Shoosmiths promotes Earth Hour 2018

Around the globe, millions of people, businesses and landmarks set aside an hour to host events, switch off their lights and make a noise for climate change action.

On Saturday 24 March 2018 we switched off our non-essential lights in our offices at that time and we continue to explore opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with e.g. our use of energy for heating and lighting, refrigerants and business travel.

Our planet, our home is in danger. A lot of the wildlife we love, from snow leopards and polar bears to rhinos and elephants are seriously threatened, our oceans are over-exploited and polluted by e.g. plastics. One in six of our planet’s species are at risk from climate change.

Everyone has the power to make a difference in the workplace and at home. In WWF’s words: ‘We’re the first generation to experience the effects of climate change and we’re the last to be able to prevent it.’

This year Earth Hour was all about connecting back to Earth and appreciating the nature and around us. The 2018 Shoosmiths competition was to ask staff for their pledges to change one thing in their everyday work, it could be something for a client or supplier or a behavioural change in the workplace.

The Earth Hour campaign is very relevant to the achievement of one of the global Sustainable Development Goals namely SDG 13: take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. There are a number of underpinning targets to be acheived by the year 2030 one of which states ‘Improve education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning.

There were lots of positive pledges designed to e.g. help cut out packaging and food waste, follow paper light practices and reduce car usage.These ideas have been added to other workplace and home tips on the Shoosmiths intranet

Our overall winners this year have been thinking about how they can help clients and colleagues. Winning ideas and activities included embracing paper light working practices including turning client reports from paper based reports to electronic copies, working with business development to brand conveyancing guides and help sheets so that they can be accessed by clients on the website and eliminating training handouts by instead storing help sheets and training notes on a dedicated section of the intranet thus creating a training and development library that can be referred to easily at any time.