Climate change is the most urgent issue facing humanity today. The time to make bold and actionable commitments is now.

At Social Change, we promise to minimise our environmental impact and promote sustainability in all aspects of our business – and help our clients and suppliers to do the same.

Through our work in behavioural science, we are on a mission to change citizen behaviour, which includes promoting bold and radical changes to the way we live our lives.

Climate change impacts every individual, company, city and nation, whilst disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable, amplifying global inequality so it is important that we all act and make changes.

The earth with illustrations of smiling clouds around it and sticker graphics.

Our commitment

As a B Corp, we have legally committed to operating with people, planet and profit in equal consideration.

As a purpose-driven business, we place value on the long-term impact our business has across ecological, social and economic environments ensuring we consider all these factors in line with profit. You can read more here about our B Corp status.

The road to Net Zero 2030

Climate action plan 2030

For a company to effectively address their greenhouse gas impact, they must first measure their footprint and understand their priority areas.

You can’t reduce what you don’t measure, so the first step in any net zero plan is to measure emissions. Social Change has undertaken a carbon footprint and monitoring assessment and created a Climate Action Plan following the results.

Download the report

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Some of the actions we are taking include:

Our offices 

Making sure our office is a low-emission space is a fundamental part of our net zero strategy. 

A net zero office:  

  • Uses 100% renewable energy (ideally generated on-site through solar panels, for example, but it can also be by purchasing renewable energy from a provider)  
  • Ensures AC systems are well maintained, and are topped up with refrigerants with low Global Warming Potentials 
  • Is as energy efficient as possible - for example, by using climate control facilities
  • Has measured emissions, and a clear reduction strategy 
  • Has a comprehensive recycling, compost and zero waste policy 

Our actions/commitments

  • Make sure our office is net zero aligned and we can do as much as we can to reduce our climate impact in the current office building 
  • Consider moving to a more sustainable office
A man working on a laptop in his living room

Remote/home working

Remote working can improve employee wellbeing, but the sustainability of homeworking depends on how much heating and energy our employees use, how often they commute, and their mode of transport. Depending on these factors, homeworking may be less sustainable. Many UK employees and companies could save energy by working more from the office in the winter, providing they turn off the heating at home when they do. 

Our actions/commitments

  • Collect further data on home set-up and behaviours at home
  • Educate employees on how to make their homes energy efficient and switch to renewable energy. 
  • Review home working policies and practices and adjust to strike a good balance between staff wellbeing [and desire to work at home] and sustainability.  
A woman sitting on a train, she is looking out the window with a pen in hand and writing on a note pad.

Travel

Having a low-emission travel policy is a great way to reduce our emissions and show climate leadership.

  • Having a train-first policy means our team must take the train for any journey that would take under 6 hours by train 
  • Optimising unavoidable travel: trying to include all relevant meetings within a single trip  
  • Promoting virtual meetings and investing in digital tools (such as Miro) to make remote meetings more productive  
  • Investing in credible carbon offsets for unavoidable flights

Our actions/commitments

  • We will review our travel policy and make changes 
  • We will implement a cycle-to-work scheme to encourage and facilitate cycling as a low-carbon travel method and incentivise cycling to work. 
  • We will invest in credible carbon offsets from 2024  
  • Where transport by car is necessary we will car share whenever possible.
  • We will explore electric vehicle use across all three scopes
  • We will encourage our clients to make sustainable travel choices through our work.
CEO Kelly talking to Alison, the Director of Growth, from across their desks.

Team

As a service-based business, our team are our biggest asset – but they are also emission generators. We will work to reduce the impact our staff and operations has on the planet.  

Our actions/commitments

  • We will help our employees reduce energy use when working from home 
  • We will incentivise employees to eat plant-based lunches. Meat consumption has a significant negative impact on the environment; a meat-based diet produces double the carbon emissions of a vegetarian one.  
  • We will arrange a ‘lunch and learn’ or opt-in discussion to educate our team on the benefits of plant-based eating.  
  • We will run a survey or discussion to gather employee opinion and engagement potential.  
  • We will consider only allowing plant-based meals to be expensed to the company 
  • We will purchase more plant-based foods and milks 
  • We will engage employees to reduce their own emissions and reward sustainable behaviours  
Colourful plastic waste boxes filled with recyclable waste.

Waste

We monitor our waste. In 2022-23 we established a baseline and our aim is to reduce our consumption and where waste is generated, divert as much as possible away from landfill into recycling/reuse. We have established a recycling programme to reduce waste and we are encouraging staff to consume items with minimal packaging.

Our actions/commitments

  • We are operating as a “paperless” office
  • We will ensure that employees recycle waste whenever possible.
  • We will ensure that food waste is disposed of sustainably. 
  • We will implement waste reduction measures such as reusing materials when possible.
  • We will implement water conservation methods on company premises.
  • When purchases are necessary, we will buy products that use eco-friendly packaging materials.
  • We will reduce packaging size as much as possible and use sustainable packaging.
  • We will optimise shipping methods and routes to reduce fuel consumption.
  • We will only use sustainable cleaning products and practices.
  • When technology reaches the end of it’s life, we will ensure it is recycled.
A small leafy plant sprouting out of a laptop keyboard.

Digital emissions

Global emissions from cloud computing make up to 3.7% of all global greenhouse gas emissions - higher than the emissions from commercial flights. Where possible, we need to reduce our digital footprint.  

Our actions/commitments

  • We will dig deeper and understand our digital footprint, including measuring our website’s carbon footprint and cloud usage.  
  • If possible, we will move workloads to data centres with low emission intensities 
  • We will reduce image and video compression to reduce file sizes 
  • We will understand more about our software suppliers footprint and make changes to suppliers who are not moving towards greater sustainability.  

 Read more about our Climate Action Plan

Download the net zero report