World Environment Day: Making an Impact

As Leonardo celebrates World Environment Day, we speak to Ben Knight, UK Head of Sustainability, who shares what motivates him and how, as part of Leonardo’s global commitment to Sustainable Development Goals, he aims to help Leonardo deliver real change.

UK Head of Sustainability sounds like a fantastic job title – what drew you to the job?

The main reason I do my job is my daughter. I had always had an interest in the environment and the natural world, but when my daughter was born, it was a bit of a Eureka moment. I realised that I needed to spend every moment in my day job – as well as my personal life – focussing on ensuring she has a world to grow up in.

When I was younger, I was fascinated by space, and a quote from ‘Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space’, by the late great American astronomer Carl Sagan, really sums up the ‘why’ of sustainability for me:

“That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

Since the Eureka moment, I have been lucky enough to work in sustainability roles in several sectors – from space to FinTech – looking at the greenhouse gas emissions from rockets and the lifecycle of satellites, to the potential impacts and application of finance.

However, when the opportunity came up to join Leonardo, I jumped at it.

One of the main reasons was the opportunity to make a meaningful impact. At Leonardo, we have over 8,500 colleagues in the UK (and more than 50,000 around the world), so amplifying the impact in helping others to understand more about sustainability – whether that's climate or digital sustainability – was a powerful driver.

Another draw was the potential of the technological applications we are working on at Leonardo. Over the next decade, we are going to see some major challenges, and innovation will be key to addressing many of these things. To me, sustainability is all about how we, as a business, can make sure we’re reducing our impacts as much as possible – but also how can we start creating a positive impact back on the world around us and our communities.

Additionally, I was impressed by the commitment that Leonardo has towards sustainability – whether the Science Based Targets at the Group level, or our UK commitment on Net Zero. What I have seen at Leonardo already is massive engagement from across the business with people who are really, really invested and want to get involved.

What are your main sustainability objectives for Leonardo UK and how do these align with wider corporate objectives?

In my experience, sustainability teams are always collaborative and this is definitely how we work at Leonardo. You cannot apply sustainability to one part of the business or a specific geography; everything has to be consistent. This collaboration is something that I have always loved about sustainability – even when working with competitors – we all have a common objective and purpose.

Leonardo has recently published our new Industrial Plan at group level with embedded specific sustainability targets. There is also the new Sustainability Plan, which is global and incorporates projects happening in the UK, including climate action, biodiversity enhancement, employee engagement, DE&I, Cyber sustainability and Social Value.

Additionally, there are UK specific requirements we are working towards – whether that’s customer or legislative requirements. Our UK business has a specific 2030 Net Zero target for our direct emissions. This is slightly in advance of the Group targets, but this actually works in parallel as the quicker we decarbonise in the UK, the more we support our Group goals.

In the UK, legislation has recently been introduced about biodiversity net gain, and alongside us looking at how we protect and enhance biodiversity on our UK sites, we are working to collaborate with colleagues in Rome to consider how to do the same across all geographies.

The key thing is collaborating and sharing ideas, because ultimately it doesn’t matter whether we’re in the UK or Italy or Electronics or Cyber or Helicopters; we’re all facing the same challenges, and must work together to find the solutions.

We have focused quite a lot on the environment, but sustainability is more than that. Could you please help clarify this?
It is a crucial point. When we think about ‘saving the planet’ it sometimes disconnects us as humans from the challenge. The image of a polar bear on an ice cap can, for some people, be a different world, whereas the impact of communicating the increasing risks to all from increased flooding, wildfires or food scarcity, is much more real.

We used to be a sustainable species. But over the past 60 years, we have massively accelerated our use of natural resources and our production of waste, to the point where humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s biocapacity can regenerate. We are the only species on the planet that is not sustainable. Our focus has to be on actually going back to ‘1 Earth’.

We must become part of a sustainable and – where possible – a regenerative system; part of nature, not apart from it.

For a business to continue to exist, it needs to be sustainable. We need colleagues, supply chains, resources and customers. That is why sustainability is so much more holistic, because it has to work with all of those key groups. We are already seeing how this is filtering into specific business challenges.

• Talent attraction and retention – there are well-documented annual studies from the likes of Deloitte and IBM which show that companies are very much held to account on sustainability performance by their employees, as people actively look at sustainability performance of a company to be aligned to their own values.
• Commercially, our customers are increasingly looking to us to align with their requirements on Sustainability and Social Value. Social Value is interesting because it is asking us to go-beyond sustainability and create additional value for the environment, society and the economy.
• Financially, around 55% of Leonardo’s investments tied to sustainability criteria. In my previous role within FinTech, I often worked with investors who were increasingly asking companies to align with their sustainability and ESG (Environment, social and governance) criteria.
• Currently there are many ESG/sustainability risks that every business is exposed to. If you rely on a specific energy source that will be obsolete in a few years or rely on materials that will no longer be available, that is a major financial risk. We must also consider the impacts of extreme weather on infrastructure or colleagues. The risk piece alone is a key driver for many why we need to be looking at some of this.

Ultimately, it comes back to the original point; we must become sustainable again and ensure we view this challenge as a wider social and economic problem, rather than saving the planet.

This point touches on Sustainability Week that takes place across Leonardo in the UK to educate our staff to show them the importance of the topic. Maybe you just want to talk about this week and some examples of what you are doing to try and to achieve from this.

For me, one of the most important factors in delivering any sort of sustainability target or strategy is the ability to embed it throughout an organisation. It is down to the people in their day-to-day activities taking action that will deliver our targets. Therefore, education and engagement are vitally important.

We need those whose roles are completely unrelated to sustainability to understand the impact they can have. We must lead them to make decisions that will result in change far bigger than anything I can do alone, so they can see how their jobs apply through the lens of sustainability.

Leonardo’s Sustainability Week aims to build upon what we have already started – with our new Sustainability Network and publishing a regular sustainability bulletin – focusing on what we are going to do and how we can embed this in our thinking going forward.

During the week, we will be highlighting how our company-funded employee benefits can help people tackle climate change. We already have our ‘Go Green Car’ and ‘Bike to Work’ schemes, and our People team is looking at new ways our flexible benefits can help people save energy at home.

For example, as of the end of the month, if an employee wants to purchase an electric radiator for home working, they will be able to do that through the flex benefits. We are also looking at helping people get heat pumps, solar panels on their roof or an electric converter for their bike so they can use an existing bike and not need to buy a new one.

There are some great examples, thank you. Our final question for you is ‘what's next’? When you look back at this in 3-4 years’ time, what would you have hoped to have achieved?

There has been some really good work already happening across our teams, and what we’re doing in the coming months is ensuring that we’ve got an action plan for our next few years to deliver our UK Net Zero target for 2030. At the same time, we are looking at things like ‘design for sustainability’ for our products whilst working with our supply chains.

We are starting to carry out biodiversity audits on some of our sites so we can understand what our impacts are and what actions we can take. I would also like to be able to see the demonstrable impact of our employee engagement – which is why we have embedded a sustainability engagement question in our employee survey and actually set targets around engagement.

To your point, if I look back in 2030…I always imagine my kids asking me “Dad, what did you do?” Personally, this is a massive driver on a daily basis.

Ultimately, the really exciting stuff that I hope to see is how we’ve started to look beyond sustainability towards becoming regenerative, and towards how we can utilise our technology to have a positive impact – building on the things we already do with sensors in space and so on. That would show that we are not only committed to delivering sustainability, but are also giving back to the world and all those that inhabit it.