Parents

School Carbon Footprint

School Community Carbon Footprint - Take the survey!

Background
The Edinburgh Rudolf Steiner School has been awarded money from the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund for a project designed to cut the school community’s collective carbon footprint.

An early piece of work is to determine the footprint of the school community so that future cuts can be measured and also so that efforts can be focussed on areas where they will be most effective.

In collaboration with Carbon Masters, an Edinburgh University spin-off run by graduates of the university’s MSc in Carbon Management, we have developed a survey that will allow households to enter information about their energy use, transport behaviour and consumption to give them a good indication of how their carbon footprint is comprised.

The survey provides a tailored “Carbon Calculator” to enable the households of pupils and staff to calculate their carbon footprint online.

Rationale
The calculator has been developed to take input from an online survey which we aim to conduct twice during the project: during the summer break 2010 and then again during February/March 2011. The two surveys take place less than a year from each other due to the time constraints of our project, which must be completed by the end of March 2011. 

Conducting the survey at the beginning and end of the funded project is essential to allow us to measure changes in the school community's collective carbon footprint and report on these changes to the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund. 

The survey data will be kept confidentially on a web-based database created by Carbon Masters. Only households completing the survey will be able to see their own carbon footprint and compare it to the average of the households within the school community.

The de-personalised results of both surveys will be published via the school’s website.

As a "thank you", all those households completing the survey will be entered into a draw - the prize will be a £50 voucher redeemable at Urban Angel, an Edinburgh restaurant that serves local, organic, free-range and fairly traded food.

Take the survey!