It is difficult to escape the media view of our impending doom. Whether the perceived cause is political, economic, climate, or an exotic cocktail of all three, the sentiment being portrayed is very clear: we should batten down the hatches and stand by for DOOM!
Markets, investors, businesses and consumers all react differently. These warnings of peril and uncertainty lead to caution (sensible) but the temptation is to become over cautious (dangerous) and we all need to balance risk against the context of the specific circumstances faced. In business, caution manifests itself in different ways – from redundancies to recruitment or spending freezes – all of which may have their place, but equally businesses must search for the opportunity that will present itself as the world inevitably changes once again.
This of course works under the assumption that political or economic doom is largely cyclical and for every ‘down’ there will also be an ‘up’.
This works politically or economically, but not so with climate challenges, which in times of political or economic crisis run the risk of becoming the elephant in every room.
Think about this for a moment…the obvious temptation is to either delay or deprioritise action or spend around climate and impact after all it’s a longer-term problem and we can pick it up again next year after we have weathered the immediate storm, right? (pun intentional).
But does this really make any sense?
Climate change is non-conformist to conventional political or economic theory and therefore – without massive behavioural and technological change – there isn’t going to be an ‘up’ just around the corner! It also fails to recognise that the carbon emissions created by a business are an implicit part of their operational processes, which has bottom line impact to stakeholders, but also the rest of us in terms of the negative effects of wider environmental impact.
Good businesses weather storms by managing risks and resources to optimise efficiency. They also actively position themselves to be ready for the opportunity or ‘up’ that lays just over the horizon.
If you don’t include managing your climate impact within this framework, then you are not managing your organisation correctly. The short-term, feel-good benefit of reducing spend or resource in this area will have a cumulative greater negative impact which will hit profit, reputation, employees and of course the earth – where we are all citizens and carry joint responsibility to be prudent managers of our world.
Managing scope 3 emissions can be a tricky business, they are incurred in everything a business does and are present in all our supplier or value chains. Typically scope 3 emissions count for more than 75% of a business’s carbon footprint, with a significant part of this coming specifically from travel and transport, which includes your teams commuting to or from work in addition to business travel.
TripShift is an automated carbon tracker which focusses specifically on those tricky travel and transport emissions by streamlining the process of collecting and visualising data. It is not resource- intensive, costly, or difficult to get started.
It allows an organisation to identify emissions hotspots and opportunities to manage or reduce emissions. Working proactively to engage with your teams promoting wider behaviour change reducing impact. Your team feels empowered by making a ‘real’ difference not just to the business but also as good citizens of earth This will also result in cost savings directly or indirectly through carbon taxation.
It also literally, makes you a better, more optimised business with a solid reputation, documented (and progressively reducing) impact and solid bottom line. What’s not to like?
Help your business make a positive difference and break the doom cycle.
#MoveBetter
