Rebecca Kimber, CEO of Create, talks to us on International Women’s Day

Rebecca Kimber, CEO of Create, talks to us on International Women’s Day about how sustainability is taking centre stage in the everyday decision making and longer-term strategies of the business, and why it’s important for all businesses to be more aware of how they can help fight climate change.

For over 20 years, Create has been empowering small business owners to design and manage their own website. The Brighton-based company builds their own software to enable anyone to get setup online.

“It’s all designed to make it fast and easy”, says Rebecca, “and you don’t need to know any code.”

They’re clearly passionate about helping people achieve more online, but their focus on the climate emergency, and the impact small businesses can have, is particularly resonating with both customers and peers.

“We’ve always been a conscious business,” Rebecca explains, “but after watching David Attenborough’s documentary ‘Extinction’ in 2020 it was clear that we had to do more. Our business is about making good things happen for people and it has to leave the world in a better place than we found it.”

It turned out that Rebecca wasn’t alone in this belief and being in the middle of the pandemic would actually prove beneficial for learning a lot more and making some great new connections. It no longer seemed to matter where you were based or what you did, having a common cause was unifying and everyone was open to having a conversation on Zoom.

It also became apparent that there was plenty of confusion surrounding the subject, from debates about tree planting benefits to the difference between net-zero and carbon-neutral. It’s one of the reasons Rebecca started giving talks on understanding your digital carbon footprint.

“It’s so easy to think that because it’s in your computer it’s not a tangible thing,” said Rebecca. 

But emissions from the ICT sector actually surpassed that of Aviation back in 2018 and have been growing ever since.

For example, all those photos we snap on our phones (around 900 a year per person). Most of them will be synced to online servers like iCloud and stored indefinitely. Those stored photos are estimated to be causing the equivalent carbon emissions of 112,500 return flights from the UK to Australia!

With numbers like these, it’s obvious that everyone can play a part in reducing their environmental impact. From an individual’s simple action of deleting what they don’t need, to creating company policy around managing resources and choosing suppliers. In many cases switching suppliers might be hard, so just starting a conversation with them about this issue can be influential. After all, we are all connected.

This shift isn’t just for a feel-good factor either, in the next couple of years more reporting responsibilities are becoming mandatory for large corporations and financial organisations and this will lead to requests for this information during pitches, tenders and procurement processes.

For most small businesses around 90% of carbon emissions will be in their supply chain, this is known as Scope 3 and is recognised as hard to measure. Rebecca shares that their own struggle to determine this is ongoing. 

“To be honest we’re still learning and working on this. What you don’t realise when you start is that the measurement of emissions covers a lot of activities and includes everything from your team travelling to work, to the carbon dioxide generated by your customers as they use your finished products.” 

For this reason Create began investing in carbon reduction schemes at the start of the process. Carbon reduction is a form of offsetting where the money raised is put to use eradicating or reducing emissions. Good schemes will meet a number of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals so there are multiple benefits for people and the planet.

“Our own struggle has been a key motivator behind the work we’ve done at Create. It was so hard to determine what the emissions might be for using a piece of online software, and lots of services just weren’t saying anything about it.

“The process we underwent made me realise how important what we were doing was and it now means that our customers’ websites are one less thing to worry about. We know we’ve made their lives easier and done something positive for the planet too.“

It’s not all been about greening Create either. One of the things Rebecca is really passionate about is restoring the planet’s ecosystem, and knowing that the impact Create could make on its own was small, they joined forces with 12 other businesses, including Brighton-based Digital Agency Propellernet to found The Million Tree Pledge. 

The Million Tree Pledge is about taking bold action for the planet and biodiversity. Every company that joins pledges to plant a million trees by 2030 and Create have so far planted 275,000. Since its launch on Earth Day in April 2021 a total of over 5 million trees have been planted and 35 million trees have been pledged. This equates to around £4.5 million of future donations towards reforesting the planet.

“For us, the Million Tree Pledge solidified where we were going into an ambitious goal and I’m incredibly proud of how it’s grown from an idea into something really powerful,” says Rebecca. 

“Amongst the pledge members we have a saying about being good ancestors. As a family business this resonates with us wanting to safeguard the future for all our families, and for their families after them.“

For more information please visit www.create.net and www.milliontreepledge.org