Brilliant Women Leadership Breakfast
In the latest of our Brilliant Women leadership round tables, we sat down with a number of female leaders in London to talk about sustainability and the impact of scope 3 on organisations.
The conversation flowed easily as usual, with the group sharing insights and experiences, all capably facilitated by Claire Robinson, our Director of Sustainable Business Consulting.
Unlike Scopes 1 and 2, Scope 3's extremely broad and the general view is it’s pretty overwhelming. Leaders are asking questions like: “Where do I start?” “How will I fund this?” “Will the introduction of mandatory reporting in 2025 result in punitive measures?” Most have more questions than answers.
As we debated the specific roles of organisations, leaders, employees and end users when it comes to delivering impactful carbon reduction plans, there were several key points that we thought were worth sharing.
Key takeaways:
- Don’t have a validated carbon reduction plan? You’re not alone. Only around 20% of UK organisations do. But that’s no reason to sit back and wait until you’re forced to implement one. A quick win could be looking at an existing project through a sustainability lens. Do that efficiency drive, do your channel shift programme, manage that cloud migration, but do it in a sustainable way. Taking that first step will lead to taking the next one and soon you’ll have a sustainability programme in place.
- Not sure where to start in the planning process? Think of it like any other business change programme. There will always be trade-offs. If you focus on carbon reduction around the tech you buy, does that mean you won’t have the time or resource to look at business travel? Maybe. But once you start to measure, you can then start to optimise. And when you see a positive result, it’ll be easier to demonstrate a return to the board or leadership community. A bit like the workings out in an exam, be ready to share your decision making process and why you started there. It’s forward movement whichever way you look at it.
- Every job is a climate job. If you want your employees to get involved ask them to take the same approach and look at tasks and projects through the sustainability lens. For example, our service design team consider how they can use lighter weight fonts, design patterns, less multimedia files, how they can design nudges in services to support consumers/citizens in their decision making: ‘have you considered whether you need to download this file?’. When you start giving some serious thought to carbon impact, you’ll see multiple benefits include making services more efficient, more accessible and lowering costs.
- Educate and inform. Seeding information and providing employees, stakeholders and users with insights, will usually lead to better decisions. Do your team expect a new laptop every 3 years irrespective of whether it needs replacing? Show them the carbon footprint for changing it out. Want your consumers to make informed choices so you can report against that element of Scope 3? Good Food magazine is using Reewild to show the carbon footprint of recipes. vegan and vegetarian recipes are typically the most carbon friendly, reducing red meat portion sizes can have a significant impact. Putting decision-making information in people’s hands is likely to result in behavioural change.
- Overwhelmed by the enormity of the task? One of our Brilliant Women, in a marketing role, looked at the carbon impact of making TV ads. How much carbon is used to make an ad and which aspects of it are most carbon heavy? With the data to hand the team was able to make changes to the process and experience the satisfaction that they’d made a difference. They were doing something, together. This provided a collective vision for everyone to step into and resulted in actions that felt impactful.
- What’s ‘good’ and what’s ‘bad’? We know air travel is bad and rail travel is good. Or do we? If the technology sector was a country it it would be the 3rd largest emitter after the US and China. Data centres were promoted as green because many of them were solar powered as long as we don’t discuss the water needed to keep temperature levels right... GenAI could support a transformational shift in our economy but what about the computing power needed to run it? When faced with the question ‘Is it good or bad?’ try reframing it this way. Is the use of it generating more benefit than the power that it’s using is causing detriment? It'll make it easier to have balance in your decision making.
Claire and the team are keen to keep talking about sustainability more widely including how you’re addressing Scope 3. If you want to join in, either drop us a line or contribute to the discussion on LinkedIn.
Let’s keep the conversation going. Let’s keep sharing insights. Let’s keep learning. After all, that’s the premise behind Brilliant Women. Connecting Leaders. Driving Change.
If you’re interested in joining our Brilliant Women network please email Emma Honeybone.
