Advice

Take Action with Protect Our Winters – Part 2

Posted by SportPursuit on

Protect Our Winters UK is a charity that exists to inspire and equip communities to take positive action to address the climate crisis. 
Join POW UK.

In our last post with Protect Our Winters UK we looked at the first steps you can take as an individual to reduce your carbon footprint, improve your impact on the environment and encourage others to do the same. Read Part One for ideas to get started. Next, we tackle the more challenging sections of the POW Mountain – actions that you can take to influence companies and money to scale the change.

Red Run – Companies

It’s rare to find an individual who is perfect, and companies are no different. This means there are always improvements you can encourage comapanies to make, and your choice as a customer is important to voice your support of these changes. What’s more, companies have the power to make changes at scale, so when things move in the right direction the benefits are significant. A few changes you can try:

  • Become a POW Partner: encourage your company to become a POW UK corporate sponsor and support environmental causes.
  • Become Carbon Literate: run Carbon Literacy training for key people or become a fully carbon literate organisation so you can develop a effective sustainability and CSR policies.
  • Reduce your waste: just like individuals, companies can improve their impact by reducing energy usage, efficiently using and recycling resources, and supporting individual choices such as cycle to work schemes.
  • Get Your Club Involved: if you’re part of a university club, outdoor sports group or company team you can get involved with the POW UK Winter Guardians programme and start influencing those around you.

Black Run – Money

This is the steepest and most challenging of the runs, influencing money. 

  • Engage with your bank: find out what their sustainability policy is – Who do they lend to and, more importantly, who don’t they lend to? Do they have funds specifically for environmentally friendly companies? If so, can you move your money into them? Funds are starting to divest fossil fuel assets but the more noise we make, the faster this will happen.
  • Educate yourself: watch this video from Aviva to understand how your pension fund can make a difference and how you can influence it.
  • Engage with your employer on pension investment policy: aim to move to climate aware funds with active stewardship. POW UK are working with shareaction to encourage pension funds to invest sustainably.

Find out more about Protect Our Winters UK and how to Take Action.

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Photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash