Carbon Management Plan 2014

6.Behaviour Change

The development of a behaviour change campaign is an important area of work. It will play a vital role in improving our overall carbon performance year-on-year. The best carbon reductions over the target period can be achieved by implementing a co-ordinated and effective campaign in parallel with this CM Plan. We are already working with our Behaviour Change and Corporate Communications colleagues to provide an environment for encouraging cultural change of staff and contractors, in order to reduce our carbon emissions and running costs.

We started work on behavioural change by looking at business flights. Flying on business is a significant contributor to our carbon emissions. We believe changing the behaviours of our people will help reduce these emissions. With this in mind, we held a behavioural change workshop in June 2014 using the ISM behavioural change tool to assess all of the behavioural influences on people taking business flights from Edinburgh/Glasgow to London. Using information from the workshop, we held a further meeting to identify potential improvement projects that can be taken forward. We are now looking to pilot improvement projects identified at the meeting with a view to rolling-out successful ones across the SG.

We intend to hold further behavioural change workshops/improvement project meetings as we identify key areas to tackle.

Another key component of our behavioural change efforts will be the work of our network of Environmental Champions. We see our Environmental Champions as a valuable resource in our efforts to promote environmental awareness and to encourage the people they work beside to change their behaviours to act in a way that considers environmental and sustainable issues.

To boost the numbers of Champions across our estate we carried out a recruitment drive in the Summer of 2014 and arranged environmental awareness training sessions for them in the September/October 2014.

Going forward we will be looking for our Environmental Champions to complete an Action Plan. These plans will outline activities that they are going to take forward to help reduce our carbon emissions. They will include activities such as switch off campaigns, recycling awareness sessions, and the promotion of the SG's travel hierarchy, advising the people they work of possible alternatives to travel such as telekits/ video conferencing. The Action Plans will be logged and tracked by the Environmental Management Team to ensure that they are fully supported and kept on track.

The CMP project register is a mixture of both technical interventions and behaviour change initiatives that require participation and co-operation across the organisation. The development and delivery of both the CM Plan and our Behaviour Change campaign will be managed by the CM Team.