The 2024 updated version of GCC’s carbon calculator includes a number of new sections, for building up a more complete picture of your carbon footprint. This blog post explains what we have added, what we have left out – and why. For more detail, we reccomend reading the full methodology. 

The aim of GCC’s carbon calculator is not to create a perfectly accurate inventory of your emissions. The aim is to give you enough information, of good enough quality, for you to get started on taking action to decarbonise your operations.

We have tried to strike a balance between making the tool easy to use, while still being accurate enough to give useful guidance on where and how to cut your climate impact. For most arts organisations, the largest parts of their footprint will be staff flights, building energy and international shipping. That’s why we’ve flagged these areas up as “priority” sections of the tool, just like in the old version of the calculator.

However, since GCC first started back in 2020, our membership has grown hugely in both numbers and in diversity of organisation. Our 1500+ members now include not just commercial art galleries but public museums, art fairs, auction houses, individual artists, studios, art shipping companies, arts publications and more. For many of these members, other aspects of their footprint outside our original three “priority” areas will be of greater
relevance. For example, an artist might find that material use is a larger proportion of their footprint than shipping (especially if the transport of their work is mainly organised and paid for by other organisations). Public galleries and museums have to wrestle with the thorny issue of visitor travel. Other footprint elements – such as the materials used to furnish exhibitions, or the digital footprint of art projects – may look small relative to flights or building energy, but are extremely visible to the public and can play a vital role in
showcasing climate solutions, demonstrating positive futures and inspiring wider public action.

Meanwhile, government reporting requirements around carbon have continued to ratchet up, with regulations like SECR in the UK, CSRD in the EU and ASRS in Australia requiring more and more businesses and organisations to measure and report on specific aspects of their carbon emissions.

New calculator sections
For these reasons, we’ve expanded the GCC carbon tool to now include the following areas, in addition to the pre-existing business flights, building energy and shipping sections:

• Material use for art creation, exhibition design, office equipment, and other day-to-day purchases
• Offsite storage
• Hotels and accommodation
• Refrigerant use in climate control systems
• Digital emissions (from websites, video calls and cloud services)
• The option to add more detailed data on local freight
• The option to enter more detailed data on surface travel (cars, taxis, public transport)
• Staff commuting and visitor travel (which are counted separately, as “shared emissions” with staff and visitors)

We hope this will allow GCC members to build carbon footprints that better meet their needs, and also help fulfil any reporting requirements they are facing from funders or local governments. However, we are also keen to ensure that our members don’t spend too long working on their footprint calculations at the expense of taking action! This is why we have included a number of shortcuts and estimation tools within the calculator, to allow you to complete a “good enough for target-setting and action planning” footprint as quickly as possible, even if you don’t have the capacity to gather all the data required for a more detailed footprint straight away.

Things the calculator doesn’t measure
There are a few areas of carbon emissions that are not included in the calculator, for a variety of reasons:

• Significant capital developments (building works, refurbishments): The footprint of major building work is not included in the tool, as we would advise carrying out a separate footprinting audit on any planned works of this scale, in order to minimise them in advance and ensure that every opportunity is taken to reduce ongoing emissions in the future. Every building project is likely to have a significant footprint that should be predicted and reduced as a core part of the planning process, with a professional carbon audit. A universal online carbon calculator would not be appropriate for this.
• Waste disposal: Under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol standards, the footprint of waste disposal (Scope 3 Category 5) is calculated in a way that usually gives it a minimal carbon footprint. This is because most of the emissions from resource and material use are counted at the manufacturing phase, and not at the disposal phase, to avoid double counting. We have therefore excluded waste from the tool, as it is unlikely to make up a significant part of your carbon footprint. Instead, we would recommend carrying out a waste audit as a separate exercise, and develop a waste strategy based not just on carbon emissions but on the wider goals of circularity and tackling the plastics and toxicity crises. See GCC’s separate guidance on this. We are hoping to also develop a separate tool that focuses on these issues, distinct from our carbon tools – watch this space. In the meantime, if you are required to report your waste emissions by a regulator or funder, let us know. There are various ways you can calculate these emissions (either by yourself or with the help of a waste/carbon auditor), and they can then be added into the GCC carbon calculator using the “Custom” tab. Please note, if you have calculated your waste emissions using the latest version of the Julie’s Bicycle tool, please note that they will not be compatible with the GCC calculator as the JB tool uses a different methodology for waste.
• “Well-to-Tank” (WTT) emissions: These are also known as “Fuel and energy related emissions”, (Scope 3 Category 3), and represent the upstream impacts of digging up and transporting the fossil fuels that end up being burned in the planes, cars, trains, buildings, power stations etc in the other Scopes and Categories. GCC does not include WTT emissions, in order to follow the same methodology as Julie's Bicycle’s carbon tools, and ensure our results are compatible. These emissions would only add a small percentage to the final total, and are not something that an arts organisation can tackle directly - the only sure way to reduce them is to reduce fossil fuel use, which is something that everyone will need to do anyway in order to reduce emissions in all other categories. Excluding WTT emissions should not significantly affect the action plans that GCC members will need to make, and also makes the tool slightly simpler for us to manage and maintain.
• Purchases for major catering and retail operations: A small number of GCC members run large shops, restaurants or cafes, that carry out volumes of purchasing too large and complex to be covered by a web tool like this one. We are looking into ways to develop separate tools to estimate these emissions, to at least give a sense of their scale. However, in any case we would strongly advise carrying out a professional carbon audit of these emissions, at least as a one-off, in order to develop strategies for minimising them.

Hopefully this all makes sense, and strikes the right balance between being comprehensive enough for most members’ reporting, target-setting and action-planning needs, while keeping things as simple and user-friendly as possible! For more information, check out the full Methodology that accompanies the calculator.