Dublin Session - Sustainability – Who Cares?

By Johan de Kam, Teaching Fellow Warwick University

EuRA’s first Sustainability Symposium at the Dublin conference was a successful initiative aiming at helping our members in their first steps towards implementing sustainable business practices.

The expert panel, with presentations from Magali Hobert, Rene Stegmann, Becky Woods and Ben Ivorymoderated by Johannes de Kam – helped participants look into the principles of sustainable development.

Sustainability “seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future”, as stated in Our Common Future Report.

ESG is for Environment - the carbon footprint we leave; Social – caring for people’s progress - and Governance –promoting healthy economic growth. Even if this general concept is widely accepted as an alarming subject, service companies are still at a very early stage of endorsement and implementation.

Participants of the Symposium were given the exercise of a Materiality Assessment – which is essentially a risk assessment of ESG driven impacts, designed to help companies identify and understand the relative importance of specific sustainability topics for their business.

Why is this important for the Global Mobility Industry?

Today, there are approximately 30 ways on reporting on sustainability and over 100 ESG rating agencies – so our industry soon acted upon the need to agree on common parameters that will ensure we share common terminology, ratings, standards and norms.

In September 2022, six leading employee mobility associations from around the world launched a global effort to ensure the industry is playing its part on environmental sustainability with a roadmap and common actions.

The Coalition for Greener Mobility’s charter – whose leaders’ Dublin session is available in EuRA’s Youtubesets the objectives to

• Promote a common understanding of good practices and actions to improve sustainable outcomes across the mobility industry

• Facilitate learning, collaboration, and improved ESG practices in the management of global mobility

• Provide the mobility community with the tools to help improve transparency on environmental sustainability

• Facilitate meaningful measurements that track and report on environmental sustainability progress The symposium was wellreceived by participants, with many indicating they would appreciate further initiatives and training towards the learning and implementation journey of corporate sustainability – and survival of their business.

This is why EuRA will be soon announcing a series of further training sessions that will address several areas that are core to developing sustainable businesses, including environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and building a company culture and strategy to sustain such efforts. Your experience, contribution and expertise is crucial to the project and Dublin’s symposium was hopefully a great kick-off to our call for action!