Does “sustainability” mean “business as usual?”
For anyone who didn’t see my blog on the Event Magazine website (@eventmagazine) – reproduced below… would welcome any comments.
I’ve spent the past few years repeating my mantra so often that I sometimes sound like a broken record. “It’s not about being greener,” I’ll say, “It’s about sustainability.” One of the fundamentals of our business is that it’s not enough to look at your environmental impact – you have to be looking at your social and economic effect too. The harmony between those three interconnected themes should in theory mean that creative events prosper in a way that reduces any negative impact we may have.
I’m starting to think I may have to change my tune. Over the past year I’ve heard a new theory start to gain traction across a number of business sectors that I think should worry anyone who is genuinely interested in a more sustainable future.
The problem arises when organisations or individuals look at the financial impact of their event and interpret that as the benchmark from which their “financial sustainability” should be measured. To give you an example, I might want to use recycled paper at my event rather than the regular paper we’ve used in the past. That would sound like a no-brainer – it’s a more sustainable option. But of course I could decide that as the (tiny) extra cost was going to have an impact on my profit, the most sustainable thing to do from a financial point of view would be to stick with the status quo.
This was illustrated perfectly by a debate on Radio 4 recently between conservationists and housing developers who wanted to build on green belt land. This would damage the countryside said the conservationists. Maybe, replied the developers, but it’s still sustainable – because we won’t be able to offer low cost housing to people if we don’t build there, and we think it’s too expensive to redevelop brown field sites. They were using an argument around affordability of their end product to justify a relaxation of environmental regulation. To me that is a misinterpretation of the financial element of a sustainable approach.
I have always believed that sustainability should not cost more across the piece of an event. That does not mean that individual elements may be more expensive, with complementary savings made elsewhere. To pretend that because sustainability involves a financial element that nothing will ever cost more is a nonsense and a wilful distortion of the case for sustainability.
Financial sustainability should mean that the decisions you take around environmental and social policy are economically sound and durable, but that does not mean you can dismiss any change in behaviour simply because it costs more.
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