Visitors arriving by car at Blenheim Palace will pay more in push to be carbon negative
BLENHEIM Palace plans to charge car drivers higher entry fees to try to encourage eco-friendly journeys as part of the Duke of Marlborough’s pledge to make his estate carbon negative.
The country house is planning to offer “deep discounts” on entry tickets to visitors who arrive by public transport and will offer to offset emissions from those who do not as part of an effort to “weaponise every part” of the estate against climate change.
Dominic Hare, the chief executive of Blenheim, said that the estate wanted to go further than an “arbitrary” net zero target and to see how much carbon could be sequestered in its grounds.
“We are very blessed as a landed estate that, unlike many businesses, while it will take effort to make us properly carbon neutral… we could go a lot further.
“There are many communities around us who can’t make the same contribution so we’re determined to use every last square acre for positive carbon sequestering use,” Mr Hare said.
Blenheim plans to be carbon neutral by 2027, with a target beyond that date of aiming to sequester 30,000 tons of carbon a year.
Mr Hare, however, said that they were unsure of the upper limit might be and that he wanted to “see just how much carbon we can sequester”.
Mr Hare said the impetus for the plan came from the Duke and his family: “The Duke has always been passionate about the countryside and the carbon benefits of that, and George, his son, is even more so.”
If the estate did nothing, said Mr Hare, the “next duke after the next duke” would look out on “parched soil” and ask “what on earth was grandaddy, daddy, doing leaving me this?”
The estate is going further than many heritage organisations, by including socalled “scope three” indirect emissions in its target, which counts examples such as carbon dioxide produced by visitors driving to the Oxfordshire estate.
Emissions from visitor transport account for three quarters of overall carbon emissions linked to the estate.
While the route from Oxford city centre to the palace can be done easily using public transport, it can prove more of a challenge when journeying from London, with a journey time of about two hours.