How “Green” is Life in Tatham?
Article discussing Tatham's environmental impacts
Published: 19 July 2023
Councillors Taylor and Wilson attended a launch event in January 2021 for a carbon footprinting tool designed specifically for parishes. It has been developed by the Centre for Sustainable Energy (opens in new tab) in Bristol, working with Exeter University, and draws on a very wide range of data sources to calculate carbon emissions for every parish in England.
The final version of the IMPACT TOOL (opens in new tab) was released in late February 2021.
Its aim is to give small communities information about their carbon emissions that is easy to interpret, easy to share, and which gives them a clear idea of their main “impact areas” – those big segments where concerted, community-based action could really make a dent in local emissions. The information is displayed visually via a series of charts; the raw data can also be downloaded. Emissions can be displayed for a whole parish, or as an average per household within a parish. The Tool shows two kinds of carbon footprint measurement: territorial and consumption. There is a full explanation of the difference between them.
Territorial footprints consider all the emissions arising from activity within a particular boundary. Agriculture is the main territorial source in Tatham, but most of the produce resulting from those emissions is consumed elsewhere.
A consumption footprint looks at how people in a given locality live their lives, and includes emissions from things that are produced outside the community – most food, clothing, appliances etc. as well as other services, such as banking. The emissions resulting from most of the food production in Tatham are included in consumption footprints elsewhere.
In terms of encouraging possible individual and community action, the most useful measure is the consumption footprint per household.
Click here to compare the data for Tatham and some neighbouring parishes (opens in new tab).
The average Tatham household has a big carbon footprint relative to Lancaster and English national averages. The most noticeable “impact area” for Tatham and the other “Top Five” parishes in the list is their large housing emissions, which the data suggest are related to use of oil as a main heating source. However, that isn’t the simple cause-and-effect that it appears to be.
How does the Impact Tool know so much about about how we heat our homes? One of the data sources referred to in its “Methodology” is Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), introduced in 2007, and a requirement now for anyone selling a house, or applying for certain government grants for energy-saving measures. Well over half of Tatham properties have EPCs; you can view Tatham EPC data in two ways: as a table (opens in new tab), or on a map (opens in new tab). We can take it as a reasonably representative sample, though many properties have been upgraded since they were last assessed.
Average CO2 emissions per household as estimated by EPCs (10.9 tonnes per annum) correlate reasonably closely with the figure for housing emissions shown by the Impact Tool (12.8 tonnes per annum). Tatham’s average energy efficiency is below 50%, indicating that over half the money spent on heating homes is wasted. So oil itself isn’t the culprit; it’s also the big proportion of old, leaky, poorly insulated houses.
EPCs give plenty of advice about how to improve energy efficiency, and make it clear which measures will be most cost-effective. If every homeowner implemented their EPC recommendations, Tatham’s average efficiency would rise from 46% (grade E) to 80% (grade C). Residents would be warmer, and have more to spend on other things.
Wasting half our heating is madness. What should Tatham do to reduce its carbon footprint?
Cllr. Richard Wilson, updated July 2023