IEMA to Hold Green Skills Event at Westminster Today

Hosted by Joan Walley MP (who is also Chair of the Environmental Select Committee), “A Workforce for a Sustainable Economy” will establish IEMA’s ambition to mainstream environmental skills across the economy with the support of like-minded leading organisations.

Held in partnership with City & Guilds (who co-created IEMA’s All Jobs Greener training programme) and sponsored by Ricoh, IEMA is gathering 200 decision-makers and business leaders together to ensure that the workforce of every organisation can become suitably skilled and equipped to capitalise upon every environmental opportunity.

The list of delegates features CEOs, Sustainability Directors and MDs from some of the UK’s largest employers (representatives from over 10% of the FTSE 100 will be in attendance), and the list of speakers who support IEMA’s aim for green skills include:

• Diana Montgomery - Chair of the IEMA Board
• Sir John Armitt - Chair of the City and Guilds of London Institute
• Nigel Marsh - Global Head of Environment at Rolls Royce
• Peter Quinn - Head of Environmental Policy & Strategy at Tata Steel
• Chas Moloney – Director of Marketing at Ricoh UK & Ireland

This event follows a call made last month by IEMA’s CEO Tim Balcon where he encouraged organisations and Government to collaborate on mainstreaming training systems with environment and sustainability to support the aims and prosperity of business. Today he renewed this call from the corridors of Westminster, placing IEMA at the forefront of leadership on green skills:

“I hear from businesses time and time again that they have the ambition and the foresight to place environment and sustainability at their core,” he said, “but because of a mismatch between supply and demand for environmental skills - which stems right back to gaps in the curriculum and right through vocational education – they cannot access the right skills at the right scale. I want to see that become a thing of the past.”

The event starts at 12:30pm today (GMT) and you can follow the proceedings as they happen on Twitter using the #alljosbgreener hashtag.

Further details will feature at iema.net, in the November and December issues of ‘the environmentalist’ and Downloaded.

Today IEMA will hold a parliamentary reception at the House of Commons which will address and invigorate the green skills agenda.