The 2020 summit in Australia had the environment and climate change as one of the major issues with the result that it really hit the news and also public awareness. Last week I went to a local small business networking function and the change in attitude to my business was enormous. Instead of the majority of small businesses saying it is too hard and their little bit does not matter, there was general concern about what they can begin to do.

Enviro Action has a stand at the Carbon Trading Expo in Melbourne this week and I think the timing is very good. Personally I have deep reservations about the emphasis on carbon trading. My belief is that this should be a last resort AFTER people have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions in other ways. The whole regulatory framework around carbon trading is very unreliable at this stage and the scheme that was developed in Europe has major flaws.

There is a lot of work to do to reduce our emissions and change our behaviour and the strength of Enviro Action’s training is that we teach people HOW to identify their environmental impacts, including their carbon emissions and to change the culture within their business to get all their personnel “on board” with behaviour change to implement their system. I firmly believe that to get the true benefits of environmental management systems, skills and capabilities must be transferred into the businesses themselves and their people and not stay with consultants.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.