Peter Hambly the Carbon Trust

Making Business Sense of Climate Change

Peter Hambly, Director Marketing Communications, the Carbon Trust

The Carbon Trust’s mission is to accelerate the move to a low carbon economy where carbon reduction will be treated as a critical success factor in every facet of business activity, ranking alongside profit creation and operational cost reduction. This de-facto approach to carbon management is crucial to ensure the necessary measures are taken to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Contributing as it does to almost half of the UK’s total carbon emissions, the business community holds the key: it exerts influence on and responds to consumer behaviour, and has the entrepreneurial expertise to bring about the required scale of revolution. The role of the Carbon Trust is to drive climate change and carbon reduction up the agenda and help business to address the associated issues and identify the opportunities that exist. The complexity of the message and the segmented nature of the business community mean that effective marketing must form an essential part of our activity and as a result we have committed a significant percentage of our budget to communications.

However, this has not always been the case. When the Carbon Trust was set up six years ago communications was viewed as mainly a support tool to the main operational function of our products and services. We quickly realised that communication was going to play a central role in our mission to be a catalyst of change, by explaining the issues and the potential effect on business value and long-term viability. There was a lot of confusion and concern and we saw our role as putting carbon at the centre of the debate and helping businesses to initiate action. Today the term ‘Low Carbon Economy’ is increasingly current vernacular and carbon is being recognised as the new currency; five years ago, when we started many people didn’t understand that addressing carbon emissions was the critical factor in dealing with climate change.

Over the last six months the level of understanding has moved on significantly, but there remains more to do. In June 2006, we ran a campaign to focus on the ‘cost of carbon’ and the £570m companies would waste over the summer months through energy inefficiency. By November, we were urging companies to seize the opportunities of the low carbon economy presented by growing awareness among UK consumers, with research that showed 50 per cent of purchasing decisions were influenced by environmental factors. We will build on this campaign by helping to encourage the debate as carbon is translated into business action through engaging employees throughout companies.  

Moving on from this the big challenge now is to influence the way goods are made and sold by companies and give consumers the information to help them make effective low carbon decisions. M&S is a good example – it has clearly seen that the benefits of action and communication outweigh the risks of publicly stating its intentions. We also welcomed the recent initiative by Tesco on carbon labelling. The Carbon Trust has been working with many companies over the past year, including Trinity Mirror and Walkers Crisps to identify the potential carbon reductions through their supply chain to identify the associated carbon content of a product. Our supply chain report in November 2006 examined this in detail and when coupled with our consumer research findings stating that a third of consumers would rather buy a low carbon product, resulted in a very powerful message.

As the climate change agenda shifts and evolves we need to ensure our communications keep up and maintain our role of shining the path for businesses, explaining the issues and providing relevant solutions. Recent research commissioned by the Carbon Trust on corporate reputations revealed two very significant findings for communicators. Firstly, the growth of customers as an influential group that can seriously impact on reputation, second only to journalists. Secondly, that while climate change tops executive worry lists, it is not necessarily top of their ‘to do’ lists. Much remains to be done, and the audience is changing.

However the Carbon Trust is not a pressure group, we are here to support business in the move to a low carbon economy. As a result our communications will continue to focus on explaining the impacts on business operations and offering solutions, using all the tools of influence at our disposal. So while our communications may raise issues, they will be backed by effective low carbon solutions.