From Blue Earth Summit to Norfolk Landscapes Conference & Exhibition: Accelar’s Autumn Event Highlights

It’s been a busy few months for the Accelar team! We’ve been out and about at a host of industry events - meeting inspiring people, learning about exciting new innovations and connecting with friends old and new. Here’s a snapshot of some of our highlights.

Back in September our Managing Director Chris attended the Blue Earth Summit, which was an opportunity to engage with a variety of nature market and green transition players. It was positive to hear how the importance of ambitious, landscape-scale nature restoration is increasingly seen to be the most accepted path forward. Our Associate Director, Michael Smith, attended the Midlands Climate Expo & Sustainability Conference. This provided a brilliant forum to chat with some of our existing clients and partners, including the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust and the Staffordshire Business and Environment Network. Additionally, our two Senior Sustainability Consultants attended Sustainability Live in London. Through key talks from leaders like Angela Hultberg, it was emphasised that sustainability needs to be reframed as a driver of business strategy and resilience, and that businesses need to adapt, or risk irrelevance.

“Attending Sustainability Live in September was truly inspiring. Hearing firsthand from industry leaders about how they've embedded sustainability into the heart of their business strategies, and the tangible successes that followed, was a powerful reminder that sustainability isn’t about ticking boxes. It’s about driving resilience, sparking innovation and unlocking new growth.”

Portia Davies

More recently, our Co-Founder Charlene attended the 10th Anniversary of the Highways UK event in Birmingham. This was a chance to engage with leaders in sustainable infrastructure, including a panel discussing whether and how we can rebuild nature and roads at the same time. “It was great being at Highways UK again, after attending for a number of years. It is also good to be reminded of the vast number of organisations looking at transforming our networks, looking to embed sustainability and innovating to deliver this.”

Two members of the team attended events at Parliament, with Michael heading to the UK Business & Biodiversity Forum and Portia at the Net Zero Business Census Report launch event. To top all of that off, at the end of October, we exhibited at the Norfolk Landscapes Conference alongside Tellus Natural Capital. We are currently working on three projects in Norfolk, including two NEIRF Round 2 Landscape Recovery projects, so it was incredibly heartening to see how the importance of nature recovery for agricultural resilience is increasingly understood as an urgent and critical mechanism. Discussions, conversations, panels and seminars showed how farm businesses are working together to drive change, through their supply chains or landscape recovery whilst new tools like Renew Earth are being deployed on the ground. The future for landscape recovery may not be smooth sailing, but there is definitely a strong foundation to tackle this challenge for agricultural and broader climate resilience.

Chris Fry and Kate Russell at Norfolk Landscapes Conference & Exhibition

A Look Forward:

The fun doesn’t stop as the weather turns colder! We are exhibiting at the Unlocking Hampshire's Green Potential event on 18th November, Charlene will be attending ConstructZero and London Build on the 19th November, and members of the team will be at Ecosystems Knowledge Network's Nature Finance Conference on the 25th November. If you see us at any of these events, please come and say hi!

Takeaways:

It is so encouraging to see how sustainable supply chains and the need for business adaptation continues to be a core theme at these events, whether it is a smaller, regional conference or an industry-wide event.

Engaging with stakeholders close to our project areas and meeting new faces who are shaping the industry, whilst seeing that nature is gaining a rising central role in sustainability considerations, makes these events really worth it.