Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: Carbon Emissions
(asked on 16th September 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, if he will place in the Library his Department's plan to reduce its carbon emissions.
Defra has a number of initiatives to reduce carbon emissions which include:
- Reducing our property footprint
- Generating renewable energy on our properties (such as solar panels) so that they are self-powered as much as possible
- Increasing energy efficiency by increasing insulation, replacing lighting, heating and air handling systems and using modern building management systems to minimise energy consumption
- Offsetting through tree-planting
As well as our internal initiatives, Defra is the Senior Responsible Owner for sustainable information technology (IT) across Government. Our vision for sustainability in Digital, Data and Technology Services (DDTS) is to show leadership and expertise as a “Centre of Excellence”. We have worked with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as a centre of excellence in sustainable IT, to help 200,000 businesses with their net zero targets:
Our current commitments for carbon reduction are published at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/greening-government-commitments-2018-to-2019-annual-report. These will be updated for the next four years in April 2021 and they will set out our targets up until 2025.
Our DDTS have set out the Defra Group sustainable IT strategy to 2025. This is available here:
We are currently finalising our bid for funding under SR20. Once we know Defra’s settlement, we will be updating our plans to further reduce our carbon emissions over the next four years.