Five ways to take climate action at work – brainstormed by employees like you!

1. Reduce food waste in the office and at events.

An estimated 30–40% of the world’s food is never even eaten, doomed to rot in landfills and emit the potent greenhouse gas methane. If you work in an office, you’ve likely seen this firsthand: dozens of uneaten sandwiches and cookies spread across the table after an event. This makes reducing food waste one of the most impactful ways to mitigate your company’s impact on the climate. If you work in human resources, operations, or any other team tasked with planning events or ordering food for the office, consider using your position to take food waste reduction measures:

• Order the correct amount of food to reduce the risk of having leftovers.
• Encourage colleagues to take food home.
• Partner with an organization to help you donate leftovers to those in need in your area.
• Educate your colleagues on the importance of reducing food waste.
• Start composting in the office so that any food waste can be turned into fertilizer. (But remember, reducing food waste in the first place is more impactful than composting it!)

Check out ReFED’s Solution Provider Directory, where you can search for organizations that specialize in food rescue and composting in your area.

2. Talk to clients and customers about sustainability.

If you’re on a team that interfaces with clients or customers, you have massive potential to spread climate action beyond just your own company. By sharing your climate concerns with clients and customers, you can nudge and support them in their own sustainability journey. If you work in functions like marketing, sales, product management, and other client or customer-facing roles, you can:

• Invest time and resources into upskilling your colleagues on climate basics. If you want a free resource, check out Project Drawdown’s Climate Solutions 101 video series.
• Research your clients’ and customers’ climate concerns so that you can bring them back to your team and integrate them into your work.
• Encourage your clients and customers to take climate action during meetings, in marketing materials, and other channels of communication. Talk about what your company is doing on sustainability.

3. Vet service providers and other partners. 

If you work with creative agencies, lawyers, consultants, or any other external service providers, you have the opportunity to choose partners that are aligned with climate action. Your business partnerships may be inadvertently contributing to climate change. For example, does your company work with an advertising agency that also works with fossil fuel companies? By giving this agency your business, you are indirectly supporting its work with high-emitting industries. (If you work with advertising agencies, check out Clean Creatives to see which have pledged not to work with fossil fuel polluters.) 

By choosing service providers and partners that have strong climate goals and abstain from working with nefarious industries, you are sending a strong market signal that your company and industry take climate action seriously. For those in positions to choose external partners, you can:

• Actively seek out and choose partners that align with your company’s climate goals.
• Ask existing partners for their climate goals and make your company’s commitment to climate known.
• Develop a company policy that outlines sustainability requirements for any new (and even existing) service providers and partners. You can check out this example from Salesforce for inspiration.

4. Ask for a climate-friendly retirement plan.

As is the case with your external partners, your retirement investments could also be indirectly contributing to emissions. Unfortunately, your current retirement investment portfolio likely includes high-emitting sectors. Switching to a climate-friendly plan is a major lever for climate action, shifting money away from bad actors and making a bold statement that investors care about sustainability. And thankfully, investors don’t experience negative performance from divesting from fossil fuels! Any employee can take action to get a climate-friendly retirement plan added to their options at work:

• Use Fossil Free Funds to look up whether your current retirement plan includes investments in fossil fuel companies.
• Reach out to your human resources team to see if your company offers a fossil fuel-free retirement option. If so, see if it can become the default option for employees. If not, learn more about the benefits of climate-friendly retirement plans and make the case for them. 

5. Create internal climate action guides.

While organizations like Project Drawdown can offer you idea after idea of how to turn your job into a climate job, the person who best knows how to do that is you! Every company, team, and individual role is different, each with its own nuances of responsibilities and how things operate. By creating internal guides for each department in your company, you can guide your colleagues across the organization toward climate action. To get started:

• Join forces with your climate-passionate colleagues who can help lead the initiative to create climate action guides for their respective departments.
• Get inspiration from other employees who have successfully created action guides at their companies. You can use this example from 3M, which is inspired by Project Drawdown’s Job Function Action Guides.
• Once you create your action guides, work with your human resources team to ensure that the guides are promoted throughout the organization and integrated into the onboarding process for new employees.

There are many ways to take climate action at work, from the simple – like talking to clients about climate change – to the more involved – like adding a climate-friendly retirement plan option. The best way to make your job a climate job is to examine your current responsibilities and position within your organization, and see where you and your colleagues can uniquely make a difference. This article highlights just a small subset of all the ideas that came from the Climate @ Work Employee Training participants, and there are many more out there waiting to be brainstormed and implemented by employees just like you!

Interested in taking the Climate @ Work Employee Training? Apply now for our September sessions before the August 15 deadline!

Aiyana Bodi, Project Drawdown manager of employee engagement, works with corporate partners and their employees to scale climate solutions in more meaningful and impactful ways. Aiyana is passionate about intersectional environmentalism and aims to use employee activation as a vehicle for just and equitable solutions. 

This work is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. You are welcome to republish it following the license terms.