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.
Watch this short video walking through how to fill in the tool.
What is involved?
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 you 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:
https://parishreturns.churchofengland.org/diocese-menu/verify-data
Find out more and keep up to date
Sign up for the Church of England’s monthly Environment Bulletin! Any updates will be posted in the bulletin throughout the year. Click to sign up