Annual greenhouse gas emissions report 2024-25
1.0 Introduction
In October 2019, East Sussex County Council declared a Climate Emergency. In 2020 it adopted a Climate Emergency Plan, which was updated in 2024. The approach adopted is that, to make its fair contribution to reducing county-wide emissions, the County Council will aim to stay within a science-based carbon budget. A carbon budget represents the total quantity of greenhouse gases that can be released to the atmosphere if we are to contain temperature rises to a given level – this is calculated globally and then broken down into national and sub-national carbon budgets.
The budget for East Sussex is based on a recognised methodology, developed by the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for calculating carbon budgets by local authority area. The Tyndall model showed that, for East Sussex to stay within a carbon budget that would keep the increase in average global temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels (as agreed at the UN Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015), emissions from the county need to be cut in half every 5 years. Therefore, the Council has committed to also cutting its own corporate carbon emissions in half every 5 years, which equates to an average reduction of 13% per year.
This report summarises data on emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) arising from Council operations, measured as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions, during the financial year 2024/25, compared with emissions from the baseline year of 2019/20. The report follows guidance set out in the internationally-recognised Greenhouse Gas Protocol on how organisations should measure and report their emissions.
The report covers:
- Scope 1 emissions: from fossil fuels used for heating schools and corporate buildings, and for the Council’s vehicles.
- Scope 2 emissions: from electricity used in building and for street lighting.
- Scope 3 emissions: arise from all other activities of the Council and include business travel, water usage, waste, procurement and staff commuting. This is by far the largest part of our total emissions, as is typical for a local authority, as most of the Council’s revenue and capital budgets are used to procure goods, services and works from third parties. Our Scope 3 emissions mostly comprise the Scope 1 and 2 emissions of other organisations (e.g. the energy that contractors and suppliers use to deliver services on behalf of the County Council).
The County Council has direct control over Scope 1 & 2 emissions, arising from our own operations, and can influence (but not directly control) Scope 3 emissions.
2.0 CO2e Emissions
2.1 Scope 1 & 2 Emissions
Table 1 describes how scope 1, 2 and 3 emission figures have been produced. We calculated Scope 1 & 2 emissions based on robust consumption data. The way scope 3 emissions have been calculated is explained in section 2.2.
| Scope | t CO2e | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Scope 1 | ||
| Gas Consumption | 3,237 | All natural gas used in ESCC buildings or those which we occupy to which ESCC is the counter party to the energy bill, including schools, properties closed and sold in 2023/24 and our portion of shared use. |
| Gas Oil, Burning Oil and Propane Consumption | 340 | All gas oil, burning oil, propane and biomass used in ESCC buildings or those which we occupy to which ESCC is the counter party to the energy bill, including schools, properties closed and sold in 2023/24 and our portion of shared use. |
| Owned Transport | 198 | All core fleet owned and operated by ESCC. |
| Process Emissions | n/a | Excluded, as not applicable to ESCC activities. |
| Fugitive Emissions | n/a | Excluded, due to cost of data collection. |
| Total Scope 1 | 3,775 | |
| Scope 2 | ||
| Purchased Electricity | 4,006 | All purchased electricity used in ESCC buildings or those which we occupy to which ESCC is the counter party to the energy bill, including schools, properties closed and sold in 2023/24 and our portion of shared use. Including street lighting and traffic signals. |
| Exported Electricity | -57 | Electricity generated by ESCC Solar PV assets and exported to the UK electricity grid |
| Total Scope 2 | 3,949 | |
| Scope 3 | ||
| Household Waste Contract | 61,907 | Supplier reported emissions |
| Nursing and Residential Care | 54,508 | Predominantly emissions estimated via ESCC model |
| Other | 22,816 | Predominantly emissions estimated via ESCC model |
| Home Healthcare | 9,970 | Predominantly emissions estimated via ESCC model |
| Highways Contract | 9,207 | Supplier reported emissions |
| Ground Passenger Transport (small) | 8,173 | Predominantly emissions estimated via ESCC model |
| Ground Passenger Transport (large) | 7,823 | Predominantly emissions estimated via ESCC model |
| Construction & Maintenance | 2,484 | Predominantly supplier reported emissions |
| Employee Commuting | 2,268 | Based on date on travel mode, days in the office, distance from home to work and days worked per year, taken from the 2024 ESCC staff climate change survey |
| Facilities Management | 1,061 | Predominantly supplier reported emissions |
| Business Travel | 1054 | All mileage claimed in private or leased vehicles, but excludes public transport and taxis, as below. |
| Employees Working from Home | 1,044 | Based on data on number of days worked in the office from the 2024 ESCC staff climate change survey and a UK Government emission factor for working from home. Note that the majority of emissions are related to home heating, with office equipment emissions an order of magnitude less |
| Manufactured Products (mostly community care equipment) | 373 | Supplier reported emissions |
| Electricity Transmission and Distribution | 358 | Transmission and distribution loss associated with all purchased electricity. |
| Waste Disposal | 20 | Waste tonnages for corporate buildings and schools. |
| Water/ Sewage | 58 | Measured m3 water use in ESCC buildings. |
| Total Scope 3 | 183,165 | |
| GRAND TOTAL | 190,889 |
Figure 1 summarises the data in table 1. This highlights that the vast majority of the Council’s emissions in 2024/25 were from scope 3 sources. Table 1 further highlights that the majority of scope 3 emissions are from procurement. As noted above, this is typical for a local authority.
2.2 Performance Against Target
The Council’s carbon reduction target of 13% per year currently applies to scope 1 & 2 carbon emissions, but not scope 3 emissions. This is because scope 3 emissions are not yet accurate enough to be subject to a meaningful target. This is discussed further in section 2.5.
Figure 2 shows annual progress against the 13% reduction target for Scope 1 & 2 emissions during the 5-year carbon budget covering 2020-25, measured against the baseline year of 2019/20. The units are tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).
The main points to note from figure 2 are that:
- In 2020/21 emissions fell by over 13%, exceeding the annual reduction target. This was largely due to a combination of Covid lockdowns, which saw a significant reduction in energy use for heating buildings and business travel, the continued decarbonisation of the national electricity grid, the Council’s carbon reduction projects and changes to the estate.
- In 2021/22, emissions fell by a further 7%. This was below the annual target of 13%, partly because there was a rebound in building usage and business travel post Covid, and also a colder than average winter.
- In 2022/23 emissions fell by 15%, exceeding the annual target, but not making up for the shortfall in 2021/22. The large reduction was because of the continued decarbonisation of the national electricity grid, a mild winter, carbon reduction measures implemented by the Council and changes to the estate. On the other hand, Covid guidance on keeping windows open to maintain ventilation will have pushed up energy usage.
- In 2023/24 the annual emissions reduction was 6%. This was achieved through a combination of the Council’s carbon reduction projects, a milder winter than in 2022/23 and changes to the corporate estate. A significant reason why the annual reduction target of 13% was not met was because the carbon intensity of the national electricity grid increased by 6% in 2023 compared with 2022, as a result of an increase in natural gas use in electricity generation and a decrease in renewable generation.
- In 2024/25 the annual emissions reduction was 1.4%. The reasons why the figure was low was because we experienced a colder winter compared with 2023/24, there was no improvement in the UK national electricity grid carbon factor. In addition, the wider budget pressures on the Council, which have mostly been driven by rapidly growing demand for statutory care services, meant that funding for carbon reduction projects had to end.
- Overall, the cumulative reduction in the Council’s emissions between 2019/20 and 2024/25 hwas 37%, against a cumulative target of 50%.
Table 2 shows the same data as figure 2, as well as the actual percentage reduction each year and the cumulative reduction against the baseline year.
| Year | Target footprint (CO2e) | Actual emissions (CO2e) | Actual annual reduction (%) | Cumulative target (%) | Actual Cumulative reduction (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | Baseline year | 12,461 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| 2020-21 | 10,841 | 10,793 | -13% | -13% | n/a |
| 2021-22 | 9,432 | 10,025 | -7% | -24% | -20% |
| 2022-23 | 8,206 | 8,525 | -15% | -34% | -32% |
| 2023-24 | 7,139 | 8,025 | -6% | -43% | -36% |
| 2024-25 | 6,211 | 7,915 | -1.4% | -50% | -37% |
Figure 3 breaks scope 1 and 2 emissions down by sector. In 2024/25:
- Emissions from buildings accounted for 79% of scope 1 and 2 emissions, with schools making up the largest share. Corporate buildings include all non-school buildings, such as office buildings, libraries and residential homes. School buildings exclude those that have converted to academies.
- Fossil fuel heating made up 57% of building emissions, a 10% increase when compared with 2023/24, highlighting the impact of a cooler year.
Figure 4 highlights shows how scope 1 and 2 emissions have changed by sector. The majority of the decrease in scope 1 & 2 carbon emissions between 2019/20 and 2024/25 was due to a decrease in carbon emissions from electricity usage in buildings and street lighting, through a combination of a reduction in the carbon intensity of the national electricity grid and our energy efficiency and renewable energy schemes.
Street lighting electricity consumption almost halved between the baseline year and 2023/24. This was due to upgrades to more efficient LED lighting across the lighting portfolio and implementation of part-night dimming and switch off programme. This programme is now complete, as demonstrated by the much smaller 1.2% reduction in emissions seen between 2023/24 and 2024/25.
2.3 Actions to Reduce Scope 1 & 2 CO2e Emissions in 2024/25
During 2024/25 the Council completed 7 low carbon heat projects, 5 solar PV installations, 4 LED lighting upgrades, 3 insulation projects and 1 large corporate building disposal. Together, these projects are expected to save at least 246 tCO2 per year from their completion dates and reduce energy bills. As part of our holistic approach, we also continued with our programme of good housekeeping, site manager energy efficiency training and monitoring and targeting.
Table 3 illustrates the financial and carbon benefits of 5 solar PV schemes that came on line in 2024/25. These will generate around 2.05 MW of clean energy and savings of nearly £60,000 per year.
| Site | System online | Annual saving (£) | Annual saving (t CO2e) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hellingly Primary School | Feb-24 | £5,200 | 5 |
| Rotherfield Primary School | Apr-24 | £1,900 | 2 |
| Bibliographic House | Apr-24 | £1,500 | 1 |
| Beckley Close | Apr-24 | £3,000 | 3 |
| Cregg Na Ba | Jul-24 | £2,000 | 2 |
| Totals: | £13,600 | 13 |
2.4 Long term Progress on Reducing Scope 1& 2 Emissions
Since 2008/9, when we first reported our emissions, Scope 1 & 2 carbon emissions have fallen by over 75%, as illustrated in figure 5.
Since 2008/9 we have implemented 278 energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, worth £18.7 million. These have been funded by a combination of Council maintenance budgets and external grants. This investment, together with estate changes, delivered savings on the Council’s energy bills of over £1.9m in 2024/25 compared with 2019/20.
2.5 Scope 3 Emissions
Comprehensive data on scope 3 emissions have been reported since 2022/23, which therefore acts as the baseline year for scope 3. These emissions have been calculated using a mix of robust measured data, where this is available (e.g. staff mileage claims, tonnes of waste) and estimates where robust data does not exist or would be too resource intensive to gather (e.g. from the many smaller companies in our supply chain). Estimated emissions for procurement are created by applying industry specific emission factors to ESCC’s supply chain spend.
Figure 6 indicates the approximate carbon emissions from the main areas of the Council’s supply chain in 2024/25.
Table 4 provides a summary of:
- The change in carbon emissions from the main service areas over the last 3 years.
- The percentage of emissions that are either estimated (the ‘spend report’ and ‘supplier report’ columns) or measured from each contract (the ‘contract report’ column).
Table 4 shows that:
- Reported carbon emissions have decreased significantly from the baseline year of 2022/23 (ie. from 260,809 tonnes to 178,320 tonnes). The main reasons for this reduction are improvement in data quality and an actual reduction in carbon emissions.
- Approximately 44% of total carbon emissions from procurement are now reported based on actual emissions, rather than estimated from contract spend, because a growing number of suppliers are required to report on their emissions.
The continued uncertainty in the accuracy of a large part of our scope 3 procurement data means that the Council’s carbon budget and carbon reduction target currently cover our Scope 1 & 2 emissions but not our Scope 3 emissions. This is a similar approach to that adopted by most local authorities.
| SECTOR | 2022/23 | 2023/24 | 2024 /25 | vs 2022/23 Baseline | % Spend Report | % Supplier Report | % Contract Report | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tCO2e | tCO2e | tCO2e | ||||||
| Household Waste Contract | 81,252 | 68,665 | 61,907 | -24% | 0% | 0% | 100% | |
| Nursing and residential care | 41,229 | 27,906 | 54,508 | 32% | 97% | 3% | 0% | |
| Highways Contract | 7,597 | 12,453 | 9,207 | 21% | 0% | 0% | 100% | |
| Other | 23,528 | 23,772 | 22,816 | -3% | 95% | 5% | 0% | |
| Home healthcare | 6,710 | 9,007 | 9,970 | 49% | 96% | 4% | 0% | |
| Ground Passenger Transport (small) | 32,931 | 7,655 | 8,173 | -75% | 100% | 0% | 0% | |
| Ground Passenger Transport (large) | 45,813 | 9,757 | 7,823 | -83% | 50% | 48% | 1% | |
| Construction & Maintenance | 5,136 | 5,332 | 2,484 | -52% | 63% | 37% | 0% | |
| Facilities Management | 9,195 | 6,180 | 1,061 | -88% | 0% | 89% | 11% | |
| Manufactured products | 7,418 | 586 | 373 | -95% | 0% | 100% | 0% | |
| Total | 260,809 | 171,314 | 178,320 | -32% | 51% | 5% | 44% | |
| Intensity per £1,000 | 0.56 | 0.35 | 0.28 | -50% |
Notes:
Spend Report = emissions calculated using spend based emissions factors (EEIOs).
Supplier Report = emissions calculated by suppliers directly reporting overall organisation emissions.
Contract Report = emissions reported by suppliers based on ESCC contract activity.
Scope 3 procurement emissions should not be compared directly between reporting years because there can be a large variation in the amount of spend from one year to the next. For example, there was a 29% increase in procurement spend in 2024/25 compared with 2023/24, largely due to increased funding and demand in residential care, homecare, highways and special education needs, as well as some individual Capital projects.
Good practice is to ‘normalise’ emissions against an appropriate business metric. For procurement, the approach we have adopted is to use an intensity factor, which is calculated based on total tCO2e produced per £1,000 of procurement spend. Table 4 indicates that, despite an increase in procurement spend in 2024/25 compared with 2023/24, the trend in the reduction in emissions intensity continued from the baseline year of 2022/23 (ie. from 0.56 tCO2e per £1,000 of spend in 2022/23 to 0.28 tCO2e per £1,000 of spend in 2024/25).
3.0 Other and Supporting Information
3.1 Organisation Information
For information on the services that ESCC provides and is responsible for delivering, and how we are organised and managed, please refer to our website.
3.2 Reporting Period
This report covers the period from 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2025. Our base year is 2008/09, chosen as it was used for the previous national indicator, NI185.
3.3 Geographical Boundary
All ESCC operations are carried out within the UK.
3.4 Organisational Boundary
We are defining our organisational boundary via the equity share approach. Although we have 100% equity in the majority of our estate, there are some buildings where we are not in full control of operations but are still responsible for paying a proportion of the energy bills, e.g. some leisure centres. Adjustments have been made to these figures during the calculation phase, to take account of the portion for which we are responsible.
3.5 Operational Boundary
Table 1 shows what we have included and excluded from our reporting in 2024/25. We have used the 2024 conversion factors, published by DESNZ, which are available here.
3.6 Alterations to Previous Figures
We have made no alterations to previous emissions figures, except for the 2008-9 base year recalculations – see Section 3.9 for details.
3.7 Carbon Offsets
To date, we have not purchased carbon offsets to reduce our emissions, as it is widely recognised good practice to reduce direct emissions as much as possible before using offsets to compensate for residual emissions.
Our current focus remains on emissions reduction through energy efficiency, decarbonisation of heat and on-site renewable generation. We are, however, looking into options for good quality offsetting to support carbon reduction.
Instead, the Council decided to use a location-based approach to calculate our carbon emissions from purchased electricity. This approach uses the average carbon emission intensity of the national grid.
3.8 Renewable Generation
Some of our sites benefit from onsite renewable generation in the form of solar thermal, solar photovoltaic and/or biomass boilers. Such measures provide zero or low carbon energy now, rather than relying on improvements over time in grid electricity carbon intensity. A breakdown of currently installed solar PV capacity, which remains within our portfolio and reporting boundary, is given in table 5 below:
| Installed Capacity (kWp) | Annual Generation (kWh) | |
|---|---|---|
| School | 388 | 545,893 |
| Corporate (Non-School) | 198 | 821,445 |
| Total | 586 | 1,367,339 |
Note: Installed capacity excludes schools with PV that have converted to academy.
3.9 Base year recalculation
In order to provide meaningful comparisons of our carbon reduction performance, we compare our current year with the baseline year of 2008/9, when we first reported on our carbon emissions.
We periodically adjust the baseline year 2008/9 figures to take account of significant estate changes, such as schools converting to academies and site closures. We remove the 2008/9 carbon emissions for sites that have left the estate and add emissions for significant property additions.
We do this to track genuine performance improvements rather than, for example, counting carbon emission reductions for schools that convert to academy as a reduction, when those emissions remain in the county of East Sussex even if they are no longer within our building portfolio.
Re-baselining took place in 2014/15 and again in 2020/21. This means that the baseline year figures shown in this report are lower than those reported in 2008/9, as emissions were included for properties that are no longer in our portfolio. We will recalculate the baseline year emissions in any given year if the significance threshold is met. The significance threshold is set at an annual reduction of 5% of the baseline year’s total emissions, where the reduction has come only from estate changes. This threshold was not reached in 2024/25, therefore the base year will not be recalculated for 2025/26.
3.10 Limitations
We have automatic meters installed across most of our estate which allows us to report with a high level of accuracy on our electricity and gas related CO2 emissions. Street lighting consumption is un-metered and the local distribution network allocates our usage based on the information we submit to them on our street lighting stock. The energy data in this report is calculated using billed kWh figures, which are validated each month against the readings taken from the automatic meter reading (AMR) loggers, where available. Where meters are not fitted with AMR loggers, manual reads are taken at least quarterly to ensure billing accuracy. Currently, we only hold limited information on combusted biofuel (i.e. biomass) as the purchasing of this fuel is delegated to individual sites, so we lack sufficient data to report. Our data for solar PV generation uses a mixture of accurately recorded generation data and estimates based on kWp system size for some 3rd party owned systems installed on schools prior to 2021, where we cannot obtain generation data from the installers.