where you are now, unpick all the details, and put a plan in place to reduce and mitigate emissions. Our internal targets actually go much wider than that initial scope now, and even start thinking about the wider footprint of our employees and their households.
How do you see carbon accounting evolving?
I’m Chair of the Sustainability Committee for my accountancy body (the ICAEW) for the South West, South and Wales and I sit on their Business Committee. What’s clear is that people just don’t know where to start with carbon accounting because the rules are not prescriptive, and as a result, people (and companies) end up doing nothing because they don’t want to get it wrong.
Financial accounting has very clear prescribed rules and regulations that are set out by the government and the regulatory authorities – for example, how you determine what’s bad debt. When you conduct an audit, you’re essentially ensuring these rules and regulations have been followed.
However, with carbon accounting, there are currently only a few documents to work from. It’s much less rigorous and what you choose to report is at your own discretion.
For larger companies, the government has quite a clear environmental reporting standards document that sets out what they expect to see in your financial statements. Compliance with these standards is a legal requirement as part of the Companies Act, because environmental reporting forms part of your financial reporting if you’re a large company.
But 99% of the companies in the UK are not large companies, they’re small companies or medium companies, meaning they’re not covered by this. However, increasingly these smaller firms are being requested for information as they are a critical part of a supply chain. So I think the next step is to provide much clearer guidance for small and medium companies around what they should be reporting in terms of their carbon footprint.
Ultimately, if, as companies, we want a roadmap to Net Zero, we need to understand what we are dealing with, and that’s where accurate carbon accounting comes in. The framework we are developing can, I believe, be a huge help to others moving forward.
If you could wave a wand to change one area of policy to help decarbonisation, what would it be?
We need better regulation around carbon reporting. Right now, it’s crazy that organisations are pretty much dictating their own parameters for reporting their carbon usage. This means the organisations that are being more transparent and thorough – so looking at scopes 1, 2 and 3 – might be reporting much larger carbon footprints than their competitors, who may choose instead to consider only scopes 1 and 2. This means the more responsible, thorough and transparent organisations are being penalised for using more carbon, when they’re simply reporting a higher proportion of their carbon usage. That can’t be right.
If it was down to me, when people do their financial budgets, they would have carbon budget equivalents attached. Everything that we monitor, regulate and budget financially needs to have a carbon value equivalent. When you do your company travel budget for each department, that has to come at a carbon cost as well as a financial cost, which must then be justified: why are you spending that part of our internal carbon budget, is it really necessary, and if so, how are you going to mitigate it?
This way, we would know where everyone really is and what they need to do to reach Net Zero.
What motivates you most about the work you do at City Science?
The challenge that we have as a country (and planet) is big, and it’s not going to go away. We’re not going to wake up tomorrow and find that climate change suddenly isn’t a thing anymore. We have to do this. And it’s not a small job.
I think over the last few years, I’ve got quite used to working in companies – especially smaller companies – where you have to be prepared to step up and be the person who takes action and gets things done. As a company, I feel like City Science has taken on that role: we are taking action. And I love being a part of that.
What do you like doing in your free time?
I have two small children, so they keep me pretty busy. And having been in the Falklands for three years, I do enjoy all things woolly – from sheep to shawl, I’ve fully embraced spinning, knitting, weaving and all the bits in between. Aside from that, trying to keep on top of the garden. But to be honest, there are never enough hours in the day!