Earlier this week, the UK Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra to you and me) joined the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Home Office in publishing real-time energy consumption data online. If you go to this page on their web site   you can see a graph spiking up and down showing energy units used per hour and use over the past 24 hours at its main London headquarters building. It is also clever enough to disclose the energy cost per hour and carbon emissions.

Whether this is simply a gimmick or real progress towards full transparency – I think it is certainly a good start. The government has committed to cutting carbon emissions across all central departments by 10% by next May, so it will be interesting to what Defra does next (and which departments follow suit). It has already promised that as more data is collected, it will publish results for different time periods (use per week, month and year).

So, Defra is definitely making a move in the right direction, but it needs to look at more than just energy consumption. Real carbon transparency will depend on reporting total carbon emissions during the whole life cycle of a building – including the energy used to produce building materials and furniture (and carpet!). Also, it’s not just carbon emissions that have a negative impact on the environment. Hopefully, one day in the not too distant future, government departments will also report on waste production and water usage in a similar way.

In my opinion, the best way for the Government (or any organisation for that matter) to get reliable and validated information on its full environmental impact, including carbon emissions is to use Environmental Product Declarations  and continue to provide just the facts.