Carbon Reduction Plan

The Nursery is pleased to be a signatory to the MRS Net Zero Pledge which commits us to being Carbon Neutral by 2026. We also comply with the UK Government’s Policy Procurement Note 06/21, and the following outlines our Carbon Reduction Plan in the Cabinet Office’s approved format.

Carbon Reduction Plan Template

Supplier name: The Nursery Research & Planning Ltd

Publication date: 25 November 2024

Commitment to achieving Net Zero

The Nursery Research & Planning Ltd is committed to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2026.

Baseline Emissions Footprint

Baseline emissions are a record of the greenhouse gases that have been produced in the past and were produced prior to the introduction of any strategies to reduce emissions. Baseline emissions are the reference point against which emissions reduction can be measured.

Current Emissions Reporting

Emissions reduction targets

In order to continue our progress to achieving Net Zero, we have adopted the following carbon reduction targets.

We project that carbon emissions will decrease over the next five years to 0 tCO2e by 2026. This is a reduction of 100% Progress against these targets can be seen in the graph below:

Completed Carbon Reduction Initiatives

The following environmental management measures and projects have been completed or implemented since the 2019 baseline. The carbon emission reduction achieved by these schemes equate to 167.382 tCO2e, a 51%ge reduction against the 2019 baseline and the measures will be in effect when performing the contract Whilst not conceived as Carbon Reduction Initiatives, the majority of these reductions were caused by two factors, both related to changed working practises during the Covid-19 pandemic:

1. A shift to hybrid working (especially in 2020 when most employees worked from home for most of the year)
2. A reduction in business travel, which was our greatest source of GHG emissions in 2019. Most qualitative research was conducted face to face until 2020; since then most has been conducted online.

Whilst these reductions will not remain in place in their entirety as working practices adapt, we expect both initiatives to carry on in a 'hybrid' model with a mix of remote and face to face both for office-based working and qualitative research.

Future Carbon Reduction Initiatives

In the future we hope to implement further measures such as:

1. We plan to continue hybrid working which will maintain employee commuting at or around 2021 levels
2. We do not anticipate a full return to face to face qualitative research but we have to accept that emissions will rise to levels above 2021 (but always below our baseline year) as we travel more to conduct research. We have identified three broad areas of attention, as follows:
   • Travelling (train, plane, taxi)
   • When flights are necessary, we are committed to ensuring we are researching which airlines will make our travel most eco-friendly
   • In Europe - encouraging Eurostar travel
   • When convenient to use public transport, we encourage team members to do so
   • When travelling by taxi, we aim to use the most eco-friendly option
   • Accommodation
   • We are committed to researching accommodation which aims to be sustainable/eco- friendly in their business operations
   • Location
   • The team will endeavour to book hotels close to public transport hubs e.g. railway station
     1. With our fieldwork colleagues we will endeavour to book venues close to railway stations, and encourage research participants to use public transport
     By pursuing these initiatives we hope to keep Business Travel to a maximum of 50 tCO2e, around 33% of the 2019 baseline.
3. Information Technology has replaced Business Travel as our single largest source of Scope 3 Emissions as a result of remote working. Whilst we expect this to reduce with our hybrid model this will not outweigh the increase in employee commuting. Consequently we are embarking on an initiative to identify areas of reduction within IT, primarily due to Cloud hosting (all our systems are cloud hosted). We have identified opportunities to archive many larger files on hard drives off the Cloud, and to delete others permanently. We have set a preliminary target of 40 tCO2e by 2025.
4. We will continue to identify areas of further reduction and monitor the success of these initiatives. By 2025 we anticipate that the majority of reductions will have been made, and at that point we intend to explore off-setting the residual emissions to achieve Net Zero ahead of target if possible, during 2025. However we recognise that off-setting is not optimal so will continue to measure our emissions and attempt to reduce them still further as initiatives and technologies become available.