The Big One: edie to attend climate action event in London this Friday

Pictured: Professionals at the September 2019 climate march in London. Image: UK Green Building Council.

This weekend (21-24 April), some 100,000 people representing more than 200 organisations will be gathering in Whitehall to tell representatives of the UK Government, as they return from the Easter recess, that the general public wants to see more robust policymaking in response to the climate and nature crises.

edie will be bringing you live multimedia coverage from the ground and amplifying the calls to action from sustainability professionals to Ministers.

edie’s content director Luke Nicholls said: “On top of our day-to-day roles as content and events professionals, the edie team are concerned citizens. The climate and biodiversity crises have made it abundantly clear that we need industries and governments to be moving further and faster to achieve a decarbonised economy in which people and nature thrive.

“As the UK’s largest sustainable business media brand, it is our duty to represent the voice of the tens of thousands of sustainability and net-zero professionals across the country who are fighting the good fight. We’re excited to be joining the gathering in Westminster on Friday and look forward to engaging with our community there.”

Policy demands

The Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) most recent annual progress report to Parliament on the net-zero transition warned that there are only “credible” policies in place to deliver around one-third of the emissions reductions that the UK is legally committed to achieving by 2050 under the Climate Change Act.

While the Government did recently publish thousands of pages on new energy and green finance policies, the jury is out on whether this will result in more rapid emissions reductions. Ministers have not agreed at this point to adopt the majority of the recommendations from Chris Skidmore MP’s net-zero review, conducted to ensure that the UK’s net-zero pathway maximises the socio-economic benefits of the transition.

On nature, the UK is in the bottom 10% of countries globally in terms of how intact its biodiversity is. The Office for Environmental Protection (OEP) warned earlier this year that the UK is not on track to meet any of its key nature-related targets.

edie has tens of thousands of readers across the UK, working tirelessly in their professional and personal lives to deliver a more sustainable future. We know that many of them feel held back by green policy gaps. In our recent Sustainable Business Leadership Survey of 225 energy and sustainability professionals, a lack of policy support was identified as one of the five biggest perceived challenges to the sustainable business movement for 2023.

We will be joining Business Declares, who are meeting outside the Department for Energy Security and Net-Zero (DESNZ) offices at 10.30am on Friday (21 April).

If you are attending The Big One this weekend and are keen to contribute to our coverage, please email newsdesk@fav-house.com. If you are not attending on Friday, we still want to hear from you. Also, let us know what you would like to see come from these protests in the comments below.