Climate
Arkwood is taking responsibility for our carbon emissions
Becoming a Responsible Financial Climate Action Contributor
As of March 2024, we are proud to be a Responsible Financial Climate Action Contributor. Protecting our environment is a responsibility that we all share. As a Landscape Architecture practice, we have to make a further commitment to continually assess the impact of our work. This is why we’re offsetting our carbon usage.
Why not ‘Carbon Neutral’?
This term is beginning to be phased out with it becoming increasingly difficult to adhere to a concrete definition. We have decided to use another term ‘Financial Climate Action Contributor’ as suggested by ClimatePartner, which focuses on the action of contributing to climate projects to offset carbon output rather than claiming to achieve ‘neutrality’. Arkwood continue to be carbon conscious and we try to limit our carbon output wherever possible.
Supporting projects such as our chosen offset project in Zambia is essential as we need to take climate action now to help safeguard the environment and improve peoples’ lives as well as offsetting our own carbon emissions.
Our Carbon Offsetting Process?
We’ve have been tracking our carbon output from 2022 to 2024 (including power usage, water usage, waste and recycling, office purchases, commuting and travelling, and energy used when working from home). We have also committed to reducing our carbon footprint wherever possible by encouraging active modes of green travel to work and to our site visits when possible. We monitor the carbon embodied in our projects and reduce this through innovative approaches to design and construction.
We are working with ClimatePartner to use this data to verify and calculate our carbon footprint. Offsetting involves donating resources to ‘offset’ the carbon we have used by planting trees, investing in renewable energy and supporting ocean protection and other projects. Through ClimatePartner, we are currently supporting improved cookstoves countrywide in Zambia. Our contributions help to provide cleaner methods of cooking for people in Zambia, using an improved type of stove, using less fuel. This makes people’s lives easier as well as reduces carbon output and pollutants via more efficient methods of cooking. If you want to read more about carbon offsetting, or the particular project that we have donated to, click here.
How we maintain eco-friendly practice
At Arkwood, creating better access to nature and conducting eco-friendly practice is a large part of what we do. Ensuring that wherever possible, we use eco-friendly materials and work with clients to protect wildlife and increase biodiversity.
In many of our projects, methods such as using rubble from demolished buildings in the foundations of new structures or recycling old timber for new constructions are ways in which we ensure that projects are sustainable and climate-friendly wherever possible. Now more than ever, due to the climate crisis, it is essential to have the local and global environment in mind when working with and improving public greenspace.
