Useful presentation yesterday by Phil Horton, Sustainability Manager at the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) as past of the BASIS webinar programme.  Comprehensive and thorough, they have a LOT to do.  Take-aways for me were …

Decide what you can control, manage and influence.  This is a great image and really useful for all of us.  National bodies have responsibilities but limited ability to enforce them.  Loads have schemes have come (e.g. Clubmark) and gone, and if tiny clubs are unable or unwilling to adopt them it’s hard to force them.

Members are young, committee are old.  This is a problem in most sports and the question is: how do we engage the young people, or the parents of young people, that climate change will most impact upon before it’s too late i.e. NOW. Tricky with 2,400 training centres worldwide.

Standards matter to customers, not to members.   RYA are pursuing ISO14001 and ISO20121 (?) standards (at least) to externally validate their progress.   I asked why and it seems to be to reassure an external audience rather than internal one. 

Champions again.  RYA are developing of Sustainability Champions to spread the word.  We dabbled with Low Carbon Champions a long time ago and it’s a good idea but hard to maintain.  Facilitating is really important and finding and replicating existing champions / outliers / positive deviants is a good way .

All that glitters … The presentation mentioned Gold Standard offsetting programmes.  There is a lot of confusion here, and offsetting / balancing options needs better press and distancing from trading carbon certificates to export pollution. 

Virtue signalling.  Never heard of this before.   If I’m ever accused of it I’ll take it as a compliment!