Why the environment matters
As an animal welfare charity, our focus is on animals and the
impact people's actions can have on their lives. But we know the
environment must be a key part of our work too. Animals and
humans are part of the same delicately balanced ecosystem,
and all elements of that system - including our precious shared
environment - need to be protected. To build a better world in
which both animals and humans thrive, we must understand and
manage our own contribution to environmental degradation,
climate change and nature loss, as well as the risk climate change
and nature loss pose to our organisation. We have a lot more to do,
but we took some important steps in 2024. Some are listed below,
while others appear throughout this report.
Some 2024 wins in
our environmental work
• Our carbon footprint is made up of scope 1 (direct emissions),
2 (electricity) and 3 (other indirect) emissions. To understand
and begin to mitigate our impact we:
• developed a climate transition action plan for our scope 1
and 2 emissions - this is a roadmap to reduce these emissions
by 50 percent from our 2023 baseline year by 2030
• completed calculations for 13 (of 15) applicable categories
to understand our scope 3 emissions impact (from indirect
activities such as colleague commuting, goods and services,
investments and waste).
• Using the outcome of our 2023 materiality assessment, workshops
on nature and climate change and our carbon footprint data,
we drafted our environmental plan.
• Teams across our animal centres worked with health and safety
teams to begin developing a plan to reduce herbicide use at
our centres.
• To increase our efficiency in medical care, while also reducing
our carbon footprint, we rolled out Provet - a digital, paperless
medicine inventory system.
Challenges
• We did not have the capacity to install smart gas, electricity
and water meters at all our centres, which makes it hard to
track performance of some of our initiatives.
• Based on UK Met Office predictions and experience to date,
we believe climate change will pose significant risk to our
operations, assets and strategic objectives (for example, more
frequent flooding at our centres in 2024 resulted in operational
disruption). Due to capacity constraints, we had to delay work
to better understand these risks until 2025.
What's coming up
In 2025 we'll:
• complete and externally verify our full scope 1, 2 and 3
carbon footprint
• pilot insulation and alternative heating systems at one centre
• explore ways to reduce our anaesthetic gas consumption while
also guaranteeing animal welfare
• strengthen our resilience by beginning to assess our climate
and nature-related risks
• finalise and start delivering our environmental plan.
TRUSTEES' REPORT AND ACCOUNTS 2024 31