Our thinking

Net Zero Festival 2023

3 November, 2023

This week, the Good Business climate team took part in the Net Zero Festival 2023. The event brought together business leaders, forward-thinking entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers. And, of course, fellow sustainability consultants!

The festival aimed to inspire, showcase real actions, forge connections, and highlight the solutions that are needed to steer the transition to net zero. All topics worthy of a proper debrief. While there were no major surprises or new announcements, we found great value in learning from others working towards the shared goal of reaching net zero.

This was neatly showcased in a dragons’-den style show case of the most innovative climate tech-start-ups in the UK, including Senergy, focused on low-carbon heating through solar thermal panels and ReBlade, who decommission and repurpose wind turbine blades into functional products such as community infrastructures like benches and walkways.

Equally innovative was the update from The Chancery Lane Project, an organisation that provides open access to sustainability-related clauses for businesses to include in their legal contracts. They shared their expertise on building climate requirements into contracts as a tool to accelerate action and generate accountability, particularly when a business is looking to engage with its suppliers on climate action, an area where we spend considerable time working with clients.

Offsets – much discussed, always controversial – also featured strongly, with consensus that investment is still needed in high integrity carbon removal projects to support climate action.

We were very pleased to hear mention of our friends at Aviva who have invested £38 million to support the WildLife Trust’s efforts to restore the UK’s temperate rainforests. And we were pleased to see other clients doing great work in this space, including VMO2 and Pernod Ricard. Throughout the festival, the message remained clear: we are in a climate and nature crisis, and we need to tackle both at the same time – reducing emissions at source and restoring nature.

Among a lot of exciting initiatives, there was a lot to learn for those new to the net zero journey and those with years of experience behind them. What came through most strongly, perhaps, was a shared recognition of net zero as a global target for humanity, which will only be reached with shared endeavour and a collective commitment to progress.

By Bertie Bateman