We recognise that protecting the environment is everyone’s responsibility and we’re been working to reduce the impact of our day-to-day operations at Sky since 2005. We’ve recently reviewed our environment strategy and announced new environment targets which you find out more about on our interactive page here. We’ve set these new targets because of the progress we’ve made towards our goals.

I’ve worked at Sky since 2005 within the Bigger Picture team. Over the last few years the business has changed beyond expectations but as a business we’ve always been focused on tackling our environmental impact.

Our first big achievement was when Sky became the first carbon neutral media company in 2006. This leadership move began our journey and in 2009 we set 10 challenging targets around minimising our business impacts from our operations, our products and our supply chain.

This year we were proud to announce that we continue to make good progress and have even achieved six of our targets ahead of schedule.

Most significantly over the last year our absolute gross emissions fell by 10%, despite Sky continuing to grow as a business. This represents a 31% reduction in our emissions intensity, exceeding our target of a 25% reduction by 2020. We’ve achieved this by creating behavioural change and investing in energy efficient technologies in every part our business. And we’re now seeing returns from this with the completion of our on-site CCHP power plant and wind turbine in 2012.

It has by no means been a simple task though and this is reflected in our fleet and business travel targets. The availability of suitable lower emission vans for use in our fleet has been much slower to materialise than we had imagined resulting in slower reductions in emissions from our fleet. However, in contrast, the roll out of telematics in all of our fleet has been very successful, and initiatives developed to educate and build competition between our engineers to drive more efficiently has started to see big improvements in our fuel consumption.

We continue to find new and innovative ways to reduce our business travel at the same time as acknowledging this to be one of our most challenging targets.

A large proportion of flights are between our two sites in London and Scotland. To try and reduce these flights we’ve been a part of WWF's One in Five Challenge, and worked with East Coast Rail to secure offers to encourage more employees to use the train. Our biggest initiative though in the last 18 months has been our investment in Lync, an integrated communications tool that allows desk video conferencing and file sharing across the business. This has resulted in us slowing the rise in flights.

Having met most of the ten targets we set in 2009, we’ve reviewed our environment strategy, and have set further goals that will result in fewer impacts, better, more sustainable products, and a bigger reach, enabling more of our customers to take action on the environment and climate change.  Click here to see our 10 new targets and commitments.