E120 - Dom Winter from Protect Our Winters

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Hi, Dom. Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Um, thank you so much for joining us today. I, um, it'd be great to understand a bit about you and the organization that you are a part of, Protect Our Winters, please.

Yes, thanks, Will, and thanks for inviting us on. Yeah, so I work for Protect Our Winters UK, or POW UK, and we're the UK national chapter of what's become a bit of an international movement. There's more than 10 national POW chapters now since it was founded in the United States States originally in 2007 by Jeremy Jones. So yeah, my background's as a sustainability manager and an engineer, and I work at Power UK as our programme manager.

Brilliant. And excuse me for not understanding, so Protect Our Winters, is it to do with winters? And, you know, could you tell us a bit more about the kind of ins and outs of who you're helping, please?

Yeah, so Power UK exists to inspire and equip UK-based outdoor communities to take positive action to address the climate crisis and to accelerate the transition to a carbon-neutral society. So we're all about working with the outdoor community, the outdoor industry on climate change and bringing both of their voices together through campaigns to make political change about climate change as well. So yeah, we work with those 3 C's and it's all about climate change and the impacts that will have on the outdoor industry and in return what those involved in the outdoors can do about it.

And it really does make a massive impact on the winter seasons, doesn't it? I remember going along to one of your talks on the impact climate change is going to have on, say, ski resorts And the— what is it? If we get— if we, if we manage to stick to 1.5 degrees, then 90% of all ski resorts will carry on as normal?

Yeah, there's loads of different sort of stats you can throw around. Some of them are quite startling. So the difference between our current trajectory of around 3 degrees and below 2 degrees is the difference between 70% of snow volume being reduced or 30% of snow volume being reduced by later this century. There's loads of other statistics like that. So by mid-century, resorts under— ski resorts under 1,200 meters are almost all not going to have enough snow to operate. Ski seasons have already reduced by about a month, the natural ski season, since the 1970s. But yeah, by the end of the century, it's really going to make a a huge difference what we do in the next decade as to whether snow sports can exist in their current format at all. So that's really the foundation for POW to exist, that's where the idea for it came from, and now we're also finding that other outdoor sports are also engaged with protecting the outdoors and the playgrounds they enjoy, so it's grown into a movement wider than just snow sports now.

Brilliant, and so do you, as a charity, do you— how do you get your money?

So we're, as you mentioned, a registered charity, so we get all our funding from donations and corporate partnerships. We don't actually get any money from the government, so it's all the community itself helping us to operate and helping us to act on climate change, really.

Okay, and what I mean, what sort of things have you done to help alleviate climate change?

So we've got quite a few programs, and Protect Our Winters in the UK is much younger than it is in the United States. We've been around only since 2017, so it's only in the last couple of years that we've started having consistent staffing. But we've got a great team of volunteers and trustees behind us, and we've been running programs like carbon literacy training where we've been training ski instructors and outdoor businesses and our own volunteers to understand climate change better, including those impacts on outdoor sports. And in the instance of instructors, I really have them being knowledgeable on the subject, being able to talk about it on the ski lift with their guests. And that's a really tangible way to relate climate change to people. Otherwise, a lot of people don't really see— if they're not getting involved in the outdoors or not relating it to something they care about, they don't have it communicated to them in a way that really has a tangible impact. So that's one of the programs we've been running is carbon literacy training. We also run political campaigns, for example, and campaigns for positive change. So a current example is Save the Ski Train. As you may have heard, the Eurostar direct train to the Alps was a great service. It had 80% reduction compared to flying to the French Alps, but it's not running this season. So this campaign has now evolved into making sure that it's clear that we want it back next season. It's really sort of the future of the low-carbon snow sports industry, or a key part of that. And we've also got those more political campaigns, particularly in the lead-up to COP26 next year. Those will be of increasing importance.

Brilliant. You've also got a pledge and this is to harness and help companies that are helping you guys. Could you tell us a bit more about it, please?

Yes, so the Power Pledge really comes out of the fact that we had a program engaging with corporates and small businesses in particular that really didn't— they were coming to us wanting to know, right, we care about climate change, we understand why it's so important to deal with this, but we don't know what to do. Getting started can be quite difficult and there's resources can be quite scattered and you hear lots of different voices about what are the most impactful things to do. A lot of them are saying, right, we've done some offsetting, but we don't really know how to progress from here. So from that, we delivered this idea of the Power Pledge, which is a toolkit and a guide on climate action, particularly for those businesses in the outdoors industry to take the 8 most impactful steps that they can on climate change to really get taking climate action and get to net zero. So it's all about being quite a lot less paperwork and less difficult to get started than some other certifications, and a lot more in one place than sort of visiting diffuse webinars and trying to formulate your sustainability strategy that way. So it's really a sort of one-stop shop to get your sustainability strategy sorted, particularly for small businesses that might not even have— might not have a person with the expertise to know what to do about climate change.

It's really unique, isn't it? I don't think there's anyone that's ever done anything like that before.

I think what's different about ours in particular is the fact that it's really based on the science of climate change. So some similar pledges might not be as unique to this sector. So it's very sector-specific in terms of communications and the way we engage with businesses, and they can then engage their customers. And also the fact that it really is pinned to getting businesses on sort of a science-based trajectory, trying to get to net zero 2040 or before, where we really need to be, and not sort of getting them to choose their own target or their own actions, without considering whether that is getting them the trajectory they need to be to actually protect us, protect our winters.

And could you take us through the process that your pledge does for our listeners?

Yeah, for sure. So when you come to the website, first up you come and register. The registration process itself is totally free, and then you're within the portal of the Power Play. So pretty much the whole, all the information's on one page. As I say, we're trying to make it super like condensed. This is where you go and it will really help you set your 8 most impactful actions in process. So yeah, once you're in there and it's free to register, then that information is at your fingertips to get you started. And then within that, there's loads of how pop-ups and why pop-ups for each of the 8 steps. Steps to really help you with those and make sure that you can take that action. And if you do, continuing the process for you, if you manage to enter all the information, if you can set a high enough bar and meet our criteria with all of your answers, then you'll be able to qualify as a public pledger. So if you qualify as a public pledge, then you'll receive the logo and all the marketing assets to really shout about what you're doing, that you really have set targets that are in line with the 8 most impactful actions that you can take on climate change. Yeah, so if you take that public pledge option, then you can talk about really widely what you're doing. And if you're not quite ready for that yet, you can sort of save your actions for now and sort of think on those and see if you can reach those at a later date.

I mean, it's brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And Have you seen— what's the take-up been so far?

Yeah, as we're recording this, it's really quite newly launched, so we've had certainly more than 50 business organisations signed up so far, and I see new ones coming in every day.

That's awesome.

Yeah, we're pretty pleased, and yeah, we're still sort of really reaching out to businesses and organisations trying to get them on board. We're starting up webinars in support of really helping people to understand the process and having calls with other businesses to try and help them complete, because whilst we have 50-odd sort of registrations getting in there, getting that climate action advice, what we really need to now do is hopefully help as many of them as possible reach the high tier of the public pledge.

That's brilliant, and well, that's you know, 50+ companies that haven't done anything before. So actually, yeah, so that's really good. That's cool. And the more companies that we can reach, the better, really. So what— where do you see this going? And what's, um, what do you, you know, what— where do you see the future with Protect Our Winters?

Um, so for the Power Pledge itself, um, we'll hopefully continue adding more businesses and adding more advice. And making sure that the level of guidance is there for all of them to take as much action as possible and start to formulate a bit of a community around that. So a lot of the businesses that we've invited onto the Power Pledge were businesses that had already engaged with us through previous campaigns, and we hope that it will become a really powerful way for those businesses to come together, and we can say bring together all the businesses that might be hotels that are struggling with particular steps. So one of them, one One of the steps that's more novel to the Power Pledge is helping divest or making sure they're focusing on divesting from fossil fuels. And if there's a particular need for a new financial product, then we can ask on behalf of those businesses, say a group of hotels, we need this, there's a market for this financial product, who's going to be the one to provide it for this industry? So I think there's a lot of future scope for improvements for how the pledge enables us to activate that outdoor community and business community. And then there's, there's a lot of other projects that Protect Our Winters UK will be running, particularly in that lead-up to COP. We've got a big campaign coming for that. So yeah, I think onwards and upwards.

Awesome. And How, if you want to help protect our winters with the brilliant work that you do, I mean, how are we able to do that?

For sure, so definitely take the POW Pledge if you're an organization or register and start on those climate action steps. You can also sign up to our newsletter on our website and you can get in contact with us via our website as well about becoming a sponsor of POW. Yeah, your support really does help us to take the climate action that we do. And yeah, just share us on social media as well. Just, yeah, introduce yourselves to us and get involved. We've got plenty of space for volunteers and sharing the ideas and hosting events. There's so many ways to get involved with this.

Brilliant, thank you. Thanks, Tom. I mean, is there anything else that you want to add?

No, I think really it's just the fact that this is really obviously such a time-pressing issue now to get started on climate change. So really what we're trying to do with all our projects is allow formulate this to sort of really start now, and that's that's where the power pledges come from. That it's it's not meant to be a really long convoluted process. It really allows you to jump in. So. My motivation would be to anyone just to get started and not wait for the perfect— not wait for the perfect solution and do what you can now.

Absolutely, I couldn't put it better myself. Yeah, no, perfect. Brilliant. Thanks, Tom. Thank you so much for being on today. Thanks as well. And actively good luck with the Power Pledge. I should probably say at this point that we've, at Green Element and Compare Your Footprint, have been helping behind the scenes on the pledge. Um, just for pure transparency. But, um, brilliant. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Will. Thanks for your help.