Taking action on sustainability is a year-round task, and we've recently been reflecting on how our teams implement this in daily roles and tasks.
We caught up with some of our own teams (Digital, Events and Multimedia) who have been working on implementing sustainable practices to help reduce our carbon footprint. Find out more about the best practices they've adopted, and how they’ve adapted to be more climate conscious in their day-to-day.
"We're at the beginnings of our sustainability journey in digital. So far, we have developed two carbon dashboards which help us to approximate the kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) generated by the website over a specified time period. An equivalent for this figure is given in gallons of petrol consumed and tree seedlings grown for 10 years.
"Our next step with these dashboards is to amend our approach to focus on user engagement rate rather than overall traffic. This will allow us to report on the ratio of useful carbon versus wasted carbon.
"We're also in the process of changing our development approach to use our content management system provider Bloomreach’s Content API (Application Programming Interface), which should help improve the performance of our websites and reduce their carbon footprint overall.
"From a development perspective, we're currently exploring modern image formats across our websites (namely WepP file format). Using modern image formats will significantly reduce image file sizes, saving on carbon.
"An additional saving on page size will be the adoption of server side tracking meaning that less scripts are loaded with the page, again saving on file transfer size. Website scripts are pieces of code that add functionality or interactive features to pages."
Person visiting VisitScotland's consumer website, visitscotland.com, on a smartphone. Credit: VisitScotland/Grant Paterson
"In recent years, there’s been an increasing focus on sustainability across the events sector in Scotland.
"Many events, from large-scale to regional and community events, continue to adopt sustainable practices to reduce their environmental impact. Event audiences now expect event organisers to prioritise eco-friendly measures such as reducing waste, digital ticketing, efficient public transport, and sustainable food and drink choices. Additionally, there’s a growing preference for events that demonstrate social responsibility and impact too.
"We work in partnership with the event sector to provide information and resources to support event organisers to deliver sustainable events in Scotland. Delivering environmentally sustainable and responsible events is also a key priority within Scotland’s refreshed National Events Strategy 2024-2035, launched earlier this year.
"Other examples of our focus on sustainable events include responsible tourism being built into all category criteria for the Scottish Thistle Awards and a Climate Action Award is embedded into the programme at a regional and national level.
"VisitScotland Connect, our flagship business to business travel trade event, also has sustainability at its heart. For example, this includes sourcing Scottish produce for catering and a dedication to highlighting sustainable product offering and experiences."
"One of our key roles in the Business Events team is to promote Scotland as a sustainable business events destination.
"It's important to remember that when business events choose to host their event in Scotland, we've likely been selected amongst other international competitors. It's vital that at early decision making stages, Scotland is seen as a sustainable destination, which is able to offer world class solutions in all areas. This includes venue carbon impacts, locally sourced menus, waste reduction initiatives, low carbon transport, and reusable/recycled consumables.
"Sustainability also applies to the industry itself. This leads us to support and shape the industry so that it still exists in the future, to support thousands of jobs in Scotland and create a huge economic impact for our communities.
"While we have a role in shaping the future of the business events in Scotland, we lead by example where we have the chance. For several years now, when attending trade shows with our partners, we've stopped using single-use plastics on our stands.
"We also ask partners not to bring disposable gifts for delegates, such as pens and USB sticks. We also work with our stand build contractor to ensure the stand can be reused as far as possible with recyclable elements."
"For a number of years, the multimedia team has been championing sustainable and responsible messaging in our visual media. The natural progression of this was to investigate ways we can track and reduce the carbon footprint of creating that content.
"This led us in the direction of AdGreen, a carbon calculator and sustainability resource aimed at creative production in the advertising and marketing industry. Initially we attended their sustainability training, learning about climate change and how we can make a positive impact by reducing the carbon footprint of our productions.
"During the summer, we calculated the impact of our first in-house production after shooting in the Outer Hebrides. This gave us a detailed overview of our emissions, covering the likes of travel, accommodation, food and drink, materials and pre- and post-production office/home office use. This was a valuable exercise to help us understand the positive impact that small changes and choices in travel, accommodation and food has on our carbon emissions.
"As a team, we spend a lot of time in our beautiful natural environment. This makes us very conscious of the impact climate change has upon it. It's still early days in our carbon-tracking journey, but our aim is to make it an integral part of our workflow. We don't want to only capture all our amazing country has to offer, but we want to help preserve it too."
Jordan, from our Multimedia team, collecting his order from Croft 36, Outer Hebrides. Credit: VisitScotland/Kenny Lam