Work out your church’s carbon footprint to help care for God’s creation
The Church of England’s Energy Footprint Tool is now open for churches to enter energy use from 2024.
The data collected from the tool will help your church understand its carbon footprint and will mean you may be eligible for grants to help kickstart your net zero projects.
This work is an essential part of caring for God’s Creation, by helping to combat global heating and climate change.
The easy-to-use online tool will reveal your carbon footprint, based on the energy you use to heat and light your buildings.
The Church of England’s General Synod voted in February 2020 for the whole of the Church to achieve net zero carbon by 2030. The vote recognised that responding to the climate crisis is an essential part of our responsibility to safeguard God’s creation and achieve a just world.
The Net Zero by 2030 programme was then established and as part of this, the EFT has been created to collect data to establish a baseline and help churches locally find out their carbon footprint.
It should only take less than an hour to fill the EFT in and the results will really help a church to kickstart carbon reducing projects as we journey together to reach net zero carbon.
What do I have to do?
Simply gather together your energy bills from 2024 and enter your church’s energy use figures into the online survey. This includes your actual energy consumption, as well as costs – you can find all this information on your bills.
Once you have entered all the data, you will immediately receive a report and results on your computer or smartphone. This includes the church’s carbon footprint in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) and how this has changed in recent years.
What’s new this year?
The EFT has been updated to reflect feedback from users last year and to help the Church of England better understand all the buildings we own or use.
Key updates:
- New questions have been added to find out about all the buildings in your parish. A new online building scope checker tool can help you determine which of these buildings you need to report on and what information you need to provide for each.
- When you have finished your survey, you will now see a report which shows the total carbon emissions for your parish and then the carbon emissions for each building you have reported energy use data for.
- The list of approved green tariffs is changing. This has impacted whether the EFT will automatically offset some of your carbon emissions when you select a particular supplier. Look out for an extensive list of approved green energy suppliers later in the year – the Church of England has appointed specialist consultants to work on this.
- You don’t need to enter work-related travel expenses this year.
- The EFT is closing earlier this year - 30 June 2025, to give more time to analyse the data and share the results back in time for diocesan synods in the autumn.
What do I need to get started?
You will need your utility bills for all your church or parish buildings for 2024: electricity, gas, oil, or whichever other fuel you use. If you have solar panels, find information on their generation over the preceding year.
Before you start collecting energy use data for your buildings, you need to determine whether a building is ‘in scope’. This online building scope checker tool will help you work this out. But essentially, if a building is not owned by the Church of England then you do not need to report on the building.
The EFT is open until 30 June 2025 and you can find it on the online Parish Returns system.
How do I find out more information and keep up to date?
Sign up to the Church of England’s monthly Environment Bulletin! Any updates will be posted in the bulletin throughout the year.