Ten Years of SE² #3: The Numbers Game

Continuing our series of blogs to celebrate our tenth birthday, this post will look at the slightly dry subject of measuring things.

Most people know us more for our work with people (facilitation, stakeholder engagement) or with words (writing guidance, communications) rather than our work with numbers. You might be surprised, therefore, to find out about some of our slightly more analytical projects….

We’ve carried out:

• Cost benefit analysis to quantify the value of energy saving advice
• Modelling to calculate the carbon emissions reductions of policy shifts within the Department for Education (notably  large scale changes to two large scale capital programmes)
• Modelling of energy and cost savings available from simple behavioural changes in schools, as part of the development of the Carbon Trust’s Empower for Schools online toolkit
• Working with Parity Projects, calculation of the first carbon footprint for the sheltered housing sector in the UK
• And again working with Parity, calculating the “tenure gap”, that is the carbon emissions associated with the difference in average energy efficiency across different housing tenures.

A few years ago, Liz coordinated a research programme for Defra, bringing together two research groups to calculate the greenhouse gas emissions from Central Government as a whole, and for a number of individual Government Departments and their agencies. Central to this was building a shared understanding of methodologies and findings between organisations that took fundamentally different approaches to footprinting – a tricky task but one that we hope we achieved!

Much of our work with the Department for Children, Schools and Families (now the Department for Education) involved calculating the costs and financial and carbon benefits of implementing different policy options. These ranged from energy reduction programmes, to sustainable travel options, to change in procurement practices. This thinking underpinned much of the work that went into Climate Change and Schools: A Carbon Management Strategy for the English Schools Estate, which we produced with the Department and stakeholders in 2010.

That experience stood us in good stead for working with the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and our friends at Paula Owen Consulting, to develop the Atlas Toolkit, a carbon footprinting toolkit for schools, currently available in the UK, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy.

The key with any measurement and analysis work is that it leads to a clear sense of what to do in response to the information provided. Information needs to be applied to be useful. Think about all the trivial things you know, like the capital city of Nigeria or the real names of all of U2. You carry around information but it only becomes useful when it can be applied (in this case, if you’re at a pub quiz!).

There are missed opportunities all around us. We know a lot about household energy consumption – it’s on our bills – but there’s nothing alongside it to say “you might save money if you did X, Y, Z” or “your consumption is higher / lower than typical”. A chart showing the make-up of a business’ carbon footprint is all well and good, but it only really makes a difference if that business knows what to do to reduce it.

My challenge to you (and indeed to us here at SE²) is to stop taking it for granted that information alone will achieve the job of persuading people to change. If you see information floating without purpose, flag it, and think about what could be added to make that information into a more powerful driver of change. And be mindful of the types of information that you receive and those that really encourage or motivate you to do something differently. What is it about those types of information? What is around the core bit of data? Does it have the same effect on others that it has had on you?

Any examples that you find, let us know by email to info@se-2.co.uk or on Twitter: @se2limited. We’ll write about them here in the SE² blog.