The Road to Reduction - Carbon and Transport

Ourea's events take runners to some of the best and most remote mountain landscapes of the UK. Based out of an office in Kendal on the fringe of the Lake District, the team travel across a wide span of the country to deliver Ourea's catalogue of races. Our amazing team of volunteers and freelancers travel from every corner of the country to support our events, and occasionally even travel in from overseas. Our participants travel from even further afield, with international runners making up almost 9% of the field across our events in 2023.

Volunteers setting up camp at the 2023 Cape Wrath Ultra® ©No Limits Photography

Our races are, by nature, often situated in hard-to-reach places. Travel can be tricky, and public transport options are often limited. The question of how best to approach the issue of transport arises time and time again. The publication of the 2023 sustainability report has resurfaced the question, and invited us to hold ourselves accountable, look at the figures, and ask ourselves what we can do better.

We have been measuring our carbon footprint since 2020, and transport and travel have consistently been the highest contributing factor to our emissions. In the 2023 sustainability report, transport and travel once again forms the largest slice of the pie chart. Within this segment, transport is further subdivided into participant travel, employee travel, and event travel. Participant travel encompasses emissions created by runners travelling to the start line of our events, and home from the finish line. These figures will always be estimates, based on the data that participants provide when they enter events. Employee travel is calculated based on the commutes undertaken by the 10 permanent members of Ourea staff, who come into the Kendal office each day. Finally, event travel covers a wider range of transport emissions: volunteer travel, contractors and vendors, and company vehicles. We collect data on all of these categories, and make as accurate an estimate as possible to give us a total figure.

Camp One on Cape Wrath Ultra® ©No Limits Photography

Within this breakdown, participant travel is by far the largest area of emissions. In 2023, participants' travel to and from our events is calculated to have released 1146 tonnes of CO2e, making up 81% of total recorded emissions. This is roughly equivalent in weight to 76 full participant dry bags on the Dragon's Back Race®! This is reflective of the wider story across the events industry, where estimates suggest that audience/participant travel accounts for approximately 80% of total event-based emissions.

Our figures show that some participants do already travel by public transport; in 2023, our participants travelled 3,228 miles by bus, and 126,989 miles by train. Mileage travelled by car and plane, however, hugely dwarfs those figures, in 2023, participants travelled 984,290 miles by car, and a massive 1,740,612 miles by plane.

“All hands on drybags!” ©No Limits Photography

We have already taken some steps to move towards a reduction in transport emissions. We encourage participants to connect with others in event Facebook groups and arrange car sharing. We also put on coaches and/or bus shuttles at several of our events, helping to reduce participant travel. On our events, we try to keep the total number of vehicles to a minimum. On our multi-day expedition events, all of our volunteers travel in shared event vehicles, rather than driving their personal vehicles between sites. We know, however, that we can do more to create change.

Over the next 12 months, one of our key objectives is to implement a carbon reduction plan. This plan identifies our largest impacts and outlines several key actions which will help to reduce emissions in these specific areas. This includes a significant focus on transport and travel, as it is consistently the largest contributor to our emissions. We will be publishing our full carbon reduction plan in due course.

Participants arriving at registration for the 2024 Cape Wrath Ultra® ©No Limits Photography

Whilst we look inwards and try to rethink our emissions as a business, we want to encourage our participants and volunteers to consider their travel too. Coming by car almost always feels the most convenient, but perhaps there are people you could car share with? Or maybe public transport is an option that you hadn't previously considered? If there are things that we could do as a business to make these decisions easier for you, please get in touch, we'd love to hear your suggestions on how we can improve for the future.