Helping small businesses engage with climate action Dr Anna Bullen, from our Zero Carbon Britain team, explains how recent Innovation Labs have been Shutterstock/Simon hark
creating a template for engaging local businesses with climate action plans for the area.
Local businesses in Shropshire have helped inform the Shropshire Climate Action Group.
T
o tackle complex problems like climate change, we have no choice but to innovate. We need solutions that work across a range of interacting areas; solutions that not only offer technical fixes but also help overcome political, cultural, economic and psychological barriers. An Innovation Lab offers a tool to design and implement the solutions needed to face this complex challenge. Innovation Labs take a variety of forms, but essentially use experimental and participatory methods to tackle complex issues or challenges. Solutions to those problems are then co-designed, prototyped and implemented. In the Autumn 2021 edition of Clean Slate, Kevin Oubridge introduced readers to the Shropshire Climate Action Partnership (SCAP) and their ambitious plans for achieving net zero by 2030, largely based on CAT’s Zero Carbon
Britain research. Early last year we had a conversation with members of SCAP about their progress and what areas they were finding most challenging, with a view to supporting them through the delivery of an Innovation Lab (see box). After some discussion, we settled on a key challenge: how to better engage businesses across Shropshire in SCAP’s climate action plan. This was not going to be one of our regular labs though. We ran this one in conjunction with our Graduate School of the Environment, supporting our Masters students in their Action Research module, in order that the students could gain ‘real life’ insight into a lab process and learn some of the central skills for running a lab. Senior lecturer, Dr Ruth Stevenson, and six students embarked on the lab, alongside myself and members of the SCAP Enterprise Working Group (EWG).
The process
The Innovation Lab set out to explore the barriers and opportunities for local businesses to engage with the SCAP EWG and their Zero Carbon Shropshire Plan. We used a series of workshops to understand the complex challenges associated with engaging local businesses in climate action. The process invited representatives from 14 small and medium enterprises (SME) (three of which were represented by SCAP members) to co-design potential solutions to the barriers businesses currently face. This way, SCAP would be able to better engage and support businesses in Shropshire to tackle the climate emergency. The 14 SMEs represented a diverse range of sectors across Shropshire, including business management and consulting, waste management, retail, recruitment, hospitality, tourism and
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