Top tips

Here are some top tips to help your organisation get to grips with climate change.

Build on existing enthusiasm

Even if you haven’t considered climate change at an organisational level yet, it’s likely that someone in your team already has an interest in this area. Or you may have a sustainability champion or team in place with responsibility for reducing your carbon emissions, like the Health, Safety and Environment team at RNIB. Wherever it lies, tap into this existing enthusiasm, as Equinox Care has also done.

Get your trustees on board

The impact of climate change is likely to require your organisation to make some key strategic decisions for the future, so it’s vital to get this issue on your board’s agenda as soon as possible.

Involve others

Once you’ve got your trustees and existing champions engaged, consider who else you could get views from. You’ll probably want to ask your beneficiaries how they think climate change could affect them; and staff, volunteers and other stakeholders could all offer useful insights. Take a look at our tips on when and how to involve people in your work generally.

Paint pictures

People within your organisation may take a while to see the relevance of this issue, so you may need to make the implications of climate change more real for them by painting a picture of daily life in the future.

Focus on solutions

The likely impact of the changing climate on our lives can often seem quite frightening. As well as considering the implications of these trends, it’ll also be important to spend time exploring solutions to reinforce a positive vision for the future. This could also turn out to be a creative exercise, throwing up for example, new insight into the needs of your users and opportunities for more collaboration with others.

Keep it real

It will be impossible to safe-guard your beneficiaries and organisation against all the risks posed by climate change. So after an initial exploration of the big picture, focus on the issues that are most likely to affect your work and the areas that you can influence and take meaningful action on.

Identify trigger points

Climate change trends are going to be wide-reaching but there is also a lot of uncertainty about what exactly will happen. So for trends with potentially major implications, such as climate-related migration, you could identify a trigger point to look out for, to bring it back on to the table.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Instead of devising new mechanisms for managing the impact of climate change, build the issue into your existing processes such as your risk management procedures and your strategic planning cycle. But if you’re part-way through your current organisational strategy, don’t use this as an excuse for ignoring these major trends.