Spain’s Guardia Civil is one of the world’s first police forces to track own carbon footprint

Greening law enforcement is a new step in the field of justice and security

The Spanish Ministry of the Interior announced at the end of last week that the country’s Guardia Civil (Civil Guard) will be the first national police force, which will take concrete steps to calculate, reduce and compensate for the environmental impact of its activities. In other words, it will try to lessen its carbon footprint. That initiative will reportedly place it among the few police forces in the world that are actively trying to become ‘greener’.

For this purpose, the Guardia Civil has registered with the Spanish Office for Climate Change (OECC). The latter, as part of the country’s ecological ministry, is the body in charge of registering this calculation of the amount of greenhouse gases that administrations, organizations and companies generate in their daily activities.

Voluntary effort for a good cause

The OECC’s registry collects the efforts made in the calculation, reduction and compensation of greenhouse gas emissions generated by the police force activities, and it is all done as a voluntary act.

Each of these three activities when successfully completed, grants a stamp of approval by the OECC.

“The process of calculating the carbon footprint is very complex for an organization like the Civil Guard, both because of its extensive deployment throughout the national territory, and because it has a large number of personnel, barracks, and land, air, and sea vehicles,” says a statement from the police force, as quoted on EnergyNews.es. 

And since the calculation process is long and complex, the Guardia Civil is counting on support from the eco ministry.

In order to take the next step and achieve the "REDUCE" objective, the Civil Guard is going to make data from the last four years available to the OECC, so it will also be possible to measure the carbon footprint since 2019, and thus analyze its evolution in this period.

Guardia Civil is the oldest law enforcement agency in Spain, dating back to the 1840s.