How Professional Bodies Can Reinforce the Climate Transition.

As climate commitments are being reinforced within organisations’ strategies and increasingly translated into action, a significant set of barriers persist. In order to transition, businesses need systemic support (infrastructure, waste capture, green skills & jobs) that can be influenced at the policy level. The issue is that some policy engagement professionals might advocate against climate policies on behalf of the businesses they represent.

The professional advisors that businesses rely on may advocate inconsistently both for and against climate policies, despite the successful implementation of business transition strategies being dependent on a supportive regulatory landscape. The We Mean Business Coalition (WMBC) has described how organisations can leverage their public affairs departments and agencies to shape enabling policies. This can be further strengthened by trade associations who have a similar role because of their influence over policy.

As WMBC explained “While trade associations have historically attracted the most attention due to their significant resource and influence, corporate public affairs departments, and the agencies they rely on, also play a decisive role in shaping the political debate and policy outcomes”.

However, we believe there is a third, critical category of player with similar influence: professional bodies representing public affairs and lobbying professionals. These bodies have a crucial role in shaping professions related to public affairs and advocacy, by setting best practice and competency frameworks.

The key challenge as highlighted by WMBC is a systemic conflict of interest. Public affairs agencies often lobby for fossil fuel clients while also advising climate activists and changemaking businesses. This creates a fundamental contradiction that undermines credible climate policy progress, at the expense of businesses leading the way in sustainability. Professional bodies have an opportunity to resolve this conflict by embedding sustainability and climate in their strategy, codes of practice, standards and competency frameworks. They can also clearly frame lobbying for fossil fuels as bad practice detrimental to the profession and the economy in the long-term through the climate risk the fossil fuels generate for people via exacerbating climate change.

The influence that public affairs professionals and their representative bodies have over global emissions can come under scrutiny through two angles: policy engagement, and serviced emissions. Serviced emissions, as described in our guide, are the indirect emissions enabled by professional services – the climate impact of services provided to clients.

While emissions associated with use of sold products and some types of services (e.g. digital services) are easily accounted for, the emissions associated with professional services are typically a blind spot in carbon accounting, despite professional services generating indirect emissions (e.g. increasing sales of ICE vehicles or flights or enabling business-as-usual for high-emitting organisations).

In the case of public affairs, by advocating for fossil fuels (the extraction and combustion of which are the main causes of climate change), the emissions associated with the profession are likely massive, as they may affect entire jurisdictions. By not guiding members on this, professional bodies may be unintentionally facilitating significant emissions through their own industry’s work, exacerbating policy misalignment, and ultimately hindering the progress clients are working hard to achieve.

There is also a commercial risk here for both public affairs agencies and professional bodies representing them, as businesses leading on sustainability may shift to providers who can consistently support their efforts by advocating for enabling policy and infrastructure, rather than undermine their attempts. However, this concern goes beyond the sector of public affairs to many other professional services such as marketing, legal, public relations, accounting, business consultancy, IT, and many more. Every sector has an opportunity to align with sustainable practices and policies to future-proof their business and sector and safeguard their clients from exacerbated climate change impacts.

Therefore, every professional body has the responsibility and opportunity to educate their members on serviced emissions and responsible policy engagement. This is both an ethical obligation and essential for the profession’s credibility.

CAFA provides the tools and resources professional bodies need to navigate this. By joining our free membership, you can access the frameworks to guide members into leaders. Join us today.