It’s been one year since six of our European employees joined former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, renowned climate scientists and communicators at the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Berlin to learn about what’s happening to our planet and how to best use powerful storytelling and personal outreach to inspire colleagues, family, friends and their communities to take action.
As part of LS&Co.’s ongoing commitment to address climate change we’ve sent employees to Climate Reality Trainings around the world. The Berlin cohort from last summer is now part of a group of LS&Co. employees committed to making a difference for our planet.
To attend the training, most were winners of a Sustainability Challenge in the region – an initiative set up to highlight the business action(s) they had taken in 2018 to have a meaningful and lasting impact on the planet. All six ambassadors have stood by the words of Al Gore: “Knowledge has to be matched with action. Each of us can be part of the solution.”
We asked some of the participants to share how their attendance at this impactful 3-day training has inspired them to make personal and professional changes and influence others to do the same:
“The Climate Reality training was a key experience for me. For the first time, someone was connecting the dots on climate change and showing me how it impacts so many issues of our time: floods, ice melting, rising sea levels, loss of biodiversity, extreme weather events, poverty, health, food supply, political instability, migrations… I came back a different person and since then, I have felt a responsibility to talk about it and push people around me to take action in their personal and professional lives, as well as demand action from world leaders. Climate change is not an opinion, it is a fact and we have to ensure that we all raise to the challenges it causes.”
– Sandrine Besnard-Corblet, Chief Counsel LSE
“My biggest takeaway was to spread the fact that the climate crisis is closer to us than some of us might think. Al Gore showed multiple slides of events that had occurred recently in various European countries, evidencing that thinking that the climate crisis concerns other continents more than us, is absolutely wrong and that we do need to act now. The training has helped me to expand my knowledge in the fields of science, market data and evolvements of the effects the crisis had upon our planet. I left Berlin filled with energy and confidence to take action, and ready to get my personal and professional environments involved to trigger a domino effect.”
– Angelique Houben, Marketing Specialist in Germany
“I started to make small changes in my personal and work life, like walking to do my small grocery shopping (I choose ecological products and try to eat by season to reduce products imported), I eat less meat, I have bottles of tap water in my fridge to always have cold water, I line dry most laundry, I try and do most travels by train/bus, I only book single bed rooms in hotels and only use one towel, I travel with my own water bottle and fill it up at airports. On my exercise walks, I sometimes bring along a bag to collect garbage in and, together with the stores in Nordics, I will keep on looking for solutions for making better use of our faulty products so these do not end up in landfills.”
– Miriam Lambaek, District Manager of the Nordics
“I try not to overwhelm everybody with scary facts and numbers, or with big speeches on what needs to be done. I would hate that from anybody. Instead, I try to weave in a little bit more of sustainability into our day-to-day life. Depending on who I am speaking to, it could be related to food, transportation, waste management, or fashion!”
– Marianne Rolin, Regional Logistics and Trade Compliance Analyst
