Back in January, we announced that the climate would be mySociety’s main focus this year.

A few months on, how are we doing with that?

One easy way to check is our new Climate page on the mySociety website, where we’re listing projects as they launch. Meanwhile, here’s a quick rundown as of now.

Climate Assembly 

In a practical piece of support for the environment, we created the digital platform for Climate Assembly UK.

This citizens’ assembly was run by Involve and Sortition Foundation, with mySociety handling the online element – which became increasingly important during the lockdown.

This has allowed for the publishing of information including a background to the assembly, agendas and livestreams of presentations, keeping the nation informed while the 110 assembly members learn, debate and vote.

When the covid-19 pandemic meant that the final weekend couldn’t run as normal, the project pivoted to a virtual assembly running over additional weekends.

Once it’s over and a final report has been produced, that will be available on the Climate Assembly site, too.

Tracking climate action 

Many local councils in the UK have now declared a climate emergency, recognising the seriousness of the climate situation and commit to taking action.

However, there is no one place where these can all be seen and assessed. And while the declarations are welcome, what we really need to address the climate emergency, both at a national and local level, are concrete plans.

So, working closely with Friends of the Earth UK and other groups active in this space, we’re working towards a site that will allow campaigners, councils and members of the public to see what councils have said they’ll do about the climate emergency.

As a first step, we’re crowdsourcing a list of councils’ Climate Action plans. You can help by having a quick search for the ones that are missing.

Looking to ourselves

If we’re holding others up to scrutiny of course, we really need to also be making sure that we’re doing everything we can to reduce our own environmental impact.

So we’ve set up an internal Climate Action Group to research, report back, and recommend changes to company policy.

The first thing we did was start gathering data, so that we know our baseline carbon output for a year. That way, we have something to benchmark against and see if we’re making progress.

While travel is obviously halted for the moment, it has always been fairly extensive at mySociety. Here’s where we got to, to be picked up again if and when things return to normal:

• We agreed to join the Climate Perks scheme, which gives staff members additional days of paid leave if they use sustainable transport for their holidays.
• We drafted a policy around work-related travel, which must be for essential purposes only. Where a trip would be under a set number of hours, it must be by sustainable transport.
• We’ve agreed to carbon offset all flights that mySociety pays for (in practice, this means staff flights and the flights of TICTeC travel grantees). While recognising that offsetting isn’t the perfect solution, we’ll do this until we can find a better solution.
• Where flights are part of a project’s grant funding, we’ll include offsetting as a cost.
• We created TICTeC’s environmental policy.

Our other big area of concern is around hardware, from our own computer equipment to the server farms pumping out emissions on our behalf. In this area we’ve:

• Drafted policies that extend the expected lifespan of staff computers, and suggest sustainable ways to recycle or repurpose them when they’re no longer in use.
• Started researching our hosts’ environmental policies with the aim of considering these as equally important to cost when we decide whether to renew contracts or to take business elsewhere.

More widely, we’re ensuring that we make it clear to all suppliers that we’d like to know their environmental policies — and that these will be a key consideration when we choose who to go with. We believe that this simple step helps create a commercial imperative that companies make progress in this area.

Similarly, we intend to keep talking about this within our sector, so that it becomes a norm. Just now, it doesn’t feel right to be plotting out our travel plans for the year ahead, but we hope we’ll be able to share our thinking in plenty of detail soon.

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Image: Andy Falconer