Sustainability & EHS Summit Europe 2024

With increasing pressures from the regulators and company boards, the complications caused by rising inflation, and the corporate focus on ESG, environment, health and safety leaders are reevaluating what to prioritize, where to focus their efforts and what to put their budgets towards.

This keynote address will preface and explain what the EHS function’s purpose will be for the foreseeable future.

Environment, health, safety & sustainability is an increasing concern for almost all business operations, placing it firmly on the C-Suite's agenda. In this session, we explore how to engage the C-Suite effectively in the EHS+S domain. Our discussion encompasses:

How to influence the C-Suite on organising the placement and sizing of the EHS+S department to improve performance.Embracing a business-focused mindset to effectively communicate EHS+S concerns with the C-Suite.Harnessing the influence of top executives to drive EHS+S engagement across the organization.Establishing partnerships with leaders from other functions (e.g. procurement, sustainability, finance) to advance EHS+S strategies.

EHS+S reporting is critical for compliance, sustainability tracking and safety management - and the quality of the data used determines its success. Yet, managing high-quality datasets presents its own set of challenges. Our expert panel engages in a thoughtful discussion centred on best practices, addressing key aspects such as:

Meeting immediate reporting needs by implementing methods to swiftly attain good data.Tackling organizational, technical, and regulatory obstacles to gathering and integrating datasets.Ensuring that a governance framework is effectively managing the veracity and ownership of EHS+S data.How to make certain data gathered is reliable and credible.

Making the right technology and services decisions is challenging given that practitioners are faced with a multitude of priorities: reducing serious injuries and fatalities, improving ESG performance, reducing the administrative burden of risk assessments, ensuring high quality reporting and more. It can be difficult to navigate how to allocate budget to procuring the best EHS products and services.

To help streamline EHS decision-making, this session matches EHS practitioner priorities with technologies and services available on the market. This session delves into evidence-based research, in which the team consulted over 400 heads of EHS, spanning 25 sectors and over 30 countries, and engaged with all the leading vendors of EHS products and services.

The significance of culture cannot be overstated when it comes to the successful implementation of an EHS strategy. Culture shapes employee behaviour, engagement, accountability and risk perception. A positive EHS culture is the cornerstone for achieving compliance, effective communication and continuous improvement. It serves as a catalyst for enhancing safety, reducing resistance to change, and fortifying an organization's reputation. This session will cover:

Best practices for consulting and engaging internal stakeholders to influence EHS culture positively.How to promote a positive culture around mental health and wellbeing.Overcoming geographical and linguistic challenges to help implement EHS strategy and best practices on a global scale.Addressing cultural challenges and navigating diverse priorities resulting from varying health and safety legislation across the world.

Join us to share 18 years of frontline communications experience. Discover trends in visualization, learning methods, and content delivery that transform HSE management systems to serve large diverse workforces. Learn how technologies, including AI, ensure critical content reaches the right people at the right place at the right time.

In these focus groups meet with EHS+S practitioners, vendors, consultancies and Verdantix analysts to discuss how EHS+S drivers, priorities and technology choices vary throughout different sectors. Some suggested points to discuss include:

What priorities do Sustainability & EHS executives have in each sector?What does the safety culture look like for each sector?What EHS+S risks are more prominent in each sector?Which technologies can be applied in each sector to help manage EHS+S risk better?What impact does CSRD have in each sector?

Mental health and wellbeing can significantly impact individuals, EHS outcomes and more broadly whole organisation performance. This issue is ubiquitous and is significant throughout Europe as a quarter of the population reported suffering from at least one mental health condition in 2023. This panel considers key issues that are associated with this topic such as:

Creating mental health and wellbeing KPIs to enable analysis of what variables and strategies significantly impact wellbeing and mental health.Ensuring robust risk management by controlling these variables to improve psychological safety.What a meaningful culture that addresses mental health and wellbeing positively, thereby improve EHS performance, can look like.Devising a comprehensive mental health and wellbeing strategy by accounting for the latest neurological research, increased hybrid working patterns, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a 2022 Verdantix survey encompassing 302 senior EHS decision-makers, 88% of respondents underscored the significance of training engagement as a matter of priority. In response to this imperative, this session is dedicated to providing practitioners with the knowledge and strategies needed to craft and execute effective safety training programmes by discussing how to:

Ensure organization-wide training is sustained and impactful.Craft bespoke and timely training initiatives that resonate with the workforce.Focus training efforts by identifying critical risks to prevent incidents.Enhance the training experience potential of e-learning, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).