Museum carbon footprint calculator

The calculator gives you three separate results. They answer different questions, so they are never added together.

Every figure uses the UK Government’s published greenhouse gas conversion factors for 2026. Your report shows each calculation line with the government row behind it, so anyone can check it.

Visitor travel is shown separately from the operational footprint in this calculator. It is an estimate of travel associated with visits, and may need a different presentation for your organisation’s reporting requirements.

You enter the number of visits in the year, the share of visits for each type of transport, the average return distance for each, and the average number of people in each car. The calculator multiplies them out and shows every step on your report.

School and group visits are counted once. You can include them in the general shares, or enter coach trips separately. If you enter them separately, they are taken off the total before the shares are applied.

Some visits are not estimated. Visitors who flew for part of the journey, and visitors whose transport is unknown, are listed on your result rather than counted as car or train journeys. A trip with several purposes, such as a holiday, counts its whole journey to the museum.

No survey yet? The calculator has a one-page visitor survey to print, a tally sheet, and a spreadsheet template. None of them asks visitors for a name or address.

Loans. Who buys the transport decides where it appears. If your museum pays for it, lending or borrowing, it is part of your operational emissions. If another organisation pays, it is shown separately as supplementary loan transport. If you move objects in your own vehicle, the fuel is already counted in the vehicles section.

Couriers. Enter courier flights, rail journeys and hotel nights in the loans section only, and leave them out of staff business travel, so they are counted once.

Shared buildings. For electricity, gas, heating oil and LPG, say whether your figure is for the whole building or already your own share. If it is for the whole building, enter your share as a percentage and how it was worked out. The report shows the whole figure, the share and the result.

• Exhibition materials, display builds, café food and shop stock.
• Building works, equipment and other capital purchases.
• Biomass boilers, heat bought from a district heating scheme, and machinery running on fuels other than petrol, diesel, heating oil or LPG.
• A model of what a collections store or climate control costs to run. Energy comes from your bills, or a broad floor-area average if you choose it.
• Visitor flights and connecting visitor journeys, beyond listing them.
• Site-by-site figures. Enter combined totals for all sites.
• Countries outside the UK.

The calculator gives no advice about temperature, humidity, storage or moving objects.

• UK Government greenhouse gas conversion factors for company reporting, 2026.
• GHG Protocol scope classifications, with an operational-control boundary.
• Scope 1, Scope 2 and selected Scope 3 activities.
• Every source is marked measured, worked out, estimated, unmeasured or not applicable.
• Refrigerant top-ups from service records are used as an estimate of what leaked. A first fill of new equipment is not counted.
• Volunteers are not employees, so reporting their travel beside staff commuting is a choice this calculator makes. The report says so.
• The floor-area estimate uses a published average for arts, community and leisure buildings in England and Wales. It is a broad average, not a model of a collections store.

To see what you get before you start, open the example report from the first screen of the calculator. It is for a made-up museum and says so on every page.

After your result, you can choose to fund C Level’s regeneration projects. The amount is sized to your operational emissions only. Funding is optional and never changes any figure in your result or your report.