ACE Environmental Reporting FAQs

Designed for Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisations, this ambitious programme aims to reduce environmental impacts and drive action across the arts and culture sector.

The programme, first launched in 2012, builds literacy, confidence and leadership skills to give cultural professionals the agency to act on climate change and champion justice and fairness. The Arts Council England 2020-30 Strategy, Let’s Create, is built around four Investment Principles, including ‘Environmental Responsibility.

The window for reporting is Thursday 1st May – Monday 30th June 2025.

We have created lots of useful resources to support you on your journey with the Creative Climate Tools.

• If you require a walkthrough of the Tools, check out our User Demonstration Video.
• For more in depth information around the different impact areas, why not have a look at our different bitesize videos.
• We also have User Guides available for the different functions and footprint options within the Tools.

There will be drop in sessions closer to the reporting period, the dates and times of these are still TBC. You can sign up to our newsletter to find out more here.

If you have further queries, please contact us.

NPOs individual reporting requirements are agreed between each NPO and their ACE Relationship Manager.

The requirements are designed to reflect each organisation individually taking into account your organisation’s size, scope and activities. Queries related to the requirements should be directed to an organisation’s ACE Relationship Manager.

Reporting requirements have been tailored to suit each organisation individually, taking into account your organisation’s size, scope and activities. While documented in your funding agreements these requirements are kept flexible to reflect the changing nature of organisation’s work.

If you feel like your agreed requirements are no longer appropriate and need to be amended please refer to your ACE Relationship Manager.

Reporting is completed retrospectively for the previous financial year. For 2024-25, NPOs will need to enter data referring to the period April 2024-March 2025.

As an organisation you may not have access to 12 months of data for your current building due to particular circumstances e.g. new building, serviced building etc. You should still report any data that you have available to you. If you can’t collect 12 months of data then get in touch.

NPOs are expected to report on the environmental impacts outlined in their funding agreements for the buildings/projects for which data is available. Organisations are not expected to report on all of their buildings and projects if unfeasible. Often your projects can be compiled into one individual footprint; for advice on how to do this, contact us.

We encourage all organisations to report on as much data they have accessible to be able to understand their own impacts and to inform decisions and actions – this can be done using a range of different footprints on our Creative Climate Tools, depending on your organisation’s set up.

If you’re not sure about what is essential for you to report, your ACE Relationship Manager should be able to give you advice on exactly what is required as part of your funding agreement.

Yes, you are encouraged to report on anything that gives you a more in depth idea of your environmental impacts and will be useful when trying to reduce your carbon footprint!

Users are not required or expected to report on their commuter travel data as part of their reporting commitments with Arts Council England, but you are welcome to do so. We would recommend either using the Business Travel tab of your Office footprint and clearly marking that this is commuter travel data in the label description, OR creating a new footprint alongside your Office footprint to keep your commuter travel and regular business travel separate and be able to better analyse the size of your impacts.

When you have entered all of your data into your Building or Project’s Footprint head to the final tab in the form called “Submit”. Here you can submit your data for review by Julie’s Bicycle.

You don’t need to send anything to ACE after submitting; Julie’s Bicycle will compile and share all data with ACE at the end of the reporting period.

We have created a Creative Climate Tools badge to celebrate your action and contribution to a collective understanding of culture’s role in shaping a sustainable future for the arts.

The reporting badge will be sent to you once your CC Tools account has met 2 criteria.

1. Submit a carbon footprint for the financial year 2024-25
2. Submit a Beyond Carbon report (if you are reporting on 2024-25, the Beyond Carbon submission should be for 2024).

Once these are both submitted, the badge will be sent to the email address signed into the account submitting the data and survey, you are then encouraged to share it with pride! For more information about the badge, please see the Creative Climate Tools Badge page.

Check out the ACE programme on Julie’s Bicycle to know more about our various trainings and workshops we provide to NPOs and IPOs.

There are not strict requirements on the content of the environmental policies and action plans required by NPOs as part of the Arts Council Environmental Programme. Julie’s Bicycle has developed guidelines to help organisations develop their own environmental policy and provide examples to see what a policy could look like in practice. NPOs are free to interpret this guidance and make it relevant to their own organisation.

Organisation’s environmental policies and action plans do not need to follow a set date range as with the environmental reporting. Typically, a good policy and action plan will be updated annually covering the upcoming financial or calendar year.

Organisations can upload the latest versions of their environmental policies and action plans onto their Creative Climate Tools account. When logged into your CC Tools account, use the Documents page to upload and save your policies and action plans.

If you are an Arts Council England (ACE) NPO or IPSO and you have reported your data as part of your funding requirements with ACE, then the data you have agreed to submit will be compiled with that of other NPOs and IPSOs. This whole set of data will be used to reflect the status of the cultural sector in England in Julie’s Bicycle and ACE’s annual environmental report.

The publication of this data is designed for the purpose of collective storytelling about our sector and understanding the ways in which impacts and approaches are changing over time. It also helps the wider sector to understand which areas of cultural operations are the most impactful so that decisions can be made about where best to focus efforts to reduce impacts.