2024 was the year we crossed the 1.5°C threshold. With only 5 years to halve CO2 emissions by 2030 to avoid an unprecedented series of global crises, business and industry action has never been so critical - which is why the work of the membership sector in relation to just transition is so important.
There is a saying that goes "the best day to grow a tree was 20 years ago, but the next best day is today". Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, the stakes are high, but the solutions are in our hands.
As a membership organisation, you may already have a written mission to work on behalf of and ensure the future of your members and society. Integrating climate action and leadership is a natural next step. The impacts relating to climate change are likely to be the biggest challenge that you and your members will face in the next few years and for decades to come.
Here are Climate Action for Association's (CAFA's) 6 New Years Resolutions recommendations specifically for your membership organisation.
Resolution #1 - Lead by example
Integrate sustainability and net zero into your business strategy. This means putting sustainability at the heart of both your internal business operating model and your member/industry facing strategy.
There is no doubt that the biggest impact your membership association can have is to speed up the support you deliver to your members. However, we know that many of your members are looking to you to demonstrate proactive sustainability leadership first. Your members expect you to be taking action, and walking the talk.
Leading your sector by example includes measurement and reporting on your own associations footprint, designing an action plan for emissions reduction and setting the goal to reduce your associations emissions every year to meet your targets.
Resolution #2 - Get under the skin of your sectors impact
If you don't know the macro impact of your sector or influence of your profession as yet, it's crucial you get a grasp on this ASAP. For instance your membership could be directly emitting greenhouse gases (anywhere from gas heating in offices, to heavy industry processes whilst manufacturing products in factories), contributing to emissions or providing the solutions (for example through their supply chains) or having influence over their clients decisions and actions (for instance professional services firms have influence of their clients emissions - this is called serviced or influenced emissions).
Sectors and professions have very specific impacts, and understanding them is a necessary step that precedes your ability to represent, steer, drive policy, advocate, identify opportunity, run programmes and give the best guidance and resources to help mitigate your sectors impact.
Undertake industry, market and profession research, and collaborate with other external third parties that may have already gathered sector specific impact data and statistics. This way you will rapidly uncover the high-impact levers that as the independent body representing your sector can collectively activate (funding, technologies, practices, innovations, business models, suppliers and supply chains). If you don't know where to go or where to start with this, get in touch with us as we've been working with many different membership organisations and partners on industry impact research and thought leadership programmes.
Resolution #3 - Introduce & Implement climate policies & advocacy
Aligning your policies and advocacy to science and 1.5o goal as outlined in the Paris Agreement is an essential 2025 resolution for your membership organisation.
This includes:
Your internal policies, introducing and embedding policies that relate to your internal operations and governance
Policies that relate to your members activity which communicate your expectation of action your members must be taking in relation to sustainability, net zero
Proactively representing the needs of your members and advocating for science aligned government regulations, incentives, policies to support your industry and profession.
CAFA has developed climate policy guidelines specifically for membership organisations to follow. Getting the climate policy balance right is a challenge but associations like BEAMA, FDA and the Association of Electrical & Mechanical Trades (AEMT) are introducing policies, net zero levy's, setting expectations and implementing codes of conduct with members.
Resolution #4 - Gather member data
Gather direct insight and data from your members on what their emissions are and what support they need from you. Don’t speculate: instead, survey your members either as part of your existing annual membership survey, run a dedicated sustainability/net zero survey, run a mini-snap survey. By gathering data at least annually on your members net zero position, challenges, needs and wants boosts your understanding, qualifies and enables your response to them and also to policymakers.
You can also run focus groups to get more detailed feedback and more natural interactions: focus groups can be done before a survey to inform what questions you want to ask your members, or they can be done after the survey to help you understand survey results and insights more deeply. CAFA is working with membership associations to help them to understand the needs and track progress of members, including benchmarking your members position and setting expectation for your industry, sector or profession. Membership associations that we've worked with who are drilling deep with members on position, challenges, needs and wants include; Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM) Annual Sustainability Survey, Chartered IIA on Internal Audit and Climate Related Risk.
Resolution #5 - Introduce the skills your members need
There is a global green skills gap and a huge mismatch in job growth and talent availability. This creates an urgent need for membership organisations to step up and embed green skills required of your industry and/or profession into your training programmes, CPD and/or formal qualifications. Addressing this need also creates a massive opportunity for membership organisations to align, deliver industry requirements, increase sector relevance, ensure future fit for members, and generate revenues from sales of training, grants, learning collaborations.
We are seeing membership organisations turnaround learning programmes at rapid speed. From climate literacy workshops, climate-focused communications, professional training, embedding sustainability into core qualifications or even dedicated carbon measurement and reporting industry know-how. We are seeing introduction of skills development in operational aspects such as how to implement low carbon processes and technologies specific to your sector (think of skills relevant for shifts in business models, supply chains, processes, energy sources.
Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) is leading competencies and skills relating to environmental measurement and reporting. Integrated finance and sustainability reporting training and development led by International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) and implemented by its powerful network of professional accounting organisations, Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) running climate literacy training, the Institute of Internal Communications taking the lead on up-skills internal communications professionals not to mention highly industry specific training and development by AEMT and BEAMA.
CAFA also runs workshops and advisory working groups specifically to help membership organisations to plan, structure, embed, curate and deliver green skills internally and as part of your membership learning value proposition.
Resolution #6 - Provide the resources that your members need.
When it comes to planning and implementing change, there are several ways for your members to find information about what to do. IPCC reports, as a summary of climate science and mitigation pathways, are an important read. Climate science is the primary source of information about emissions reduction and sits at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge in the sector (hence why initiatives like the Science Based Targets Initiative exist, and hence why CAFA makes such a big deal out of being science-aligned). Reading such documents can however be a daunting task especially for non-experts and busy professionals.
Another option is to use external help. That help can come from consultancies that do your members' emissions footprinting, emissions reduction plans, and that hold them accountable to their targets while supporting them with implementation - CAFA, for instance, is able to provide such a service either to you, your members, or both.
Free or low-budget sources of external help also exist, and you can be one of them. As a matter of fact, considering that the other options are quite a stride forward for those who are only starting their journey, you probably should be one of these sources. Your members need a kind of help that they can leverage as a first step on their journey, with low budgets and little time.
Resource hubs are the perfect example of this kind of support. By providing jargon busters, emissions calculators, sector-specific guidance and document templates, you will save time, money and effort to most of your members, by giving them actionable tools and boiled down information that they can start using and implementing immediately.
Many dedicated net zero hubs, calculators and other initiatives of support have already been launched by membership organisations. Having launched a sustainability or net zero resource hub is something that the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), Chartered Institute of Trade Mark Attorneys (CITMA) and many others all have in common. They offer guidance and resources relevant to their sector directly on their website or on their member-only platforms - these resources can then be used and leveraged by tens or even hundreds of thousands of members.
Big numbers, big impact and big change are a defining trait of what it means to be a membership organisation in the age of climate change. The good news is - membership organisations are a click away from delivering that change a sector at a time.
To sum up...
If one or more of these resolutions has resonated with you and you would like support in implementing them, as well as more best practices to replicate and the possibility of following what organisations like you are doing in their sector, CAFA is the only resource and network exclusively dedicated to supporting membership organisations on their journey to sustainability.
The resolutions above follow CAFA’s foundation principles and best practice framework of what a good association looks like. Many of the associations mentioned throughout this article are already members and actively using our support. We do our best to practice what we preach and have made many resources, policy templates, survey templates available to our members. For those willing to go one step further, we also have a dedicated in-depth programme of support that we offer as a service.
If you want more information about how we are helping associations accelerate climate action, feel free to get in touch at Guillaume@cafcollective.org, to discuss your next steps as an organisation committed to making a difference.
You can also access CAFA's guides, policies, and templates designed to save you time, including environmental and operational policies for your organisation, such as a working-from-home policy, policies for members and suppliers, and even green working-from-home guidance, and much more.
Members can access these via the Member Hub, or join our Collective today to gain access here.
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