Question
Many local and national businesses are making significant progress in reducing their carbon footprint. What efforts have WBC made to engage with local and national businesses and learn from their efforts in reducing our own Carbon Footprint?
Minutes:
Many local and national businesses are making significant progress in reducing their carbon footprint. What efforts have WBC made to engage with local and national businesses and learn from their efforts in reducing our own Carbon Footprint?
Answer
As you know, responding effectively to the Climate Emergency is something I am very passionate about. Engagement with businesses and the identification of best practice is indeed a priority for the Council to help identify how we can most effectively reduce the Borough’s carbon emissions. This relates to both informing our own actions as an organisation and how we seek to influence the actions of others.
Of particular note, Wokingham Borough Council has already set up a Climate Emergency Advisory Board of experts in this field. This involves both national and local business organisations as well as representatives from the academic and charity sector. Acting as a ‘critical friend’, the Board sets out to use its members’ expertise and experience to provide necessary advice and guidance at the strategic and project levels, bringing to bear knowledge of best practice, emergent technologies and a level of scrutiny on our plans and actions.
Within the Borough this is supplemented by engagement with academics at the University of Reading to ensure the Council can learn from expert advice in the fields of Climate Science and Climate Justice. This will broaden understanding of the climate emergency, best practice for carbon dioxide reduction (both policies and practice) and allow the Council to find the most efficient methods of mitigation and adaptation.
In addition, of course, current exceptional circumstances are also providing a platform for extensive business engagement and learning. Whilst not belittling the enormity of the impacts of the Covid-19 epidemic, there has been a silver lining with regard to environmental impacts over the short-term, including reduced carbon emissions and a significant improvement in air quality for example, primarily linked to reductions and changes to business activity. To a degree some of these impacts may be transitory but the Council is keen to learn how far positive changes might become embedded in new ways of working and an ongoing commitment to ‘greening’ the economy.
We are currently embarking on an extensive survey of local businesses that will incorporate getting a better understanding of how they are operating and adapting in the face of the Coronavirus pandemic and the likely longer-lasting changes they might implement that will support carbon reduction. We believe this information is vital in helping us work together to provide the best possible advice and support to the local business community as well as plan and deliver our own initiatives and services going forward. Linked to this we are also looking to repurpose and grow the Wokingham Borough Business Group into an effective ‘Business Task Force’ that can both advise and collaborate on economic recovery and on how we can ensure that this promotes a more sustainable future.
Finally, on a note of cautious optimism, Ernst and Young’s recent survey of larger businesses confirms that 57% of those businesses surveyed considered that climate change and sustainable investment will be a renewed priority going forward – this is something we can build on locally.