Earth Day 2022

IEMA's Digital Journalist Tom Pashby reflects on the significance of recognising Earth Day 2022 and the inspiring work that our Corporate Partner Jacobs are doing to action change for sustainability.

Today (Friday 22 April), the world marks Earth Day 2022, which was started in 1970 in the USA by a Democratic senator called Gaylord Nelson and a Republican congressman called Pete McCloskey. Together, they recruited a young activist called Denis Hayes to run university teach-ins to raise awareness of environmental issues. Since the first Earth Day, 1 billion individuals have been mobilized for action across over 190 countries.

From the IEMA community, our corporate partner Jacobs – an international engineering company with a focus on sustainability – told us what they’re doing to promote action.

Zoe Haseman, an IEMA accredited ISO 14001 auditor, and Jacobs Head of Global Sustainability said: “This Earth Day Jacobs sets out ambitious new climate commitments in our brand new Climate Action Plan, two years after the release of our first plan. Our updated plan further commits that we ensure all projects are a climate response opportunity, that we achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across the value chain by 2040, and that we maintain carbon neutrality status and 100% low-carbon electricity for our operations.

“We’ve made significant progress in helping to preserve the planet for future generations by meeting our initial climate action goals, achieving carbon neutrality for our operations and business travel and adopting 100% low-carbon electricity.

“We also recently became the first professional consultancy and one of the world’s first companies with net-zero targets approved by the Science Based Targets initiative.”

Unlike Earth Hour, which was held recently, Earth Day is a standalone organization and event. Earth Hour is a project coordinated by the environmental charity WWF. This year Earth Day is focused on financial support for the transition to a sustainable global society, under the tagline ‘Invest in our planet’ and hopes to encourage businesses and politicians to act now on the climate emergency.