Collaboration over competition: how building a shared sustainability standard for the industrial sector should be a no brainer
Business is often held up as a metaphor for life. Both involve growth, planning, decision making, adapting to change, tackling challenges and facing competition
Competition is a good thing. It inspires commitment and innovation, encourages us all to do our best, and requires us to stay sharp and on the front-foot to earn due recognition and reward. At SEGRO we compete with our peers over securing leases with customers and acquiring land to deliver the highest quality, best-located developments.
If there is one area of business which should be exempt from competition, it is sustainability. We live in an age of increasing collaboration and nowhere I think is more acutely important than our collective approach as an industry in tackling climate change, and there are few bigger challenges for which the best solutions are yet to be found.
However, we also live in a world of growing scepticism and polarisation, which only serves to reinforce our commitment that cross-business collaboration is the best and only way forward. This is because we understand that climate-change is man made and that many of us are already experiencing extreme changes in climate that affects their way of life.
When I first joined SEGRO three years ago I was immediately struck by not only how as a company it was committed to pushing the boundaries of sustainability best practice to champion low carbon growth, but the buy in from colleagues across the whole company.
Perhaps though, we could have been guilty of thinking that achieving net-zero was for us alone to find the solutions for. In reality it is shared between us, our peers, our customers and our suppliers.
Cross-industry collaboration is not only beneficial in supporting and effecting real change, it’s fundamental.
The emergence and subsequent galvanising roles of forums such as the Better Building Partnership, the British Property Federation and the European Logistics Federation ESG Forum have been invaluable in bringing together the sector for meaningful debate and knowledge-sharing to learn from each other and explore the most effective and efficient means of identifying and pursuing decarbonisation pathways through a collective effort. This is the fundamental, driving force behind why we collaborate.
We never stop learning and to have the shared resourcing and experiences to be able to connect with my counterparts at the likes of GLP, Tritax and Prologis, to name but three, is a hugely rewarding, and overwhelmingly positive tool in our shared commitment to address our emissions and play our part in addressing climate change.
Our customers are an equally important stakeholder for deep collaboration. Encouraging our customers to switch to half hourly electricity meters and share the data with us helps them utilise their energy more efficiently and allows us to support them based on insights generated through high quality data.
Some governments, such as France, have recognised the importance of landlord -tenant energy data sharing and have introduced a mandatory requirement. This is very helpful and we would welcome this kind of forward-thinking approach across all our markets.
Given the breadth and variety of our customers, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for collaboration. The large global occupiers are actively collaborating on sustainability initiatives, while smaller customers require more support and training.
With these stakeholders, we have started offering tactical training sessions on topics like pollution prevention and recycling, which have been well received so far. We have plans in place to further expand this programme over the coming years.
In recent years as advances in technology has opened doors, we have, purchased a sophisticated energy and emissions platform to improve the reliability and quality of our data and how we interpret and report it.
Working with an external partner, this customised platform for our business has taken 12 months to implement and means that energy data can be processed with minimal effort.
It provides a vital input to our forecasting processes where we attempt to predict the impact of our prospective investment initiatives, over and above our current functions and processes.
We share some of our data (in an anonymised and aggregated form) with independent organisations who are working hard to build better benchmarks. We do that together with our competitors and see this as an important part of our shared knowledge-building.
It requires embracing a completely new mindset and philosophy for putting collaboration and, ultimately, the greater good of the environment, ahead of competition.
In conclusion, collaboration is a win-win for all parties. For our business, our colleagues, the communities in which we operate, our customers, our competitors, and, ultimately, the planet.
Collaboration plays a crucial role in helping us understand what ‘good’ looks like, achieving sustainability by enabling shared responsibility, pooling resources, and increasing the impact of sustainability initiatives. By working together, we can address complex challenges, share best practices, and leverage our collective scale and influence to drive systemic and achievable change.