Business sustainability: joining the Mayday journey

Are you a small business looking to reduce your carbon footprint, but need a helping hand? The Mayday Network was set up by HRH Prince Charles in 2007 with the aim of mobilising UK businesses on climate change. It is about to launch a new SME friendly online tool to help the growing number of small businesses keen to respond to climate change and other environmental challenges.

Today over 3,500 companies have joined the Network to share best practice, sustainable solutions and look for opportunities to collaborate and network. Last year the Network achieved a seven per cent aggregated emission reduction.

The Network increasingly deals with broader sustainability issues not just climate change, and members conversations are shifting from how to reduce impacts to how to win new business and turn sustainable strategies into winning business propositions. Last year, 76 per cent of our members said they agreed that climate change is as much a business opportunity as a threat.

SME tool

This May the Network is launching a new SME friendly online tool that will provide and track simple actions for organisations to take whilst enabling businesses to monitor and report their progress. On each page that a member passes through there are options to add quantitative data and to check from a series of 10 actions that a company could take. These are:

Reduce

1. Energy

2. Travel

3. Water

4. Waste

Engage

5. Employees

6. Suppliers

7. Customers

Build Resilience

8. Adapt and manage risk

9. Biodiversity

Transform

10. Vision and new business models

Use of the tool will allow members to ‘Report Back’ every year to the Network on their progress.

Next year will see Rio + 20, a huge Earth Summit, 20 years after the first in Rio in 1992, which spawned a plethora of new environmental policies and focused minds on the huge challenge at hand. This event is likely to also drive forward much of the sustainable thinking which is currently coming of age.

More money than ever is flowing into new technologies and business models. As more organisations share solutions and articulate their vision of a sustainable future, business is increasingly rising to the challenge and seizing the opportunity presented in our changing world. We look forward to hearing about your sustainable journey and together moving towards a prosperous and secure future.

Join the Mayday Network for free at: www.maydaynetwork.com.