Team IoIC believes we each have a moral imperative to reduce consumption and carbon emissions, to protect our planet for future generations. We also believe there’s a huge opportunity for internal communicators to kick-start and facilitate carbon conversations at work, engaging as many people as possible in the race towards net-zero business.
In April 2023, we launched our own pledge to embark on organisational sustainability (https://www.ioic.org.uk/about-us/professionalstandards/sustainability.html). Part of that included our commitment to share with members educational resources to help us learn, develop, grow and achieve lasting change together.
With this in mind, we’re thrilled to launch a monthly roundup of sustainability news.
Here are the first in a series of recent sustainability news items that have caught our eye, alongside an overview of the opportunity for internal communicators.
Environmental sustainability
By now, few will be surprised to hear that fossil fuel companies have undertaken egregious greenwashing over the years. Despite this, evidence exposing the degree to which some continue to do so in 2023 makes for pretty jaw-dropping reading.
As an example, analysis by non-profit watchdog Corporate Accountability reveals 93% of the offsets Chevron bought and counted towards its climate targets from voluntary carbon markets between 2020 and 2022 were too environmentally problematic to be classified as anything other than worthless or junk.
Regardless, nearly half of Chevron’s corporate communication attempts to extol its green credentials – even when it’s found to have allocated less than 0.25% of its capital expenditure on low-carbon investments.
While efforts the major polluters will go to are depressing, the scrutiny they now face is cause for hope. The strategic opportunity for internal communicators is to advocate for authentic truth-telling across ALL communication. The age of whistleblowing and employee activism is here.
Economic sustainability
Since our current capitalistic economic frameworks are now showing their flaws, it’s essential we find new models of economic sustainability. We must conserve natural and financial resources to create greater stability over the longer term.
Sustainable economic systems have the capacity to last far into the future with minimal environmental and societal impacts. They will leverage less wasteful systems, prioritise low-impact economic development, and integrate renewable energy sources.
The non-profit Network for Business Sustainability recently polled members on what they deem to be the biggest issues affecting this area in 2023 – read what their most pressing priorities are here.
Community sustainability
The holistic value organisations bring to their local communities helps those communities thrive. Business has a primary part to play in community sustainability.
Increasingly, that also encompasses the design of where we gather to work – and the impact of those physical structures on their immediate and wider environments. Essentially, the longer that materials are used in buildings, the better for the communities in which they sit.
The OECD predicts global consumption of raw materials is set to double by 2060. As such, there’s far greater focus on low-impact and low-carbon resources when it comes to office new-builds.
Global architecture firm Gensler is a leading proponent of prioritising climate action through design at the heart of its endeavours to help create better built environments. It studies the embodied carbon emissions of different building materials using a method called global warming potential (GWP).
Discover how it helps clients make informed decisions that are good for ALL stakeholders.
Community sustainability
Deloitte’s 2023 Gen Z and Millennial Survey contains a wealth of useful insights into the key behaviours and preoccupations of these mercurial cohorts. But it’s in the area of climate change where perhaps one of the biggest opportunities lies for the internal communication community.
50% of Gen Zs and 46% of millennials say they and their colleagues are pressuring businesses to take action on climate change – while similar numbers believe their leaders have already deprioritised sustainability endeavours in recent years due to external factors like COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Speak to the C-suite and quite a different picture emerges, however. 75% of business leaders Deloitte recently polled claim that their organisations have increased their sustainability investments over the past year.
This disconnect suggests that companies need to better communicate their climate strategies with younger employees and help them understand how they can get involved, in order to bring them along in the transition to a low-carbon future.
Personal Sustainability
As already explored in this month’s round-up, fossil fuel companies are among the worst transgressors when it comes to their environmental impact. Plus, we know that Gen Z are a hyper-aware lot, arguably more so than any other generation.
More than 500 current and recent students from some of the UK’s top universities, including the University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University College London, and the University of Edinburgh, have recently pledged a ‘career boycott’ of insurance firms that work with fossil fuel companies.
Vowing not to work for what they term “climate wreckers that insure those responsible for the climate crisis”, they warn that they will call out insurance companies that fail to shift to climate-friendly policies. In the age of polycrisis, perhaps it’s time for all of us to ‘live our values’.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lindsaykohler/2023/03/30/why-getting-employees-to-make-greener-choices-at-work-is-so-hard---and-what-to-do-about-it/?sh=314900ec1cea
