Climate Action: We need more pace, we need more scale

We were honoured to receive the Climate Change Coalition’s Large Business Award this week in recognition of over a decade of systemic climate action across all parts of our value chain. The Award offered us the chance to reflect on what we’ve achieved, what we need to still to do and how more broadly society, politics and the economy are grappling with the imperative of a low carbon future.

https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/sustainability/business-wide/climate-change?intid=PlanA_Tile18_climatechange

There’s been a welcome resurgence in wider societal interest in climate change over the last few months. A little over a decade ago we saw the very public impact of the Stern Review, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and the UK’s Climate Change Act 2008 (and it’s supporting institutional framework – Committee on Climate Change, 5 Year Carbon Budgets etc). Many people were engaged which in turn energised politicians and business leaders to begin, let’s call it, Climate Action 1.0, the first ‘20%’ of the journey to a low carbon future. But the Financial Crisis intervened, dulling mass engagement and whilst the technocratic, behind the scenes journey continued (e.g. the UK’s swapping of coal for offshore wind), peaking with the COP21 Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, it’s largely played out ‘beneath the radar’ of mainstream day-to-day life.

That’s changing. More extreme weather events (wildfires, floods and drought) are making climate change real for many people. Equally the mainstreaming of desirable low carbon products in the marketplace, from Tesla EVs to Impossible burgers, is showing people that there is a positive alternative. Citizen movements frustrated by the slow pace of change, like the amazing Greta Thunberg’s School Climate Strike and Extinction Rebellion, are helping 10,000s of people to demand very publicly action. And the IPCC’s recent 1.5C Report was sobering reading for many politicians and business leaders who thought we had time, time enough that they could leave things for their successors to sort out!

So twelve years into our low carbon journey now is the time to reflect on what’s worked, what hasn’t and how we tackle the very much more that still needs to be done.

Operations

Rightly the first decade of our work has focused on reducing our operational carbon footprint. From sourcing 100% renewable electricity; to making our store footage 40% more efficient; to cutting refrigeration gas emissions we had to get our own house in order.

There’s still plenty to do. A long term programme to swap out high carbon refrigeration gases for CO2 based systems will involve many years of capital investment. We need to continue to make our logistics operations more efficient, better blending deliveries to our stores with our suppliers’ lorry movements. The same goes for food waste, where like much of the food sector we’re becoming better at avoiding it and when it does happen donating the surplus to Food Banks or sending it to generate green electric (anaerobic digestion) or be composted (none goes to landfill).

https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/stories/blog/over-five-million-meals-dished-out-to-communities-through-m-and-s-redistribution-scheme

Within reason the solutions to continuing to drive down this operational footprint exist already, our challenge is one of the cost of implementing them. We will also need to reflect on our current policy of offsetting our residual carbon emissions. Today we believe it allows us to drive urgent, cost effective action in the developing world but as Science Based Targets become the norm for companies and their value chains we may need to change this approach.

Supply chains

Compared to our operational carbon footprint the emissions from our supply chain are very much more substantial, perhaps ten times greater. We’ve been working hard to keep forests standing threatened as they are by palm oil, cocoa, soy and timber sourcing.

https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/stories/blog/keeping-forests-standing-the-beating-heart-of-a-sustainable-food-system

We will soon be sourcing 100% of our cotton from farms meeting the less carbon intensive Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) standard (which has multiple other social and environmental benefits too). All our food factories are on a systemic continuous improvement ladder to drive down their energy use and waste. We’ve been helping 1000s of farmers adopt independent sustainability standards such as LEAF and Bord Bia, that help them improve soil and fertiliser management and reduce energy use. We’ve also been very clear that no business, however large, can make global supply chains sustainable without collaboration so we’ve been working hard with the Consumer Goods Forum and its membership (collectively turning over $3 trillion pa) to tackle these issues.

We’ve brought all this activity together into a Science Based Target with the goal of cutting 13.3 million tonnes of CO2e from our supply chain emissions.

What lies ahead? More of the above, very clearly but more of a focus on helping meat and dairy farmers prepare for the future, soil in particular will be important, as well as encouraging the uptake of renewables globally in supply chains. We’ll also be looking increasingly at the resilience of our supply chains in the face of climate change

https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/stories/blog/gender-climate-change-and-youth-empowerment-our-collaborative-programme-sees-success-for-peruvian-coffee-growers

Products

All the supply chain work above reduces the carbon embedded within the 3 billion items we sell each year but there are some more specific carbon related steps that are becoming ever more important in our product mix:

• Clothing longevity – the best way to reduce the carbon (indeed any environmental) footprint of clothing is to ensure it lasts longer. There’s a welcome focus now on fast fashion, wear it once and then throw it away. We are focused on the style and quality of the clothing we sell, designing it so it can have a second life whether through re-sale, donation or hand me down.
• Packaging – we are rightly part of an industry drive to reduce our use of plastic packaging and ensure what we use is easier to recycle but in doing so we are being careful not to create an additional carbon footprint, either through more waste or heavier packaging impacting logistics
• Plant Kitchen – we’ve launched successfully a new 50+ vegan product range that has a lower carbon footprint than most other foods.
• M&S Energy – our domestic electricity supply business works in partnership with Octopus Energy to offer 100% renewable electricity and support community energy schemes too.

https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/stories/blog/meet-the-winners-of-the-new-look-mands-energy-community-energy-fund

The future is about ensuring we have more clearly low carbon products, with engaging stories for our customers that drive wider behaviour change, which in turn requires the use of consistent standards across the whole consumer sector.

So we’ve achieved a lot but we are clear that we need to do more, all in partnership with others to help create a low carbon future. Every day the negative impacts of climate change on our way of life become more obvious, inaction simply certainly isn’t an option but nor is the pace of change we have today. We need to accelerate and scale today's solutions and we need to innovate to create fundamentally different, low carbon ways of doing business.

@planamikebarry