stressed, and are starting to question whether they have any right to take the water resource that is essential to the local population. The desire to act is growing based on more busi- ness resilience needs. It is depressing that we haven’t got a global deal, but it’s not such a massive deal.


What is driving the work you are doing within business?


Businesses tend to come with a problem and we, hopefully, provide a solution. It’s about how businesses get the sustainability mes- sage through to their employees and make it business-relevant.


What patterns have emerged?


Senior managers go on about carbon foot- printing, which is not in everybody’s daily language. So there’s a need to build confidence to talk a language that people understand. There is the Jeremy Clarkson scepticism


– that it’s a load of baloney. And getting through that is really important. But it’s about making it relevant to people’s jobs and build- ing it into the culture of the company. You might find competitiveness is quite a good way through; who is the greenest driver in the business. It’s about playing into that cul- ture and getting the message across in dif- ferent ways.


How do you deal with the Clarksons?


Jeremy


It depends where they sit in the organisation. A “Jeremy Clarkson” in facilities is a nightmare.


How do you gauge your success when


working within companies?


We measure our success in environmental savings and the number of people engaged. We also do cultural attitudinal surveys and spot checks on behaviour. So, there’s lots of measurement; it’s what the businesses expect.


What can you do for these businesses that they can’t do themselves?


We are a charity and in a business setting it’s an interesting dynamic. It isn’t a manager say- ing, ‘do this, do that’. And we’re not a consul- tancy. So they know we’re coming in because of an environmental concern. That gives us an authenticity which others may not have. We can provide a continuity of solutions which a consultancy couldn’t or a business couldn’t.


You also work with SMEs.


That’s how we get EU funding. We now have a team of six SME business advisers. It’s a free support service for SMEs. As part of our EU links, we run EMAS Easy, which is specifi- cally for small businesses and it’s a very sim- plified process for them to get to ISO 14001.


What’s the take-up been like?


Really slow. There’s this mythology about the supply chain that big business is driving sus- tainability down. But for most big businesses, their suppliers are enormous. And we’re deal- ing with SMEs, with less then 250 employees. It just doesn’t get that far. But if you can get SMEs engaged, they change so quickly because there is less bureaucracy.


So, how can big business drive the message down through to the SMEs?


I think it’s a long way off because most big businesses are still struggling with their tier 1 suppliers. The aspirations of the purchaser is not always reflected, even in the tier one suppliers.


One could argue that staff engagement is just touching the edges and what is really required is mass investment in clean tech- nology. Do you agree?


You can have brilliant technology, but if the people don’t use that technology prop- erly, you invariably don’t get the savings that you should. And what happens if somebody saves lots of money on their energy bills and then buys a flight to wherever. They are still using the car- bon, but in a different way. You have to have the behavioural change part of the piece otherwise it doesn’t mesh.


How much of your work is aiding that unlocking of investment?


That’s really hard to say. But we’re getting people thinking differently. For instance, we do a programme called Eco Teams for one of the companies we work with, which is about getting people to think about changes at home. We trained somebody to do that and, as an unintended consequence, that person was the lead in the legal department at a large company. They went back and shifted the procurement policies of the business so that it included sustainability as one of the prerequi- sites in all contracts.


The companies you have worked with seem to be the leading players. But how can you reach all the others out there?


That’s increasingly difficult. As the auster- ity measures bite, there are certain companies which are leading and doing more and more. And there’s a whole lot who perhaps dabbled with it two or three years ago, then retrenched and haven’t got back on board.


There is more scepticism about climate change in boardrooms and that laggard group is quite strongly embedded at the moment.


Will we ever get consumers on board? And does it even matter?


The CBI identified it as an economic blocker –that people just aren’t making the connec- tions between carbon and energy efficiency. Different conversations are happening. CEOs are talking about carbon and carbon foot- printing. And their customers aren’t. So the challenge that came out of that CBI report was how do make that language real to that group.


What’s the one thing you’re most proud of in your time at Global Action Plan? What always pleases, and slightly surprises me, is that we have always tended to be ahead of the curve on a lot of stuff. We were the first organisation to have an online carbon tool, back in 1998, for example.


What do you hope to achieve with Global Action Plan?


I’ve got no idea. I’m not a great planner. What I want to see happen is for the UK to have a sustainable economy, which is an economy which hits the science-identified carbon tar- gets and gives as many people as possible as aspirational a life as they can lead.


Are you optimistic?


Ultimately, yes. People have a great abil- ity to change very quickly and are inherently innovative. We will get there, the problem is we should have been planning for this 10-15 years ago. What we’ll probably do is respond incredibly late when it gets a bit desperate.


Sustainable Business | June 2011 | 29


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