With COP26 fast approaching and government policy starting to catch up with where the science is at (emphasis on the starting), there’s a clamour to engage with, and make improvement in the field of, sustainability in many public and private sector organisations.
The first thing to note is that sustainability isn’t just one subject, it’s lots of subjects combined. To make positive and lasting impacts, a number of different approaches are required. Some organisations or businesses make the mistake of allocating their sustainability strategy purely to their operations team to deliver. Which is like allocating the birthday cake to one guest at the party and asking them to eat it all on behalf of everyone there. It wouldn’t work, for lots of reasons. It has to be a shared endeavour. Feel free to flip this analogy the next time you’re at a birthday party and someone’s helping themselves to more than their fair share of cake...
Procuring expert suppliers is a very different skill to delivering inspiring social media content about your actions. To expect one specialist department to handle the whole thing would be a poor use of your resources and would undermine your strategy.
The key here is that, yes, it’s important to get your contracts and services right to make a tangible impact in reducing your carbon emissions and environmental impacts, but it is also important to recognise that communication is an essential part of a successful sustainability strategy. It’s crucial that you get your communication right. Broadly, this means directing this element of your work into two categories:
Being transparent about your goals and roadmap, to help you achieve them;
Communicating about your work to have impact beyond your organisation.
There are a lot of organisations talking nebulously about their intentions, or developing strategies which sit on a hard-to-find page of their website laying out the general areas in which they hope to improve over the coming years and then gathering dust as projects and deadlines take up the bandwidth. This is what is often referred to as ‘greenwash’. It is a recognition by an organisation that it is beneficial to look at its environmental impacts and publicly state an intention to improve those impacts and then neglecting to deliver successful action on those impacts.
There are two approaches which lead to this outcome. One is by prioritising being seen to do something over the doing of it, largely for reputational reasons. The other is doing something beneficial but without communicating the detail or engaging your stakeholders in that work. What I described at the start of the previous paragraph is the latter - unintentional greenwashing - which comes from having good intentions but not seeing through those intentions with a high level of resolve or transparency.
If you’re in this camp, the first significant thing you can do is to look again at your strategy and map out how best to clearly engage your audiences with the detail of it. That way, if you’re fully committed to putting your strategies into place, you can be held accountable by your stakeholders, making the process of achieving sustainability easier for you and them, as you galvanise around a shared vision. This includes communicating well with your staff to support them to achieve their own sustainability objectives for the business and to recognise opportunities for personal impact as well.
Sustainable development, in its essence, is something which touches every part of an organisation’s work, and it should be communicated as such rather than hidden away on a website, along with a privacy policy or terms and conditions. Not all organisations will be ready to do this, but now is the time for the ambitious, nimble and agenda-setting organisations out there to take action. There is widespread recognition that we need to reduce our carbon emissions by at least 50% by 2030: if we’re going to do that, it’ll need all of us to accept that change is necessary and that our own actions can contribute to achieving that goal.
Sustainability is a badge which should increasingly be worn visibly, not only for what it says about your organisation, but also for the valuable impact it can have on the world around you.