Forster : Turning Ambition into Action

TURNING AMBITION INTO ACTION FROM BUSINESS DECLARES MEMBER: FORSTER COMMUNICATIONS

One year on from launching its ambitious plan to be climate positive by 2023, Kate Parker from Forster Communications shares some of the highlights and challenges of bringing the plan to life.

Declaring a climate emergency back in July 2019 was the easy bit. In the 20 months since,  we have taken a long hard look at ourselves and how we can make the biggest impact in tackling climate change. 

Yes we need to work through our own business, but we are a small service business with limited emissions. Our turning point comes by influencing and supporting our clients, suppliers and wider community to change. We’ve chosen to go beyond the emissions we produce to include our whole value chain in our metrics.

This means leaning on our communications expertise to engage our employees, suppliers, clients, partners and wider network. We may not have the same leverage as a larger business in some areas, but we’ve certainly been able to box clever and make up for it in others.

Small but mighty

As a B Corp - and having lived and breathed sustainability issues our entire existence - we started from a strong place; incentivising sustainable travel, sending zero waste to landfill, using 100% renewable energy and our ISO14001 certification.

We made some quick progress focussing on simple things we could directly influence. Working with our landlords to switch waste suppliers for the whole building, extending our sustainable travel incentives to clients, and supporting our employees to switch to green energy suppliers as the pandemic hit and home working became the norm. 

By March 2022 all our suppliers will be committed to achieving net zero and so in tandem with tracking their commitments we are developing a toolkit to support them, signposting to resources like the B Corp Impact Assessment and the SME Climate Hub.

By April 2023 all our clients will have publicly committed to cut their emissions and we are already seeing a gear change in ambition from those we’re working with. From tackling food waste with Neighbourly; to changing the face of retail with Selfridges and Patagonia; to inspiring individual action with Energy Savings Trust, our impact is growing in partnership with our clients.

The power of transparency

In our annual Impact Reports we recognise that the biggest part of our carbon footprint is the work that we do for our clients. Using our expertise to promote business-as-usual in carbon critical industries would go against all our climate positive commitments and so we are one of a growing group of agencies publishing Clients Disclosure Reports. Sitting alongside the Clean Creatives movement we think this presents a genuine opportunity to help change our industry from the inside out.

But there are more hurdles ahead. One of our priorities for this year is ensuring our investments support climate positive solutions. While it has always be relatively simple to join an employee pension scheme, it’s proving much more difficult to leave.

Progress isn’t easy.

Even as we tackle the complexities of achieving our goals, our ambitions have grown and we want to take new action to ensure adaptation and mitigation measures support social justice and drive equality.

Fundamental to our progress is measurement and although we have been tracking our impact for a long time more recently we’ve been working with Green Element and ClimateCare to measure and offset. Offsetting is by no means a long term solution, but we see it as an important part of the transition to net zero as we continue to reduce our carbon emissions. 

“We are not claiming to be perfect, we are all on a journey” – Business Declares

We also want to learn and welcome the opportunity to talk and share. 2021 is about everyone choosing to lead by example.

If the pandemic has shown us anything it’s that we can adapt the way we operate more quickly than we thought. There’s a lot of noise about finding purpose and tackling the climate crisis but unless we all turn commitments into tangible action, it will be too late.

If you have any comments or questions, I’d love to hear from you via kate@forster.co.uk. You can read our latest Climate Positive Plan here