This story was told in a story circle at the Learning History workshop in February 2008.
Read how a group of sustainability officers capitalized on the growing interest in the Private sector for climate by bringing all the big employers together and offering them a means to start practically addressing carbon reduction.
Tapping into Energy on Energy
A story told in the “Tales from the Carbon Face” story circle
I
was working with colleagues on looking at how to make a significant difference
around carbon reduction within the city of Brighton and Hove. And we figured
that, in many ways, the private sector was ahead of the public sector and the
voluntary sector in terms of really making plans and having an openness.
Certainly right about the turn of last year (2007), for all sorts of reasons,
the big private sector companies were saying that energy and climate change was
rising up to the top of their agenda. So we thought we would cast this in a way
with the economic partnership within our city. So we said: okay, what we are
going to do about this and how we are going to capitalize on some of these
concern and interest? Can we run
an event with you, but we want it to be a practical event, so there will be carbon
reduction workshops within it. And
we will threshold these, and we designed a process with them.
With
got the Regional development agency to work with us – and they were going “ah, now, this is interesting - we
work with the top 25 employers in your city and they are actually responsible
for employing 75% of all the people within the city”, so we said, “Okay, this should not be just down to the
private sector, but other big employers, but we will still do it under that
banner,” and then okay, we will have the Carbon Trust so we will check in
with all of these people: is your energy
bill more than £50K a year: if it is, then you are in this workshop, if it
isn’t then you are in this one. It was dead simple in effect. We had the means
to provide funding support for SMEs and we had the means to sign the big ones
up to the carbon management program run by the Carbon Trust.
So
what surprised me a little bit was (A) How willing they were to come forward,
people in general, American Express, Lloyds TSB and they were all sat in a room
and okay, they were like the regional offices of those. They were not the
national office or not the European office, but they were all there, and they
were all going, “Yes, this makes
sense. We will sign up for this.” And we were thinking this could have a
very major impact on how it goes.
It
is very difficult to monitor, none of them want to give away information about
their carbon footprint or carbon savings readily, certainly in terms of
regional reporting, but a certain amount of follow up through SEEDA and its
relationships through the Carbon Trust, we are still working out how we try and
accumulate the data of it and how we prove or otherwise it is successful.
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