Irish Funds Climate Challenge 2024

The Panel were delighted to participate in this years Irish Funds Climate Challenge.

Led by our colleague and ESG & Sustainability Consultant Darina Heavey, The Panel decided to take part in the Irish Funds Climate Challenge 2024.

What is the Irish Funds Climate Challenge?

It is a competition organised by Global Action Plan Ireland and the Green Team Network, in collaboration with Ducky. Running between April 22nd and May 6th, this year was the 2nd competition, 27 organisations, and 2,901 participants took part.

The aim is to engage, inspire, and educate staff members on how they can reduce their carbon footprints, no matter how small an action they take in their everyday lives.

The three categories were:

best service provider
best professional services
best manager

The Panel CLAN was not deterred by being one of the smallest firms to take part but determined to do their best.

Here is how we got on!

To add a bit of friendly competitiveness to the challenge we divided the team into four separate teams: CLANet Earth, R3newable R3cruiters, Clan with a Plan, and 00Kiss.

Each team was tasked with encouraging each other, sharing advice, and reminding each other to log their Duckys every day on the app. Never before have so many vegan/vegetarian recipes been exchanged among staff. It is fair to say that over two weeks, we collectively fixed more bikes, air-dried more laundry, took more public transport, used electrical bikes/cars, walked, recycled, and bought more sustainable goods.

The overall challenge

Though the odds were not in our favour. We started week 1 in 16th place, then moved fast to 14th, 9th, and 4th place. In the second week, we made great progress as the full team continued to engage and record their sustainability activities, day and night. Week two, we spent in 1st and 2nd place, battling it out with Innocap.

Where did we end up?

Internally Clan with a Plan came first, followed by R3newable R3cruiters, 00Kiss and CLANet Earth. Well done everyone!

Overall, it was down to the smallest margin, but in the end, after dominating 1st place over the bank holiday, we ended up in 2nd place overall and 1st place in the Best Service Provider category.

We would like to extend our best congratulations to Innocap (1st place), and Kroll (3rd place) in the overall category, it was lots of fun. Congratulations also to our fellow Service Provider participants MUFG Green Partners, Euroclear SA, IQ EQ Group, and AQMetrics Limited, well done to you all.

Here is Darina Heavey talking about the challenge and our experience of it.