We are pleased to announce ArtAML™ has successfully qualified as a 2024* Active Member with the Gallery Climate Coalition. To achieve active status, we had to demonstrate that our organisation had implemented environmentally responsible best practices in line with GCC guidance.
Carbon report: Creating a baseline
This was, in part, a practical exercise to audit the carbon impact of our daily operations. We don’t use freight, for example, but as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, we heavily use digital services, storage, and secure backups.
Getting access to good data from third-party services that we use was at times challenging, and the calculator was helpful in allowing for that—marking data quality as having a high degree of accuracy to estimates—and being able to add notes for context to refer to in next year’s report or as measurements change.
For example in measuring our gCO₂e per page view, we marked the data quality as 1, fully estimated data and commented: “An estimate, as ArtAML is a secured SaaS platform and website carbon (the tool GCC advises to use) cannot access it; we instead used website carbon’s benchmark of 0.8g for an average global page view.”
Practical action and communication
It was also about communicating with each other and making explicit the choices we were making—and planning to make—with our team. As we are a remote team and meet regularly online, becoming more conscious of our approach to video calls, for example, was a practical and effective way to reduce our energy impact.
A more sustainable future for the arts and art businesses
The process has been extremely helpful in formalising our instinctive inclinations of good stewardship towards nature and the climate and building them more explicitly into our business. By taking these steps to reduce our environmental impact, we can more proactively support a more sustainable future for the arts.
A focus on future proofing
Auditing our day-to-day processes, software, and third-party services has made the choices we can make as a team more concrete and informed the criteria we can use when tackling new projects. We’ve now got an easy-to-follow process to keep up to date, ready for next year’s submission, which handily ties into the business’s aims for 2025 —a focus on future proofing!
Communicating values with clients and the team
Having our sustainability statement publicly available on our website and processes in place to help audit and document our carbon impact means not only will our clients be more aware of the impact of using our platform and services, but as an ambitious and growing organisation, any new team members will be aware of our values and approaches, too.
Sustainable choices becoming the norm
Active Membership is not a certification of sustainability nor a claim that we are doing things perfectly. We’re all doing our best to assess, report and reduce our impact, setting targets in line with science, taking any actions we can and working out other solutions as we go.
By becoming active members, we hope to highlight the positive steps our sector can take and make standing up for climate-friendly and sustainable choices the norm.
We encourage all our peers and colleagues to visit the GCC website to learn more about the initiative, download helpful resources, and learn how to get involved!
*Membership is applied retroactively. Active Member Badges are year-stamped, and we must resubmit annually to retain the latest Active designation.