Happy New Year, everybody!

For Sustainability people, 2020 is a bit like when we hit 1984 and the Western World wasn’t run by oppressive, manipulative regimes, or 2000 and we found that the sky wasn’t purple and people weren’t running everywhere (ask your parents/a Prince obsessive). That’s because, as a target date, ‘2020’ is not only a nice quasi-symmetrical number, and a reference to perfect vision to boot, but, for many years after Sustainability came onto the corporate agenda, it was just the right timeframe to stretch organisations to make meaningful change.

So now we’ve got to 2020, where do we go from here? Well, from here we have a decade to make real change happen – the science suggests we really have to get the supertanker motoring in the right direction by 2030. Ten years is a pretty good time frame for a Sustainability Strategy too – enough time to develop, assess, build and commission capital projects, while not too far in the the future that decision makers think they’ll be safely on the golf course by then.

So the 2020s must be the decade of change, where we start walking the walk, where everything we have been talking about for the last 20-30 years starts happening in real life, on the ground:

• the renewables boom extends from electricity to all energy needs;
• the economy becomes circular, endlessly recycling the materials we need;
• persistent chemicals are phased out;
• the natural world is given enough space to flourish.

If you’d like to join me on this journey, make sure you sign up to our free webinar “12 Kick Ass Sustainability Ideas for 2020” on 22 January. Normally I pick the ideas in this webinar from a long list of my favourites, but this year I’m going to give them a bit more structure to produce a Sustainability manifesto for the 2020s. See you then!