Trewin Restorick – Global Action Plan

 Since 1993, Global Action Plan has contributed to greater environmental awareness. We have taken a practical approach to help communities reduce their carbon emissions and impacts. Our initiatives work with people across society, at every point in their life. 

EcoTeams is one of our most successful campaigns, and focuses on you and your friends, families and neighbourhoods. It lets you tweak your lifestyle – from keeping your home warm and comfortable for less, to eating a healthy low carbon diet. It gives information and tools so that you know what will make the biggest difference, and track your progress as you go. The average participant reduces their carbon emissions by 17% in the first five months, and continues to improve. 

Businesses are under increasing pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. This will continue as we approach emission reduction targets. The Carbon Reduction Commitment currently only affects larger businesses, but all organisations are under pressure from consumers, other businesses and their own employees to improve their environmental practices. In many industries, environmental initiatives can help to trump competitors and are investigated in procurement processes. However, even though it is such a huge commercial issue, many organisations don’t know where to start. We work with businesses of all sizes to tackle their issues through training, Green IT solutions, employee engagement programmes, consumer campaigns and tailored initiatives.  

The most important people to involve in all the actions and discussions are young people. It sounds obvious, but they are the ones who are going to have to deal with the outcomes. Climate Squad encourages 16-25 year olds to volunteer and use their own potential to be part of the solution. To motivate them, we are inspiring them to envision their future, and challenge MPs to get us there. Greenprint for 2050 was launched back in June. We had representatives from all the Youth Party councils at the launch to begin discussing what the year 2050 should look like. The volunteers will present a report to key political leaders at the House of Commons later this year.  

Finally, Global Action Plan has been the charity partner for Sky for nearly three years. This has been transformative for us. While we have worked with major companies for many years, Sky was the first organisation to choose us as an official long-term partner. The projects we run with Sky and its employees not only continue to enhance our reach and influence, helping us to achieve targets, but also gave us the confidence to realise how much we could achieve and the value of our programmes.