Season 4, Episode 120 : Dom Winter

Will Richardson 00:02
Hi, Dom! Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. It would be great to understand a bit about you and the organisation that you are a part of Protect Our Winters, please.

Dom Winter 00:21
Yes, thanks, Will, and thanks for inviting us on. Yes. So I work for Protect Our Winters UK or POW UK. And we're the UK national chapter of what's become a bit of an international movement. There are more than 10 national power chapters now, since it was founded in the United States originally in 2007, by Jeremy Jones. And so yeah, my background as sustainability manager and an engineer, and I work at POW UK as our programme manager.

Will Richardson 00:48
Brilliant. And excuse me for not understand, so Protect Our Winters is to do with is it to do winters? And, you know, could you tell us a bit more about the kind of ins and outs of who, yeah, who you're helping, please?

Dom Winter 01:04
Yeah, so POW UK exists to inspire and equip UK based outdoor communities to take positive action to address the climate crisis and to accelerate the transition to a carbon-neutral society. So we're all about working with the outdoor community, the outdoor industry on climate change, and bringing both of their voices together through campaigns to make political change about climate change, as well. So episode three-season, it's all about climate change, and the impacts that will have on the outdoor industry and in return, what those involved in outdoors can do about it.

Will Richardson 01:39
And it really does make a massive impact on the wind seasons, doesn't it? I remember going along to one of your talks on the impact of climate change is going to have on say ski resorts. What is it if we get if we, if we manage to stick to 1.5 degrees, then 90% of all ski resorts will carry on as normal, or...

Dom Winter 02:12
There is loads of different sort of stats, you can throw on some of them quite startling. So the difference between our current trajectory of around three degrees and below two degrees is the difference between 70% of snow volume being reduced or 30% of snow volume being reduced by later this century. There are loads of other statistics like that. So by mid-century, resorts and ski resorts under 1200 metres, are almost all not going to have enough snow to operate. Ski seasons have already reduced by about a month, the natural ski season since the 1970s. But yeah, by the end of the century is really going to make a huge difference what we do in the next decade, as to whether snow sports can exist in their current format at all. So that's really the foundation of the power to exist. That's where the idea for it came from. And now we're also finding that other outdoor sports are also engaged with protecting, protecting the outdoors and the playgrounds, they enjoy. So it's grown into a movement wider than just snow sports now.

Will Richardson 03:14
Brilliant. And so do you as a charity, do you? How do you get your money?

Dom Winter 03:19
So, as you mentioned, a registered charity. So we get all our funding from donations and corporate partnerships. We don't actually get any money from the government. So it's all the community itself helping us to operate and helping us to act on climate change really.

Will Richardson 03:42
Okay, and what, what sort of things have you done to help alleviate climate change?

Dom Winter 03:52
So we've got quite a few programmes and Protect Our Winters in the UK is much younger than it is in the United States. We've been around only since 2017. So it's only in the last couple of years that we've started having consistent staffing, but we've got a great team of volunteers and trustees behind us. And we've been running programmes like carbon literacy training, where we've been training ski instructors, and outdoor businesses, and our own volunteers to understand climate change better including those impacts on outdoor sports. And, and in the instance of instructors, I really have them being knowledgeable on the subject, being able to talk about it on the ski lift with the guests. And that's a really tangible way to relate climate change to people that otherwise a lot of people don't really see if they don't get involved in the outdoors if is not related to something they care about, they don't have it communicated to them in a way that really has a tangible impact. So that's one of the programmes we'll be running is carbon Lister training. We also run political campaigns for example and campaigns for positive change. So a current example is the saved ski train. As you may have heard, the Eurostar direct train to the Alps was a great service that we had 80% reduction compared to flying to the French Alps. But it's not running this season. So this campaign has now evolved into making sure that it's clear that we want it back next season, it's really sort of the future of the low carbon snowsports industry are a key part of that. And we've also got loads more political campaigns, particularly leading up to cop 26. Next year, those will be of increasing importance.

Will Richardson 05:28
And you've also got a pledge, and this is who harness and help companies that are helping you guys, could you tell us a bit more about it, please?

Dom Winter 05:46
Yes. So the POW pledge really comes out of the fact that we had a programme engaging with corporates, and small businesses, in particular, they really didn't, they were coming to us wanting to know, right? We care about climate change, we understand why it's so important to deal with this, but we don't know what to do. Getting Started can be quite difficult. And there's resources can be quite scattered, and you hear lots of different voices about what are the most impactful things to do? A lot of them are saying, right, we've done some offsetting, but we don't really know how to progress from here. So from that, we delivered this idea of the POW pledge, which is a toolkit and a guide on climate action, particularly for those businesses in the outdoors industry to take the eight most impactful steps that they can on climate change to really get taken climate action, and get to net zero. So, it's all about being quite a lot less paperwork, and, and less, like less difficult to get started than some other certifications, or a lot more in one place than sort of visiting diffuse webinars, and trying to formulate your simple strategy that way. So it's really a sort of one-stop shop to get your stainability strategy sorted, particularly for small businesses that might not even have might not have a person with the expertise to know what to do about climate change.

Will Richardson 07:08
It's really unique, isn't it is, I don't think there's anyone that's ever done anything like that before.

Dom Winter 07:14
I think what's different about ours, in particular, is the fact that it's really based on the science of climate change. So some similar pledges might not be as unique to this sector. So it's very sector-specific in terms of communications and the way we engage with businesses, and they can then engage their customers. And also, the fact that it really is pinned to getting businesses on a sort of science-based trajectory trying to get to net-zero 2040, or before where we really need to be and not sort of getting them to choose their own target or their own actions without considering whether that is getting them a trajectory they need to be to actually protect us protect our winters.

Will Richardson 07:55
And could you take us through the process that your pledge does? For our listeners?

Dom Winter 08:03
Yeah, for sure. So when you come to the website, first up, you come and register, and the registration process itself is totally free. And then you're within the portal of the power pledges are pretty much the whole all the information on one page and say we're trying to make it super like dense, this is where you go, and it will really help you set your eight most impactful actions in the process. So yeah, once you're in there, and it's free to register, then that information is at your fingertips to get you started. And then within that, there are loads of how pop-ups and white pop-ups for each of these eight steps to really help you with those and make sure that you can take the action. And if you do, continuing the process view if you manage to enter all the information, if you can set a high enough bar and meet our criteria with all of your answers, then you'll be able to qualify as a public pleasure. So if you qualify as a public pledge, then you'll receive the logo and all the marketing assets really shout about what you're doing that you really have set targets that are in line with date, most impactful actions that you can take on climate change. Yeah, so if you take that public pledge option, then you can talk about really widely what you're doing. And if you're not quite ready for that yet, you can save your actions for now. And sort of think on those and see if you can reach those at a later date.

Will Richardson 09:29
It's I mean, it's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And what have you seen? What's the take-up been so far?

Dom Winter 09:37
Yeah, as we're recording, this is really quite newly launched. So we've had certainly more than 50 business organisations signed up so far, and I see new ones coming in every day.

Will Richardson 09:49
That's all brilliant!

Dom Winter 09:50
Yeah. We're pretty pleased. And yeah, we're still sort of really reaching out to businesses and organisations trying to get them on board with starting up webinars in support of really helping people to understand the process, and having calls with other businesses to try and help them complete. Because whilst we have 50 odd sort of registrations, getting in there getting that climate action advice, what really needs to not now do is hopefully help, as many of them as possible reach the high tier of the public pledge.

Will Richardson 10:24
That's brilliant, and less, you know, 50 plus companies that haven't done anything before. So actually, yeah, that's really good. That's cool. And the more companies that we can reach, the better really, what? Where do you see this going? And what do you you know, what, where do you see the future with Protect Our Winters?

Dom Winter 10:46
So for the power plant itself, and will hopefully continue adding more businesses and adding more advice and making sure that the level of guidance is there for them to take as much action as possible and start to formulate a bit of a community around that. So a lot of the businesses that we've invited on to the power pledge were businesses that are already engaged with us through previous campaigns, and we hope that it will become a really powerful way for those businesses to come together. And we can say, bring together all the businesses, that might be hotels that are struggling with particular steps. So one of them, one of the steps that are more novel to the power pledge is helping divest or making sure they're focusing on divesting from fossil fuels. And if there's a particular need for a new financial products, then we can ask, ask on behalf those businesses, we need this there's a market for this financial product, who's going to be the one to provide it for this industry? So I think there's there's a lot of future scope for improvements for how the pledge enables us to activate that outdoor community and business community. And then there's, there's a lot of other projects that Protect Our Winters UK will be running, particularly in that lead up to Cop, we've got a big campaign coming for that. So yeah, I think almost upwards.

Will Richardson 12:08
Awesome. And how, if you want to help Protect Our Winters with the brilliant work that you do, have, I mean, how are we able to do that?

Dom Winter 12:22
For sure. So definitely take, take the power pledge, if you're an organisation or register and start on those climate action steps, you can also sign up to our newsletter on our website. And you can get in contact with us for our website as well about becoming a sponsor of POW. Yeah, your support really does help us, to take the client action that we do. And yeah, just share us on social media as well. Just Yeah, get it introduced yourself to us, and get involved. We've got plenty of space for volunteers and sharing ideas and hosting events. There's, there's so many ways to get involved with this.

Will Richardson 13:00
Brilliant, thank you. Thanks, Dom, is there anything else do you want to add?

Dom Winter 13:06
Um, no, I think really, it's just the fact that this is really obviously such a time pressing issue now to get started on climate change. So really, what we're trying to do with all our projects is allow formulate this to sort of restart now. And that's where the power pledges come from. That it's not meant to be a really long convoluted process, it really allows you to jump in. So my motivation would be to anyone just to get started and not wait for the perfect not wait, wait for the perfect solution and do what you can now.

Will Richardson 13:41
Absolutely. Couldn't put it better myself. Yeah, no, perfect. Brilliant. Thanks, Don, thank you so much for being on today. And thanks. Well, good luck with the power pledge. I should probably say at this point that we've as Green Element and Compare Your Footprint have been helping behind the scenes on the pledge or pure transparency. Brilliant, thank you so much.

Dom Winter 14:05
Thanks. Will, thanks.