Our Environment

We have a responsibility to understand and manage the impact of our operations on our shared environment, to build a sustainable business and contribute towards a sustainable future. We continue our work to reduce our environmental footprint and impact, which in turn helps build resilience in our operations to climate-related risks.

Bloomsbury is delighted to have received the IPG Sustainability Award and the LBF International Excellence Award’s inaugural Sustainability Initiative Award in 2023/2024. These awards reflect the continued work of all of our colleagues. The illustration below sets out some of the key milestones achieved in 2023/2024.

As publishers, we have the opportunity to amplify the conversation around climate change through the content we publish. Bloomsbury’s Academic & Professional division’s United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Working Group continues to identify ways to align publishing strategy with the SDGs. In December 2023, we launched a series of events, Bloomsbury Lectures, which draw on the development goals and through a dedicated page on Bloomsbury.com, we highlight SDG-aligned research published by Bloomsbury, with a view to facilitating easier scholarly communication around the goals.

Bloomsbury is delighted that one of our publications, ‘Religion and Inequality in Africa’, has been selected by the UN SDGs Working Group.

Scope 1 and 2

We have set ambitious targets for our operational footprint (Scope 1 and 2) in line with the Paris Agreement and have committed to a 46% reduction in emissions from base year 2019/2020 to 2030. We aim to use 100% renewable energy at our offices where possible. For sites where this is not possible or practicable, we have purchased Renewable Energy Certificates, meaning that 100% of the energy purchased during the year was renewable.

We have reduced our Scope 1 and 2 market-based emissions by 77% since 2019/2020. Total market-based emissions if we had not purchased Renewable Energy Certificates would have been 283 tCO₂e, a 54% reduction in emissions.

Scope 3

We have also set a Scope 3 target to achieve a 20% reduction in emissions across our supply chain by 2035 from 2019/2020.

In 2023/2024, we engaged further with key suppliers in respect of sustainability issues which has enabled us to better understand the progress they are making in their own efforts to reduce carbon emissions associated with their operations and how we can partner with them to achieve Bloomsbury’s own targets.

CDP climate change and forestry questionnaires

In 2023/2024 we achieved a CDP climate change score of B for the second year running, which demonstrates our coordinated action on climate issues. In 2023/2024 we also completed the full version of the CDP forest questionnaire, as part of our journey to assess the biodiversity impact of our operations and supply chain; we achieved a C score, indicative of awareness-level engagement.

Industry collaboration

Bloomsbury is part of the industry-wide collaboration across publishing to tackle climate change. Bloomsbury was a founding signatory of the Publishing Association’s ‘Publishing Declares’ pledge and is an active participant in the key publishing industry environmental and sustainability groups, including:

• UK Publishers Association (PA) Sustainability Task Force;
• UK Book Industry Communications (BIC) Green Supply Chain;
• UK Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) Sustainability Action Group and Committee;
• UK Book Industry Communications Green Supply Chain Committee.