Teja: Life in the Sustainability team

Our Sustainability and Stewardship team focuses on embedding sustainability across Royal London. This includes all climate-related risks and opportunities such as our climate commitments and sustainability disclosures.

The team’s goal is to enable all business areas to support Royal London’s Purpose outcome of moving fairly to a sustainable world.

Teja tells us about her role in the team.

Embedding climate and sustainability solutions

I'd describe my team as small but mighty. Formed to help embed climate and sustainability solutions across Royal London, we lead on the organisation’s sustainability strategy and the delivery of our climate commitments. This includes capability building, internal engagement and consultancy, and climate reporting – so we've got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies!  

Many of us have come from other roles in the business, so we have a range of viewpoints and experiences, which is essential when we're considering all the angles of a thorny problem and trying to work out the best approach to take for the planet, society and our members. Our team discussions can get quite lively because we all care so much, but you won't meet a more welcoming or supportive team – there's a lot of laughter too. And being distributed between our London, Alderley Park and Edinburgh offices, we try to get together in person once a quarter for team days, to stay connected.

"I lead our Eco Champs colleague network, which aims to build a culture of sustainability internally"

Most of my work is on colleague sustainability engagement, capability building and data, and every day is different.  I lead our Eco Champs colleague network, which aims to build a culture of sustainability internally. We pick a theme each month and explore it with articles, events and deep dives on our internal communications channels.  I love this part of my job as it gives me a chance to research a topic and figure out how to explain it to colleagues – I end up learning a lot myself. We also plan a Sustainability Summit every year for our colleagues, which is a whole week of events, activities and competitions across all our offices. And we run several company-wide challenges every year through partner app, Pawprint, where teams of colleagues compete to reduce their carbon footprint. 

Net zero targets

Sustainability is central to Royal London's Purpose, and there's a lot of awareness and willingness in the business to support the transition to a more sustainable world. I'm proud of the journey we're on. We have net zero targets in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement and have made some great progress on decarbonising on own operations. Most of our emissions come from our investments, and we work actively with the companies that we invest in to influence their plans to reduce their carbon emissions. We also support a just transition and work to address existing injustices in the process of building a greener world. I’ve learned so much since joining this team about the nuances of responsible investment from people who are passionate about making a real difference.  

Working in sustainability can certainly be challenging and frustrating at times, but at Royal London it can also be rewarding and satisfying, and I always feel supported. I know what we’re doing can make a difference for our members and our world, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

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