Nature provides us with air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink. The metal in your laptop, the wood in your desk, the glass made from sand – they all come from nature. We depend upon these resources and yet, as we extract them, we are destroying places where wildlife lives.
There are an estimated 1 million species at risk of extinction. As a result, the delicate balance between species that sustains life on Earth is at risk of collapse, with damaged ecosystems making the climate crisis worse, undermining our food supply and putting livelihoods at risk. Half of global GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according to the World Economic Forum.
Carbon emissions are only part of the story when we think about destruction of the environment. The United Nations has told large businesses that by 2030 they should also be disclosing their impacts and dependencies on nature. But what does this mean in practice? At the Guardian, we’ve been working it out with researchers at the University of Oxford. It means examining all our daily activities: from the newspapers and website we produce to how our journalists get to work.
In our carbon audit, greenhouse gases are the endpoint of our analysis (in common with most businesses, we report on our carbon footprint in terms of the equivalent amount of greenhouse gases emitted). But no such north star exists for nature – it cannot be boiled down to one thing.
Impacts range from depletion of water resources to water pollution, air pollution and species loss driven by changes in land use, such as deforestation. Not even ecologists can agree on how it should be measured, yet they agree we need to act. We followed the same methodologies outlined in an analysis published in the journal Nature.
There is a lot we still don’t know, but in the spirit of transparency and accountability, we want to share with readers how we carried out our first ever measurement of the Guardian’s impact on nature and what we found.
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How did we measure our biodiversity footprint?
A consultancy called Wild Business analysed the data we supplied for the year to March 2022. The research was performed by Dr Talitha Bromwich and supervised by the consultancy’s co-founder, Dr Joseph Bull, both of whom are at Oxford University.
The key areas were production of the Guardian and Observer newspapers; digital products (how readers access news through our website and apps); operating the office (use of heating, lighting, water); our IT; business travel; and canteen refreshments.
The researchers examined five biodiversity impacts of all these activities: greenhouse gas emissions, water use, water pollution, air pollution and land use. All are crucial resources for wildlife, and together, they rank among the main drivers of nature loss.
Working out our impacts on air, water and land was only half the story, which is why they are called “mid-points”. They show our impact on nature, but to find out the effect this is having on biodiversity, we needed to estimate the number of species lost (for example, how water pollution affects species in a particular watercourse).
The final metric we looked at is something called “species.year”, which quantifies the number of species that would probably be lost from a localised region because of the environmental pressures exerted by a given activity over the course of a year. This is useful as it gives a high-level overview of the size of impacts relative to other organisations.
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What did we find?
The main driver of biodiversity decline comes from production of the newspaper. This accounted for 68% of our impacts, similar to what we found in our carbon audit. Most of this came from greenhouse gas emissions (making paper involves a lot of energy). Other significant factors were water usage and water pollution from chemicals in the pulping process. We looked at the impact of inks and aluminium printing plates – both of which are necessary to get words on the page.
Vehicles deliver the newspaper. We looked at how transportation by road can release nitrogen oxide, which contributes to ozone formation, and sulphur dioxide, which is a factor in acid rain. Some of our print products are made from sustainably sourced virgin paper. Growing trees to make paper in Scandinavian forests has an impact on land.
The next driver is the website and app (10%), which relates to the impacts of people reading, watching and listening to the news on their computers or phones. Most of this is energy to power and transmit data to those devices, and this is linked to greenhouse gases. The figure is based on national averages for energy generation for our global readership, reflecting the mix of renewable and non-renewable energy sources in different countries.
Offices accounted for 8% of impacts. This includes anything to do with electricity, water, waste and furniture. IT hardware accounted for 8%, and business travel was 4%. Our final impact was catering, which was 1%.
It’s hard to understand the size of our impacts on nature without having a comparison with a similar organisation. We are not aware of any other newspaper publisher that has carried out such a comprehensive audit. A biodiversity audit of Oxford University found 79% of its impacts came from greenhouse gas emissions. The Guardian had similar results: 80% of our nature impacts were also driven by greenhouse gas emissions.
In part, this is because of the nature of our business. Bromwich says: “The Guardian’s primary activities involve paper production, printing, the use of digital products and the distribution of papers, which are all energy-intensive activities that likely have genuinely considerable greenhouse gas emissions impacts.”
Overall, the Guardian’s total biodiversity footprint was 10% of the size of Oxford University.
“The size of the Guardian’s impact is relatively small compared with organisations in other sectors that we’ve looked at,” says Bull.
“We’re not super-surprised that the impacts of some of the main commodities, like paper, were so dominant in the mix and such a big part of the biodiversity footprint – that makes perfect sense.”
What do we still not know?
It’s early days for this kind of audit. “All studies we’ve done like this for different organisations have data deficiencies,” says Bull.
There are three key reasons for this:
Our suppliers did not have all the data, because this is such a new field. In the future, we’ll be asking all large suppliers for information on water use, land use and air pollution when we request data on carbon emissions.
The supporting research has not been done yet. The team at Oxford trawled through mounds of research to find the answers to such questions as: “What are the environmental impacts of ink used in newspaper printing?”, and sometimes they did not find anything because no studies exist. These cases we had to leave blank, or use estimates based on related industries.
Supply chains are messy – we do not know the source of some materials. In the future, if supply chains are more traceable we could have more accurate data on our impacts. It would then be easier to choose more sustainable suppliers.
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What are we doing about it?
This project represents a shift in how we think about what it means to be a sustainable business. Because there is generally a strong correlation between our carbon footprint and biodiversity impact, the data shows that by reducing our emissions we will often also lower our impact on nature (although there is not always a direct correlation – for example, switching to renewables can have biodiversity impacts through the use of water in hydroelectric power plants). Having this information gives us more confidence that the path we are following to address our environmental impact is the right one.
We are incorporating biodiversity considerations into our emissions-reduction plan. For example, we are working on ways to reduce waste within the newspaper supply chain, and have started asking for data relating to nature impacts as part of large purchasing contracts.
We aim to get better data on the water and land use associated with paper supply, and the use of aluminium plates, chemicals and inks necessary for newspaper printing.
For now, we are not yet in a position to set a hard target for reducing our impacts on nature. We expect measurements to evolve over the coming years, so a target we set today could be meaningless in a few years.
Nor are we thinking about credits or offsets. Guardian reporting has shown that many carbon credit schemes have little or no measurable impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Alistair Purdie, a sustainable agriculture analyst from BloombergNEF, says: “There’s a quote floating around in this space quite a lot, which is ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’. In the push to achieve an ideal solution, you throw away workable, yet imperfect solutions. The Guardian’s analysis of its footprint here is valuable. Whether it’s entirely accurate isn’t necessarily the most important thing.
“The cost of inaction is far bigger. So you see and you try to quantify your impacts, and then make a push to improve your outcomes. That’s always going to be better than just ignoring it and doing nothing.”
By expanding our understanding of environmental impacts to include biodiversity, we can start calculating our impacts more broadly. We believe this is the right thing to do and now is the time to start. We still have a lot to learn, and hope our transparency will be useful – and set a precedent – for others setting out on this path.
