Lewis and Graves Partnership to date have offset 606 tonnes of CO2e and planted 128 trees in the UK, by supporting UK tree planting and renewable energy projects around the world, we are very proud of this achievement. Last year April 2017 to March 2018 we offset 52 tonnes of CO2e supporting our UK tree planting project.
The reasons why we offset our emissions include:
- Meeting Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) targets
- Providing structure to CSR activities
- Giving back to local communities where business is being done/products are sourced
- Helping reduce global CO2e emissions
- Helping enhance developing countries – economic, social & communities
- Fostering local community relations
- Helping to build brand reputation
- Delivering PR advantages
- Engaging staff and enthusing internal teams
- Helping to win in competitive tender situations
- Differentiating ourselves from competitors
- Balancing out unavoidable emissions and becoming carbon neutral
Moving forward our offsetting programme is to provide clean drinking water to a community in Africa: Borehole Rehabilitaion Project
Located in northern Uganda, this project works with local communities to identify and repair broken boreholes. As well as health benefits, communities no longer need to boil water before drinking, saving firewood and preventing the release of carbon emissions. Prior to some of the boreholes, women typically spent over 3 hours per day collecting water from a distant unsafe water source.
The impact of a safe water supply from a borehole in the heart of the community therefore cannot be overestimated. Many hours are saved that would otherwise have been spent travelling to faraway sources.
The fact that the borehole water is safe and does not need to be boiled also greatly reduces the need to gather firewood to purify the water. We have noticed in recent years how women report that the time saved that was previously spent gathering these resources can now be invested in working on the farm and learning new skills to generate income.
The borehole rehabilitation and maintenance in Lango sub-region, Uganda, will be the very first programme to implement the new Gender Equality methodology from the Gold Standard.
This project provides Four of the Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals:
Guarantee the health and wellbeing of all by reducing deaths, combating epidemics and ensuring universal health-care coverage including access to sexual and reproductive health-care services and education
Achieve gender equality; ending discrimination, violence and harmful practices against women and girls, ensuring women have equal access and rights to economic resources (such as land ownership) and full participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making
Ensure safe and affordable drinking water and adequate sanitation for all, improving water quality and management and protecting and restoring water related ecosystems
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, increasing every countries resilience and ability to adapt to climate change, improving education and awareness and implementing national measures against climate change and the commitments made to the UN FCCC in assisting developing countries mitigate and adapt.
Lewis and Graves Partnership Energy Saving Goals
The Government had already stated its intention to end the sale of new conventional petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040.
The Road to Zero strategy will build on this commitment and outlines how government will work with industry to support achieving this.
Lewis and Graves purchase vehicles that meet the already established EU fleet-wide targets for 2020/2021 of 95gCO2/km for company cars and 147gCO2/km for light-vehicles, which are based on the NEDC (New-European-Driving-Cycle) test procedure. We are on the government “Road-to-Zero” plan all new-vehicles will be replaced with hybrid-vehicles with an average 70gCO2/km. L&G will by 2020 have an electric vehicle on our contracts.
Energy Saving Opportunity Scheme (ESOS)
Carbon Footprint produced L&G ESOS Evidence Report, we submitted our ESOS notification in October 2015. We have completed the compliance process for Phase-2.