Carbon bandwagon
Public relations must take responsibility for its role in the climate crisis.
The public relations industry is falling over itself to help businesses get to grips with the climate crisis. Agency initiatives and new roles appear daily in industry publications.
This is the carbon bandwagon. Like previous corporate booms it’s characterised by a rush of talent with varying levels of credentials, seeking to capitalise on the demand for professional services.
The result is bullshit statements from business about people and purpose, while failing to make the difficult changes needed to make their organisations sustainable.
Corporate websites are awash with net zero targets, but you’ll rarely find data or a plan, itself an indication that business doesn’t wholly understand the issue.
Eliminating carbon will require an unprecedented effort and huge levels of innovation. It is the greatest challenge that humanity has faced.
The naked opportunism would be less infuriating if the stakes weren’t so high. The climate crisis is in plain view. Temperatures in Italy and Turkey reached almost 50C this summer.
Business doesn’t place a financial value on the environment, stupid
In my view the root of the issue lies in the way that businesses account for their carbon usage. They don’t.
Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, a University of Cambridge economist, calls out business for damaging the environment by failing to place a value on the earth’s assets. He was commissioned by the Treasury in 2020 to investigate the impact of economic activity on the natural environment and propose interventions.
Dasgupta estimates that the economic system is broken to a cost of $4 to 6 trillion per year. This is the cost of the natural assets that we plunder from the earth, waste products that we dump into the sea, and toxic gasses we emit into the atmosphere.
None of this appears on a profit and loss or balance sheet. It’s plainly wrong.
Our systems of corporate governance need urgent reform to account for the environment. There’s a growing assortment of voluntary standards from the International Integrated Reporting Framework to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), but there is no legal requirement for businesses to account or report for their carbon usage.
Businesses should file an annual carbon return
It’s hard to reconcile claims that the Government is driving a climate agenda, and that business is playing an active role in addressing the issue, when legislation itself fails to account for the environment.
The Companies Act, the law that sets out corporate governance for the directors of UK companies, requires they be held accountable to shareholders for financial performance. There’s no mention of the environment, or indeed any other form of stakeholder.
It doesn’t make any sense.
The Better Business Act, spearheaded by the B-Corp movement, is campaigning for a change in legislation to account for all stakeholders. It would amend the Companies Act so that businesses are legally obliged to operate in a manner that benefits all their stakeholders including the environment.
I have limited confidence that change is going to come with the urgency that is required to address the climate crisis.
The Government’s record on tackling social issues through corporate governance is poor. It sought to tackle gender diversity by introducing mandatory reporting for businesses with more than 250 people in 2017, but then gave them a pass out for 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19.
Most recently the Competition and Markets Authority has launched a Green Claims Code and threatened to act on businesses that overreach. It’s an odd intervention that effectively says that business can continue to damage the environment so long as it doesn’t make false claims, and miss sell products or services.
Watch out for the grand commitments for change from politicians at the upcoming COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, but if we are serious about the role of business, targets for carbon reduction must be mandatory.
Filing carbon usage data should be as normal as submitting annual accounts to Companies House. Until then voluntary, science-based targets are the best that we’ve got.
Public relations must avoid becoming part of the problem
It’s hardly a sport to beat up on the public relations profession, but we have an opportunity to help businesses understand and address issues related to climate.
We have two choices. We can either help businesses deal with the root issue of the climate crisis and make meaningful change to eliminate carbon, or we can fiddle around theedges with greenwashing campaigns that obscure the issue.
Our past record isn’t good.
BP’s campaign in 2005 by Ogilvy to promote individual carbon footprints is an example of greenwashing on a massive scale. It sought to shift emphasis from the need for systemic change in the fossil fuel industry and instead divert attention to an individual consumer’s carbon footprint.
It convinced us that it was more important for consumers to manage their own carbon footprint, equivalent to 0.000000003% of global emissions. The energy sector accounts for a quarter of all emissions.
The BP carbon footprint campaign led to another significant marketing misdirection.
Carbon offset schemes have become a popular means of accounting for carbon usage. Here organisations invest in tree planting schemes as a means of mopping up their carbon usage. It’s a crude solution for a complex problem, however well intentioned.
Until business is forced to account for carbon, doing the right thing by the environment requires bold leadership and brave businesses that are prepared to make a stand.
Iceland Foods boss Richard Walker is spearheading environmental efforts in the supermarket industry as head of his family’s business.
Iceland has successfully removed palm oil from its own-brand food and is working to remove 13,000 tons of plastic packaging from its own brand products by 2023. Walker says customers will always vote with their hearts for environmental solutions when asked but will vote with their feet if it impacts prices.
Public relations practitioners must support business in making the right choices, however difficult, and communicating those to the public. It’s an issue of legacy for everyone. If we get this wrong, we’ll need to explain how we screwed it up to our grandchildren in the next 30 years.
This is a feature that I’ve written for the latest edition of Don’t Cry Wolf Quarterly. It’s like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair, but for the public relations industry.
