The financial climate
I'm standing in a rainforest in India surrounded by bank staff. The buzzing of cicadas fills my ears, punctuated by the mournful echoing hoots of what I later discover are capped langurs (a type of monkey). The leaf litter crackles under my feet – the monsoon is still several months away, and the ground is bone dry – as a well-camouflaged butterfly materialises beside me, jerkily flits a few metres away and then disappears once more. And yes, I did say bank staff.
Small groups of them are engaged in a variety of decidedly non-finance-related tasks: measuring trees, collecting leaf litter, slapping red paint on trunks. And this isn’t an isolated occurrence – this scene is being repeated in forests and woodlands in China, Brazil, the USA and the UK, and will continue to do so for several years yet.
It’s all part of a groundbreaking partnership between HSBC and four of the world’s leading environmental organisations (see Partners in clime). These five locations host research centres established by international environmental charity Earthwatch, where groups of HSBC staff come and help collect data for a project looking at the impact of climate change on the world’s forests.
Human impact
The research project was set up, and is being run by, Earthwatch’s head of climate change research, Dr Dan Bebber, a biologist who studied plant sciences at the University of Oxford. The project, he explains, is investigating the relationship between human disturbance and climate disturbance.
‘Most forests around the world have been, or are being, affected by people in various ways, whether it’s slash-and-burn agriculture or clear felling,’ he says. ‘The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more than two thirds of forests are impacted by people directly. But even those forests that we think of as being pristine have been impacted by people in the past, so there’s a very strong connection between humans and forests.
‘This means that the natural regeneration and growth processes of forest don’t really apply any more,’ he continues. ‘It used to be that forest would regenerate after a natural disturbance, but these days, there are people in there cutting trees, taking forest products, interfering with that process in various ways, modifying it.’
In order to understand the impact that climate change is going to have on forests, this human dimension has to be taken into account. For example, scientists have demonstrated that in the tropics, if forests are partially harvested, it opens the canopy up, dries the forest out and makes it more susceptible to damage from climatic events such as drought. ‘However, it’s less well known in other types of forest how human impact will alter the changes that forests will undergo in relation to climate change,’ Bebber says. ‘So both in terms of managing forest on a practical level, and modelling forest dynamics, we need to know what the interaction is between human disturbance and climatic change.
‘What we’re trying to do is set up an experiment to directly address that question,’ he continues. ‘So we’re setting up what we call forest-dynamics plots ‑ one-hectare plots where people measure a number of different variables relating to tree growth, death, leaf production, that kind of thing. The plots are placed in woodlands or forests that have been affected by people in different ways. As they change, as the trees grow, as they die, as different species do better, others do worse, as we see those changes happening, we should be able to relate them to the past management or disturbance that the forests have undergone.’
Biodiversity hotspot
The Indian centre is situated in the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs up the west coast south of Mumbai. The region is one of Conservation International’s 34 ‘biodiversity hotspots’. Even now, new species are being discovered here on a regular basis, including, in the past few years, more than ten species of frog – one of which belongs to a new family – and a gecko with an unusual iridescent sheen on its tail.
On the drive up to the town of Sirsi, where the HSBC teams are based, the vegetation goes from dry scrub in the lowlands through woodland, forest and eventually rainforest. Signs of humanity are ever present – villages, clearings, fires, in some cases still burning. Just as the forest begins to seem dense and healthy, it gives way abruptly to a series of dry rice terraces, or perhaps a field of sugarcane. There is obviously no question that people are having a significant impact on this forest.
The teams stay in a small, relatively basic hotel on the outskirts of town. These are very much city dwellers – the majority of them have never actually been in a forest before (I overhear one saying that the closest he ever gets to a forest is when he plays golf) – and the Earthwatch staff overseeing the programme hope that by taking them ‘outside their comfort zone’, it will help them to concentrate on the task at hand. And that task is more than just collecting data in the rainforest, as Zoe Gamble, corporate learning manager at Earthwatch, explains. ‘We start out by showing them this quote from Steven Green, the group chairman of HSBC: “By working with four of the world’s most respected environmental organisations and creating a green taskforce of thousands of HSBC volunteers worldwide, we believe we can tackle the causes and impacts of climate change.”’
And that’s what the partnership with Earthwatch is all about: creating Green’s ‘green taskforce’. The first step in this process is to give them an identifying label, something that sets them apart from their colleagues – in this case, they’ve gone for the slightly cringe worthy ‘climate champions’.
Over the partnership’s five years, 2,200 climate champions from across HSBC will visit one of the five climate centres, each of which has its own ‘regional catchment’. ‘At this centre, obviously, we have a lot of people from India, but they can also come from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Middle East, from South Africa, from Mauritius,’ Gamble says.
There they will undertake a two-week programme that involves data collection in the forest during the day and a variety of seminars and other activities during the evening. But in some ways, it appears that the data collection is really just a motivational tool – even a diversionary tactic – the real meat is in the evening sessions.
The idea here is to educate the climate champions about the science behind climate change and then get them thinking about how it affects HSBC’s business activity. ‘We have sessions where we talk about risks and opportunities for businesses posed by climate change, investment opportunities, carbon markets, that kind of thing,’ says Prashant Mahajan, the Earthwatch learning and communications manager responsible for delivery of the learning sessions.
Action stations
But this, again, is just the start. As the cliché goes, actions speak louder than words, and the programme is really a ‘call to action’. ‘They make a commitment to be a climate champion for 12 months, and the idea is that this programme is the beginning of their 12-month journey,’ Mahajan says.
So, when the climate champions leave and go back to the ‘real world’, they’re expected to carry out projects that either help to spread the word about climate change or, more importantly, actively work to reduce its impact. ‘We ask them to commit to engaging people and raising awareness of climate change issues generally. But every climate champion also has to complete a business project on their return,’ Mahajan explains. ‘The project has to be suitably stretching, it has to be measurable, and it has to relate to climate change and deliver business or reputational benefit for HSBC.’
And the climate champions themselves are essentially just the vanguard of a much wider movement: that green taskforce again. ‘The role of the 2,200 climate champions is to lead by example, to mentor other people, to coach other people,’ Gamble explains. ‘Then you have what we call local volunteering projects, which have also been set up by Earthwatch with a local partner in 20 different cities across the world. These are one-day projects in which we’re hoping that 25,000 employees will get involved. And then we have the online part of the programme, where we have a wide selection of material set up on the HSBC intranet to help people understand climate change.’ This material has a potential audience of some 300,000 HSBC employees.
Making a difference
The cynics among you will be thinking, ‘Well, this is all good PR for HSBC, isn’t it?’ And it is. But is it just greenwashing? Well, US$100million is a lot of money, and 25,000 is a lot of people – let alone the 300,000-plus who could potentially be touched by the programme. ‘To my knowledge, this is the biggest employee-engagement programme on climate change,’ Gamble says.
Will it make a difference? Who knows? But it’s clear that many among the group of climate champions I observed were deeply affected by their time in the Western Ghats. ‘The programme was a life-changing experience – the best thing I’ve ever done,’ says Shatha al-Hmoud, assistant international banking centre officer for HSBC Bank Middle East in Jordan. ‘There are days when I still want to be in the forest and nights when I dream I’m still there. It was a unique, unforgettable experience,’ says Avanish Dwarka Sultanti, a customer service assistant with HSBC in Mauritius.
And the roll call of projects that they’ve undertaken since returning to work is impressive, taking in everything from energy- and waste-reduction campaigns to tree-planting days, awareness-generation sessions, school visits, and the introduction of office car-pools, even birdwatching excursions.
How well this will filter upwards is unclear – turning lights out in the office is one thing, introducing a business model that incorporates sustainability and social responsibility is quite another. But with so many governments reacting with such reluctance to the threat of climate change, it’s extremely encouraging to see a large corporation such as HSBC taking a lead. We can only hope that others will follow.
Partners in clime
Earthwatch is one of four organisations within the HSBC climate partnership, the others being the Climate Group, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and WWF. By engaging with these different groups, the organisation hopes to ‘counter climate change impacts for people, forests, water and cities’. Hence, each group will focus on different elements of the overall strategy.
The STRI will be conducting research on carbon pools, studying where carbon is stored in natural ecosystems and how it moves from the atmosphere to plant biomass and the soil; investigating how tropical forests store water and the ways in which land-use decisions affect both the storage and release of water; and establishing further forest dynamics plots.
Meanwhile, WWF will focus primarily on water-related issues, helping to protect four of the world’s major rivers – the Amazon, Ganges, Thames and Yangtze – from the impacts of climate change.
And the projects driven by the Climate Group will have a human focus, concentrating on Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York and Shanghai, where it will engage government, business leaders and the general public through analysis, advocacy and education.
More info
For further information about the HSBC climate partnership, visit www.hsbccommittochange.com
October 2009
Small groups of them are engaged in a variety of decidedly non-finance-related tasks: measuring trees, collecting leaf litter, slapping red paint on trunks. And this isn’t an isolated occurrence – this scene is being repeated in forests and woodlands in China, Brazil, the USA and the UK, and will continue to do so for several years yet.
It’s all part of a groundbreaking partnership between HSBC and four of the world’s leading environmental organisations (see Partners in clime). These five locations host research centres established by international environmental charity Earthwatch, where groups of HSBC staff come and help collect data for a project looking at the impact of climate change on the world’s forests.
Human impact
The research project was set up, and is being run by, Earthwatch’s head of climate change research, Dr Dan Bebber, a biologist who studied plant sciences at the University of Oxford. The project, he explains, is investigating the relationship between human disturbance and climate disturbance.
‘Most forests around the world have been, or are being, affected by people in various ways, whether it’s slash-and-burn agriculture or clear felling,’ he says. ‘The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more than two thirds of forests are impacted by people directly. But even those forests that we think of as being pristine have been impacted by people in the past, so there’s a very strong connection between humans and forests.
‘This means that the natural regeneration and growth processes of forest don’t really apply any more,’ he continues. ‘It used to be that forest would regenerate after a natural disturbance, but these days, there are people in there cutting trees, taking forest products, interfering with that process in various ways, modifying it.’
In order to understand the impact that climate change is going to have on forests, this human dimension has to be taken into account. For example, scientists have demonstrated that in the tropics, if forests are partially harvested, it opens the canopy up, dries the forest out and makes it more susceptible to damage from climatic events such as drought. ‘However, it’s less well known in other types of forest how human impact will alter the changes that forests will undergo in relation to climate change,’ Bebber says. ‘So both in terms of managing forest on a practical level, and modelling forest dynamics, we need to know what the interaction is between human disturbance and climatic change.
‘What we’re trying to do is set up an experiment to directly address that question,’ he continues. ‘So we’re setting up what we call forest-dynamics plots ‑ one-hectare plots where people measure a number of different variables relating to tree growth, death, leaf production, that kind of thing. The plots are placed in woodlands or forests that have been affected by people in different ways. As they change, as the trees grow, as they die, as different species do better, others do worse, as we see those changes happening, we should be able to relate them to the past management or disturbance that the forests have undergone.’
Biodiversity hotspot
The Indian centre is situated in the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs up the west coast south of Mumbai. The region is one of Conservation International’s 34 ‘biodiversity hotspots’. Even now, new species are being discovered here on a regular basis, including, in the past few years, more than ten species of frog – one of which belongs to a new family – and a gecko with an unusual iridescent sheen on its tail.
On the drive up to the town of Sirsi, where the HSBC teams are based, the vegetation goes from dry scrub in the lowlands through woodland, forest and eventually rainforest. Signs of humanity are ever present – villages, clearings, fires, in some cases still burning. Just as the forest begins to seem dense and healthy, it gives way abruptly to a series of dry rice terraces, or perhaps a field of sugarcane. There is obviously no question that people are having a significant impact on this forest.
The teams stay in a small, relatively basic hotel on the outskirts of town. These are very much city dwellers – the majority of them have never actually been in a forest before (I overhear one saying that the closest he ever gets to a forest is when he plays golf) – and the Earthwatch staff overseeing the programme hope that by taking them ‘outside their comfort zone’, it will help them to concentrate on the task at hand. And that task is more than just collecting data in the rainforest, as Zoe Gamble, corporate learning manager at Earthwatch, explains. ‘We start out by showing them this quote from Steven Green, the group chairman of HSBC: “By working with four of the world’s most respected environmental organisations and creating a green taskforce of thousands of HSBC volunteers worldwide, we believe we can tackle the causes and impacts of climate change.”’
And that’s what the partnership with Earthwatch is all about: creating Green’s ‘green taskforce’. The first step in this process is to give them an identifying label, something that sets them apart from their colleagues – in this case, they’ve gone for the slightly cringe worthy ‘climate champions’.
Over the partnership’s five years, 2,200 climate champions from across HSBC will visit one of the five climate centres, each of which has its own ‘regional catchment’. ‘At this centre, obviously, we have a lot of people from India, but they can also come from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Middle East, from South Africa, from Mauritius,’ Gamble says.
There they will undertake a two-week programme that involves data collection in the forest during the day and a variety of seminars and other activities during the evening. But in some ways, it appears that the data collection is really just a motivational tool – even a diversionary tactic – the real meat is in the evening sessions.
The idea here is to educate the climate champions about the science behind climate change and then get them thinking about how it affects HSBC’s business activity. ‘We have sessions where we talk about risks and opportunities for businesses posed by climate change, investment opportunities, carbon markets, that kind of thing,’ says Prashant Mahajan, the Earthwatch learning and communications manager responsible for delivery of the learning sessions.
Action stations
But this, again, is just the start. As the cliché goes, actions speak louder than words, and the programme is really a ‘call to action’. ‘They make a commitment to be a climate champion for 12 months, and the idea is that this programme is the beginning of their 12-month journey,’ Mahajan says.
So, when the climate champions leave and go back to the ‘real world’, they’re expected to carry out projects that either help to spread the word about climate change or, more importantly, actively work to reduce its impact. ‘We ask them to commit to engaging people and raising awareness of climate change issues generally. But every climate champion also has to complete a business project on their return,’ Mahajan explains. ‘The project has to be suitably stretching, it has to be measurable, and it has to relate to climate change and deliver business or reputational benefit for HSBC.’
And the climate champions themselves are essentially just the vanguard of a much wider movement: that green taskforce again. ‘The role of the 2,200 climate champions is to lead by example, to mentor other people, to coach other people,’ Gamble explains. ‘Then you have what we call local volunteering projects, which have also been set up by Earthwatch with a local partner in 20 different cities across the world. These are one-day projects in which we’re hoping that 25,000 employees will get involved. And then we have the online part of the programme, where we have a wide selection of material set up on the HSBC intranet to help people understand climate change.’ This material has a potential audience of some 300,000 HSBC employees.
Making a difference
The cynics among you will be thinking, ‘Well, this is all good PR for HSBC, isn’t it?’ And it is. But is it just greenwashing? Well, US$100million is a lot of money, and 25,000 is a lot of people – let alone the 300,000-plus who could potentially be touched by the programme. ‘To my knowledge, this is the biggest employee-engagement programme on climate change,’ Gamble says.
Will it make a difference? Who knows? But it’s clear that many among the group of climate champions I observed were deeply affected by their time in the Western Ghats. ‘The programme was a life-changing experience – the best thing I’ve ever done,’ says Shatha al-Hmoud, assistant international banking centre officer for HSBC Bank Middle East in Jordan. ‘There are days when I still want to be in the forest and nights when I dream I’m still there. It was a unique, unforgettable experience,’ says Avanish Dwarka Sultanti, a customer service assistant with HSBC in Mauritius.
And the roll call of projects that they’ve undertaken since returning to work is impressive, taking in everything from energy- and waste-reduction campaigns to tree-planting days, awareness-generation sessions, school visits, and the introduction of office car-pools, even birdwatching excursions.
How well this will filter upwards is unclear – turning lights out in the office is one thing, introducing a business model that incorporates sustainability and social responsibility is quite another. But with so many governments reacting with such reluctance to the threat of climate change, it’s extremely encouraging to see a large corporation such as HSBC taking a lead. We can only hope that others will follow.
Partners in clime
Earthwatch is one of four organisations within the HSBC climate partnership, the others being the Climate Group, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and WWF. By engaging with these different groups, the organisation hopes to ‘counter climate change impacts for people, forests, water and cities’. Hence, each group will focus on different elements of the overall strategy.
The STRI will be conducting research on carbon pools, studying where carbon is stored in natural ecosystems and how it moves from the atmosphere to plant biomass and the soil; investigating how tropical forests store water and the ways in which land-use decisions affect both the storage and release of water; and establishing further forest dynamics plots.
Meanwhile, WWF will focus primarily on water-related issues, helping to protect four of the world’s major rivers – the Amazon, Ganges, Thames and Yangtze – from the impacts of climate change.
And the projects driven by the Climate Group will have a human focus, concentrating on Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York and Shanghai, where it will engage government, business leaders and the general public through analysis, advocacy and education.
More info
For further information about the HSBC climate partnership, visit www.hsbccommittochange.com
October 2009
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