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Environmental consultancy WSP hosted the latest IEMA Fellows networking event at its newly refurbished, sustainably designed and energy efficient offices in Chancery Lane.
Welcoming around 30 Fellows to the event, WSP’s Future Ready innovation programme leader, David Symons, said: “It’s a great privilege to be part of IEMA and to have this great network.
“The environment has never been more important, and it is down to us to drive and spearhead change.”
On the same day, IEMA launched its #GreenSkillsAtCOP campaign, which calls for countries to prioritise green education, skills and jobs at this year’s COP16 and COP29 conferences.
Not-for-profit organisations, businesses and members of the public are urged to sign up to the campaign and back the call for leaders to invest more in green skills.
“Climate change and the global loss of biodiversity are two crises that are intrinsically linked, and any real progress is magical thinking without the green skills that are absolutely fundamental to a sustainable future,” IEMA CEO Sarah Mukherjee MBE said.
“While it gets talked about around the edges, [green skills] should be a central plank of both COPs, so please do sign up – the more signatures we have, the more attention policymakers will pay to these very important subjects.”
Mukherjee was then joined by Dr Rhian-Mari Thomas for a wide-ranging discussion on sustainable finance, which began with a focus on nature.
“The nature and biodiversity space is in a far more nascent stage in terms of how it is engaging with the finance sector,” Thomas said.
“With climate, it has a lot to do with getting the pension funds and the big banks to get more primary capital allocated from the capital markets into the technology and infrastructure we need.
“With the nature programmes, it tends to be more corporates. What are the demand drivers currently for large corporates to invest in instruments that finance nature and biodiversity in ways that otherwise wouldn’t generate a financial yield? That’s what we are trying to solve.”
Positive outcomes from COP, regulation and the risk of stranded assets were also discussed. Thomas went on to discuss the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, and Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.
Although she has sympathy for some who are struggling with compliance, she added: “When I hear people complaining about this, I think ‘you haven’t quite grasped the existential nature of what we’re talking about here’. Climate is going to impact every bit of your business.
“If we continue on the pathway that we are going with the nature depletion we are seeing, we could see a 12% reduction in UK GDP in the early 2030s. To put that in context, Covid wiped off around 5-6% – climate breakdown is going to be really messy.”
IEMA Fellows were invited to take part in a Q&A session and a networking exercise in which they were asked: “If you could change one thing to deliver greater sustainability, what would it be?”
Feedback will help inform IEMA’s Fellows Action Plan. More networking events and involvement from Fellows are planned in the years ahead, as these esteemed thought leaders look to devise solutions to the environmental and climate crises we face.
For more information on how to become a Fellow, contact IEMA’s relationships and networking manager, Eleanor Morris, on [email protected]
