As our global Future-Fit partnerships grow, so does my optimism for the future. By working in coordination, we enhance your ability to help businesses play their part in creating a flourishing future for all. This is why we’re so excited to be growing our partnership with ISSP. To achieve this, we need many more examples like the above - enabled by each and every one of you equipped with a set of Future-Fit tools in your sustainability toolkit. Our vision is a Future-Fit Society - one which protects the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever by being environmentally restorative, socially just and economically inclusive. That’s finance driving positive change! (See a brief case study here). The tool will help these businesses understand and improve their impacts, whilst enabling the bank to start tipping its balance sheet toward companies that are actively trying to be part of the solution - ultimately rewarding them with lower borrowing rates. We’ve helped Virgin Money UK’s corporate banking team develop an online questionnaire for its SME borrowers. Read more about their sustainability commitments and watch this short video from their CEO.Īnother example comes from the usually un-radical world of banking. Today they’re using unrented fossil-fuel powered RVs as temporary accommodation during the pandemic tomorrow these RVs will be electric. Despite the pandemic and operating in regions hit by devastating wildfires, the company has doubled down on its commitments - in part because it recognizes that there’s no tourism industry if there’s no world worth seeing. Take for example Tourism Holdings Ltd, a leading RV rental business in New Zealand, Australia and the USA. This need for radical transformation led me to co-found Future-Fit Foundation and create tools to help businesses make these vital changes. These pressures are only going to intensify, and the winners will be the ones who adapt first and best. Carbon and pollution taxes, supply chain disruptions, and evolving customer expectations (to name but a few) are very real risks facing every business leader right now. Radical action is not an optional extra for businesses, as many CEOs are quietly (radically?) hoping. It’s like trying to treat Covid-19 with two paracetamol and a quick nap. Carrying on with business as usual, just producing a bit less smoke, won’t get us anywhere near net-zero or a 1.5-degree global warming target. (And us).Īnswering the call of the SDGs will mean the vast majority of companies having to radically transform their business models. Will it? Well, that depends partly on you. The return-to-earth question is: how do we make it happen? Global governments have mostly demonstrated their inability to lead on the SDGs (see their cumulative lack of progress to date, despite having signed up to them). (Admit it, that at least raises a glimmer of hope…) Impossible? Definitely not with the right resource allocation. The progress of the 1920s to now, all delivered again by 2030. What would happen if we put the same level of effort and resources into overcoming these global challenges as we have for the virus? What if businesses and governments threw themselves into a coordinated effort to tackle the SDGs with all of their resources and know-how? And what if we could recreate the pharmaceutical companies’ ten-fold acceleration, whilst solving issues such as clean energy generation and storage, or plastic circularity? That would mean we could achieve the equivalent of a century’s worth of innovation in just one decade. Perhaps many of these don’t feel quite as urgent as Covid-19 because they don’t impinge so severely upon our daily lives (particularly in the West), but their impacts will ultimately be far, far more severe and long-lasting. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need convincing that global society is actually facing a huge range of “pandemics” across climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, poverty, injustice, and so on. The UN is calling the next ten years the “Decade of Action” to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Something that would normally take 10 years was achieved in just one year. The most potent example is the design, production and approval time for the vaccines we are all pinning our hopes on being reduced by an order of magnitude. The outpourings of compassion and kindness have been wonderful, but even more amazing is the overnight shift in business models in response to the urgent need in front of them. The pandemic has impacted every aspect of our lives, yet the response of the business community around the globe has been nothing short of phenomenal. And whilst right now we seem to be living in “groundhog year”, I am remaining defiantly optimistic - at least for the medium-term and beyond. It’s probably fair to say that few of us were overly sorry to see the back of 2020.
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