OPINION Sharing the sustainability journey In a diverse industry built on land, sea and air travel, every mover must work hard and draw on the latest resources to create their version of environmental and social sustainability. Dominic Offer, Director of Client Engagement and Sustainability Committee at Bristol Global Mobility, shares his firms journey DOMINIC OFFER, DIRECTOR OF CLIENT ENGAGEMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY COMMITTEE AT BRISTOL GLOBAL MOBILITY 60 FF304 Dec_Jan 22 pp60-61 Opinion.indd 60 O ne of the hardest questions in sustainability is where to start. The challenge with sustainability is that it is a reflection of life. We are carrying the weight of human history with every step we take, socially, environmentally and in the governance that we adhere to. The fact is we must look backwards and forwards at the same time. We must gaze into the past to understand our mistakes, using science in the present to give us faith that our next steps will be better than our previous steps, all with the aim of propelling ourselves into the future. At times, it feels like a paradox, where we now ask the question: is Atlas carrying the world, or is the world carrying Atlas? We have been discussing sustainability within Bristol for many years. In 2019, I published an article, called Global Mobility Versus Global Climate Change (available on our website) discussing the state of the world, with the wildfires in California, hurricanes in Japan threatening the rugby World Cup and how these incidents would impact the world of mobility. In 2020, we began speaking about it in more depth, and it was in May 2020 that we took our first steps towards creating a simple plan to become more sustainable as a business. As we formulated our ideas, the pandemic was in full swing and Bristol, along with almost every other company in the world, was finding new ways to work and discovering new possibilities while tackling challenges we hadnt dreamed of a few months earlier. At the same time, we decided to tackle the topic of sustainability. We realised very quickly how much we were doing, and if you find the correct eyes within your organisation, you are most likely doing so as well. We became members of the UN Womens Empowerment Principles and shortly after that, CEO Action. Both are organisations that we felt related to our aim of connecting with (as opposed to controlling) people. Later, we added being a disability-confident employer in the UK. Knowing we had made a commitment to social sustainability felt comfortable and familiar and is still a core focus of our initiative. We recognised, however, there was still much to be done, and began looking at other parts of our sustainability journey. It was then we were faced with the most vast and imposing challenge, environmental sustainability. In an industry that makes its living from the coordination and support of flying, driving, and shipping everyone with all of their possessions, everywhere, this seemed like a WW W. F I D I FOC U S . OR G 07/12/2021 10:07