Carbon footprint

The Diocese of Europe asked that parishes calculate their carbon footprint. Our eco-committee has worked on a carbon footprint analysis in answer to that request. 

Please note that most of the work was done by an engineer, Martyn Maguire, who was working with numbers from the various Berlin utility companies supplied by the church office. The bottom line is that St. George's church in Berlin has a carbon footprint of 35207.33 kg  CO2 emissions or 35.2 Tonnes.  The details are complex. The sources of total carbon emissions were:

  • electricity 1133.30 kg, 
  • gas heating 33929. 57 kg, 
  • drinking water 5.07 kg, and 
  • wastewater 139.39 kg. 

The conversion factors come from the UK government, and are based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). 

For these number to make sense, we need comparison data, ideally from other parishes. Those data will be posted as soon as we have them.

Obviously there are significant contributions to our carbon footprint that are not in this calculation, including automobile use by clergy and parishioners. As a highly international parish, a portion of our carbon footprint involves international and transcontinental air travel. Those numbers are difficult to determine. COVID19 has helped to show that a significant portion of international travel can be carried out by means of videoconferencing. Many people feel that videoconferencing is no substitute for face-to-face meeting, and perhaps it is not, but we have an environmental crisis in which everyone needs to do what they can to save God's creation.

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