Small businesses want to fight climate change but need support - Michelle Ovens

Given this, it’s hard to understand why such a downbeat, negative tone prevails about the plans and solutions we do have – particularly around going net zero. It’s self-defeating and gets us nowhere fast.

Ahead of the UN Climate Summit COP26 in Glasgow this November we need a message re-set – with a fundamentally more positive, inspirational conversation that galvanises action. This must mobilise powerful leaders and influencers in the business community who can make a difference – notably entrepreneurs.

Lowering carbon emissions to zero, and even becoming carbon negative, of course brings challenges. We don’t have all the answers about how we get there yet. But focusing on the issues, versus the opportunities, risks talking businesses out of starting the process and wastes precious time.

As someone who has run major campaigns for many years, like Small Business Saturday UK, I’ve seen first-hand that a clear, positive message and a can-do attitude gets people behind a mission far more powerfully than pointing out the problems. When we empower and encourage, when we bring together and spotlight the influencers and the change-makers, amazing things can happen.

In the UK there are 5.9m small businesses, representing 99 per cent of businesses, meaning they have a massive role to play in the ‘race to zero’. In May the Government called upon every small business in the UK to join the fight against climate change in the run up to COP26, by pledging to cut their emissions in half before 2030, and to net zero by 2050 or sooner.

The pandemic has shown us just how amazing and tenacious small businesses are. They care enormously – about local people, about their communities and about the planet – and wield a lot of influence. They are exactly the group for this mission. Particularly as so many are early adopters and innovators of sustainable practices, from eco-friendly products and services to supply-chains.

We see this across Yorkshire in the businesses that are being born and built. Take Hanna Dilley, from Harrogate, who started a frozen baby food business called Benji’s Bites, out of her own experience of motherhood and built-in sustainability at the outset, from compostable packaging to tackling food waste. Or Helen and Christopher Neave, the founders of Make It Wild, a business they started to safeguard nature areas throughout North Yorkshire, by running retreats as well as tree dedication and tree planting for other businesses.

Despite this growing consciousness, there is a lack of confidence. Many business owners (73 per cent) say they are not clear how to measure carbon emissions and need help to understand this. A lot can also see going greener as expensive and time-consuming – even though it can help them reduce costs and engage customers more. It’s clear business owners need to be supported on how to understand their environmental impact and how to address it. But more fundamentally we must challenge this belief that for a business to start their journey to net zero they must first understand all the detail and have a perfect plan in place.

Undoubtedly measurement and strategy are important. But as any entrepreneur will tell you, if you wait for perfect conditions to start something challenging, you’ll wait forever. When it comes to climate change, we don’t have time to lose.

We need to tap into that entrepreneurial instinct by talking their language – hope, opportunity, and possibility. The journey to net zero needs to be broken down into practical steps, starting with ‘quick wins’; from reducing waste and travel, to switching suppliers.

Important things are rarely easy to achieve. But we still have time to create powerful change. Let’s block out the negativity and get going.

Michelle Ovens CBE, founder of Small Business Britain and the Small Business Planet campaign.