Written By:
Richard Selby
Chair
IoD Wales
Richard Selby is the co-founder of Pro Steel Engineering and chair of the IoD in Wales. He believes the pandemic has given directors the opportunity to reshape their businesses in preparation for the economic upturn and begin the journey along the ‘green road’.
While lockdown has been a significant challenge, it is also providing new opportunities. For the first time in a long time, it’s given many of us the chance to take a long, hard look at our businesses – internally and externally. Working out a new direction for your organisation lies in taking sufficient time to think and plan. How can we become more efficient? What will the market look like a year from now? Where do our services fit? How can we join the journey to net-zero?
Here at Pro Steel, we used lockdown to overhaul processes and increase production line efficiencies as well as analyse new markets to accelerate a drive into exports. We have also been collaborating closely with our industrial cluster to address our carbon capture and identify our own route to net-zero.
The G7 summit, hosted by our Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Cornwall earlier this month, emphasised the importance of international collaboration. The discussions were centred around working together, ‘building back better’, and collectively addressing policy priorities such as Covid-19 recovery, trade, and the environment.
In that spirit, they revealed a democratic focused ‘Green Belt and Road Initiative’, which is designed to increase climate funding across the continents. Climate change is a phenomenon that most definitely affects everybody. The only way forward is global cooperation.
During the summit, the G7 made a whole host of commitments to the climate change battle. These included the reaffirmation of the Paris Agreement and the promise to progress its implementation; rapidly scaling up technologies and policies that will accelerate the race to net zero; ensuring the sustainable conservation and regeneration of ecosystems; championing ambitious and effective global biodiversity targets such as conserving or protecting at least 30% of the global ocean and land by 2030.
The seven leaders also agreed to phase out the most polluting energy sources, the worst of which is coal. In doing so, they have said they will scale up investment in technology and infrastructure to facilitate this green transition, as well as ending all funding of new coal generation, and offering up to £2 billion to stop using the fuel in developing countries. They have urged other countries to join them in this.
Back home in Wales, Senedd Cymru approved a net zero target for 2050 earlier this year. Our legal framework in legislating for the needs of future generations is being studied across the world. Our practical action on recycling is nudging the top of the global league table. Our tax on single-use carrier bags has been widely followed and has succeeded in significantly cutting down on plastic use.
Since 1990, Welsh greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by 31%. But there is lots more we need to do. Reports suggest that we are going to need to more than double all the cuts we have managed over the last 30 years in just ten years. If we simply maintain our current pace, we will not achieve net zero until around 2090.
Our Government might be taking the lead, but we cannot do it alone—no Government can. Each business and organisation, and each of us, have to consider our own responsibilities, to consider the impact of the choices we make, the way we heat our homes, why and how we travel, what we eat, where we shop, how we relax, the way we work, and where we work.
The price of not doing so is just too great.
The IoD supports Directors in adopting sustainable policies, raising awareness, and spreading valuable knowledge. Visit https://www.iod.com/news/sustainable-business#tab-Courses to find out more.
