We have been working with organisations such as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), Business in the Community (BITC) and the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to bring climate change and carbon reduction information to the world of business. While governments set policy, it is the private sector - especially business - that will be called on to deliver many of the changes called for in those policies.
The largest challenge lies in engaging small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Unlike large corporations, SMEs rarely have the staff to dedicate to participating in climate change actions, and they have significantly less control over the energy efficiency of the buildings they occupy (many of them don't pay the bills directly). Our discussions with CBI, BITC and DECC have shown us that the best way to support SMEs in climate change is to provide them a simple to use set of resources through which they can create and carry out their own climate change strategies, both within their companies and throughout their supply chains.
This part of the Engagement website of 4CMR is dedicated to providing those resources. We have organised the resources into five Steps, modelled on the BITC and CBI processes for SMEs. These are Inform, Measure, Manage, Reduce, Engage. We provide materials needed by SMEs to carry out those steps. Clicking on each Step will take you to a page describing that part of the process.
Step 1: Inform yourself about climate change, the role of the business community in providing solutions, the risks to business activities from climate change, and the requirements of emerging legislation and other climate change programmes
Step 2: Measure carbon dioxide emissions from your business, at a level of resolution suited to identifying specific actions you can take.
Step 3: Manage the carbon dioxide reduction activities in your company by creating organisational capacity that cuts across all aspects of your business requiring emissions reduction
Step 4: Reduce the emissions in your company by implementing the most effective projects that will lead to significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions
Step 5: Engage your customers and your supply chain so they will take the actions needed to support the climate change goals of the entire community
If you would rather follow through similar steps sponsored by CBI, we have been working with CBI staff to create a bespoke version for their site, which can be found here.
