This blog was written by Amy Lightfoot, Academic Director, English and School Education, British Council.
Programmes with a focus on supporting education systems and practitioners to become more environmentally aware are understandably on the rise. Ministries of education are reviewing their curricula to include a greater focus on our impact on the natural world – a new GCSE qualification in Natural History launched this school year in England and Wales, and countries including Iraq, Zambia and India are looking at how they can better integrate climate change and sustainability education into their curricula. There are an increasing number of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) and other training resources available to help teachers develop their knowledge of climate change and to support their learners to take action and become more resilient in the face of its effects. All of this is critically important, but there remains a question around the environmental impact of the projects and programmes we are delivering and whether there are ways we can make this delivery more sustainable: exploring our contribution to the problem, as well as our response to it.
With this in mind, the British Council partnered with Jigsaw in early 2024 to design an approach to calculating the environmental impact of teacher professional development (TPD) programmes. This specific study focused on assessing the relative carbon footprint of online versus face-to-face delivery. We wanted to test the assumption that online delivery would have a lower carbon footprint, and the results were both surprising and helpful for future project design.
An initial review of the literature clearly showed a lack of research in this area – and in particular a lack of evidence in relation to the environmental impact of education delivery in low- and middle-income countries. As a case study, we identified a project which offered both modes of delivery – online and face-to-face: Secondary Teachers English Language Improvement Rwanda (STELIR). This gave us a way to test the approach to measurement. Within the STELIR project – delivered by the British Council under a partnership with the Mastercard Foundation – teachers participate in courses of between 60 and 90 hours of online study, 30 to 60 hours of intensive face-to-face sessions and six months of school-based peer-supported continuing professional development per course level.
The research team explored the modes of delivery in detail, listing the relevant data points that would be used to calculate the relative carbon footprints of the online and face-to-face delivery. These data points included the number of participants involved, transport requirements, goods and services purchased (including tablets to facilitate the online course delivery), energy usage within the premises used for face-to-face courses and details of accommodation and meals.
Recognising the lack of information about emission factors[i] that has been calculated for Rwanda specifically, or for low- and middle-income countries more generally, the research team identified appropriate metrics to calculate the emissions from the online and face-to-face training phases, and then totalled these to compare the overall carbon footprint of each phase.
The results were somewhat unexpected. Our assumption was that the face-to-face element would have a greater carbon footprint than the online element, given that teachers were travelling from around the country to the training centres, and the emissions associated with board and lodging for all the participants. However, while this is likely to hold true in contexts where participants use their own devices to access the online component of a similar programme, in Rwanda we needed to procure tablets, chargers and earphones to ensure the teachers could get online. The emissions involved in the manufacturing of this hardware and the transportation of it into Rwanda meant that the online component ultimately had a higher carbon footprint than the face-to-face delivery. Some of this can be offset by reuse of the hardware in future projects, and we are exploring further ways of how we might mitigate the environmental burden in future project design.
Recognition of the somewhat hidden environmental impact of technology is not new, but undertaking this study has been a welcome reminder of the costs involved with delivery of a project of this type – moving beyond a narrow view of financial cost to also consider environmental cost as a critical factor. Clearly there is a need to also consider the learning outcomes that are achieved using different models, recognising that there is a balance to find between the relative effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of any project. Getting this balance right is an area we will continue to explore.
A link to the free-to-use framework and calculation tools that were developed to measure the carbon footprint of the relative modes of delivery is available here, along with a report of this study for further information.
[i] An emission factor is a coefficient that quantifies the rate at which a given activity or process releases greenhouse gases (expressed as carbon equivalent emissions) into the atmosphere (Climatiq, 2024).
