Over the past few years, PR consultancy FleishmanHillard has tried all the usual ways of reducing its environmental impact, such as encouraging employees to recycle and cutting back on business travel that uses less sustainable forms of transport. But the firm recently realised that it was overlooking an area where it could perhaps make a bigger difference: by switching the default workplace pension fund to a greener option.
Many employees have thousands of pounds sitting in company pension schemes without realising that they may be funding industries that contribute heavily to global warming and environmental degradation. Moving that money to more ecologically sound alternatives – as an individual or as a business – could therefore be a great way to help tackle the climate crisis.
“Our workers tend to be young and engaged with climate issues. They care about the planet,” says Ian Williams, a director at FleishmanHillard. “We realised that the default pension fund we had wasn’t an ESG fund. We approached our pension provider and found that it had a more sustainable option, so we switched to that at the start of this year.”