What all organisations can do to get on with tackling climate change (aka the BRIGHT Transition TM)

Against a stark and urgent climate reality, businesses can plan their transition and step up immediate action.

People have heard plenty about climate change and the need to reduce emissions and address the destruction of nature. Some may have looked into the science, perhaps via David Attenborough's films like Breaking Boundaries: The Science of Our Planet or in coming across previous reports from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yesterday felt different though. Yes, being based on a wealth of new data the message from the scientific community was robust: "Climate change widespread, rapid, and intensifying". But it felt so stark and so real to watch the news coverage of the raging fires in Greece and pictures of many other extreme weather events from around the world this week.

It was definitely thought provoking and, like me, you may have had a worse night's sleep as a result. Today hopefully it is also discussion provoking within workplaces, families and communities. But will this moment and the next few months provoke more action?

The IPCC panel that prepared the latest report is clear that "human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate. The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change, even as other greenhouse gases and air pollutants also affect the climate.

Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions."

International commitments are essential to set the framework that will lead countries towards net zero emissions, that will regulate, incentivise, enable new markets to prosper and guard against inequalities. That is of course why the COP 26 climate summit in Glasgow in November is so important. However most of us don't run countries and nor do national governments themselves actually carry out most of the action that it will be necessary to take. This needs to be a global and local, joint endeavour - as former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney put it “Achieving net zero emissions will require a whole economy transition – every company, every bank, every insurer and investor will have to adjust their business models. This could turn an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time.”.

Those leading and running organisations may well have a range of feelings about their part in tackling climate change and environmental recovery. Motivated? Somewhat overwhelmed? Concerned about cost? And perhaps confused as the issues and solutions involving new technologies, reimagining markets and supply chains etc can get pretty complex and technical pretty quickly. So how can this problem be broken down in a way that enables rapid short term action whilst also getting on the "right" kind of medium term pathway?

What works for me anyway is for a business/organisation to think in terms of a transition over about 10 years (perhaps 15 or 20 works better in some industries) with immediate no regrets action to start this week/month/year and the opportunity to achieve more and more through the 1-3 year business planning and investment cycles. I had the recent privilege of talking about this at the Enterprise M3 Local Enterprise Partnership annual conference and it was refreshing to hear chair Dave Axam's simple clarion call - along the lines of "make a plan and start doing it".

That's where my picture of the line of dominoes fits in (though it equally well conveys the way that some climate changes and physical impacts are reinforcing each other and accelerating). The starting point has to be that each business and organisation and its most effective approach towards climate change is different. The dominoes need to be lined up in some kind of order of what it makes sense to tackle first - ideally to reduce carbon emissions, contribute to restoring nature and adapt to climate change most rapidly - though as with all good business strategies, also cognizant of the organisation's capabilities, operational resources, market position and so on. Some of the dominoes might be a bit bigger or heavier and take time to prepare before there is enough momentum to knock them over (e.g. through R&D and technological breakthroughs). Those ones can be sequenced a little later in the plan - as long as they are still early enough to beat the required pace of the transition in the relevant sector. Other dominoes might take very little effort to push over and provide some immediate impact, whilst also helping the organisation to learn and build confidence.

Once the dominoes are lined up based on a rational transition then the first one, two, three can be knocked over. In the meantime you'll be learning and things will of course be changing in the external environment in terms of policies and regulation, market prices, customer preferences and so the dominoes later in the line can be re-sequenced a bit from time to time e.g. to reduce risk or build competitive advantage. Hopefully that starts to sound do-able?

To illustrate and work through this I came up with the idea of a BRIGHT Transition TM to focus attention in the main dimensions of relevance to most organisations:

• Buildings;
• Renewable electricity;
• Investment & finance;
• Goods including raw materials and food;
• Heating; and
• Transport.

In each case I would advocate thinking about and tracking four aspects. The outcomes/co-benefits if you like, including how they can reinforce each other: how can this reduce carbon towards net zero (i.e. meeting or beating a science-based emissions reduction target)? how can this enable us to adapt to the impacts of climate change? how can this contribute to nature recovery? and how will this address the future needs of our customers/stakeholders (including considering our business model).

Coming back to how this relates to the dilemmas around lining up and starting to knock over first few dominoes, lets take a couple of examples. For Investment & finance an immediate action could be to take a quick action with potentially large positive impacts relating to existing investments such as a pension scheme (check out the Make My Money Matter 21x challenge ). A domino for later in the transition might be to adjust business models to harness emerging green financial products and services that help to reposition your products and services in new markets. In relation to Goods including raw materials and food a simple sustainable procurement policy that helps colleagues to start to ask the right questions could be a short term action whilst starting to work on the next generation circular business models based on product re-use which to significantly reduce the natural resource and carbon footprints.

I hope that these thoughts might provide some helpful perspectives and pointers. I would love to know what you think about the ideas discussed and the BRIGHT Transition model so please do get in touch.

To dig a bit deeper into this topic there is great material out there from a wide range of sources - do get in touch if you'd like some pointers for your organisation. You can check out one of my own small contributions via the Enterprise M3 annual conference net zero transition talk and Q&A/discussion below (from c. 21 minutes).

#pledgetonetzero #togetherforourplanet #cop26