CPD Roundup: October 2023

Welcome to October’s CPD round-up! This is where I share a quick summary of the continuing profession development (CPD) I’ve completed during the month.

The Institute of Translation and Interpreting recommends that all members, including Qualified Members (MITIs) like me, do at least 30 hours of CPD per year. I normally end up doing rather more than that, and I normally only include subject-knowledge CPD (and sometimes some translation skills CPD) in this public summary. You can find out about the other types of CPD that the ITI recommends here and my previous summaries here.

This month’s CPD was dominated by two major events, one online and one local:

Subject knowledge

The first one was the UN Global Compact UK’s Annual Summit, which was made up of a number of really interesting sessions:

• Driving a Just & Green Transition

• Advancing Culture Change for Transformational Governance

• Innovating to Accelerate the Climate Transition

• Accelerating the SDGs through corporate investment

• Measuring the S in ESG

• Raising Ambitions for Sustainable Development

• Bold Ambition or Greenwashing?

• Embedding Nature into Climate Transition Plans

• Delivering transparency: Anti-corruption due diligence

• Building supply chain resilience through supplier engagement

• Disrupting ESG as Usual

There was far too much to cover in detail here, but some really interesting takeaways for me were:

• Financials

  • Many investors are interested in sustainable investments, but they expect the same level of research rigour on the financials as they would for any other investment.

  • Greater reporting needs to be made mandatory to ensure comparability between investments.

  • Conversely, major institutional investors may be hampered in their efforts to move towards more sustainable investments by regulatory solvency requirements.

  • We can accelerate the pace of the transition by making sure that it is more profitable to take the sustainable path than the unsustainable one.

  • Consistency of government policy is essential if we want non-financial indicators to become really effective.

• Ambition

  • Companies can benefit from building an ‘innovation gap’ into their planning - i.e. setting their ambitions higher than currently technologically possible.

  • Customers - both personal and business - are increasingly drawn to companies with greater ambition.

  • The career case for making one’s workplace more sustainable can also be very powerful for individuals.

• Governance & transparency

  • Governance comes in hard and soft forms, the former focusing on procedures, policies, etc. and the latter on behaviours, which can take much longer to embed!

  • Disconnects between levels of governance can compromise a company’s transparency, which is not only a business/reputational risk, but also increasingly a regulatory risk.

  • Big organisations in a supply chain have significant power to effect change within the smaller members, but it must be done through cooperation, not coercion. This is particularly true if the suppliers are also dealing with other customers.

  • Greater standardisation of, for example, supply chain anti-slavery questionnaires could improve comparability and reduce the administrative burden on suppliers.

  • Compliance has been a good starting point, but we now need to move towards best-in-class (etc.) reporting,

• Technical challenges

  • Collaboration can be a powerful tool to avoid everyone having to reinvent the wheel.

  • If you can’t measure it, you can’t report it, which means you can’t compete on it!

  • Proxy measures can be invaluable when it comes to heard-to-measure risks like modern slavery.

  • The effort involved in establishing risk-management systems must be commensurate with the actual risk.

  • The ‘S’ in ‘ESG’ has not historically been as clearly defined as the ‘E’, which has made it harder to focus on when it comes to measuring etc.

The second was the Chelmsford Science Festival, hosted at the Chelmsford campus of the ARU.

Similarly, there were several sessions:

• Delivering Nano-Medicines into cells – interactive workshop

• What's in a clot: unravelling the mysteries of blood clots and thrombosis

• Adam Rutherford - The Invention of Race

• Green skills: Creating Equal Opportunities in the East

• Construction - big part of the Climate Problem or Vital Solution?

It might surprise you to see CPD on medicine in this list, but there are links that make it relevant. Firstly, there is my interest in biomimicry, which I understand much more broadly than simply improving the physical designs of things like wind turbines. In fact, I think it is through looking at nature’s processes rather than its products that we can gain the greatest advantage. For example, are there productive parallels to draw between the way our blood vessels become clogged with plaque and the way our rivers clog with silt? And are there similarities in how these things can go unnoticed until a major event like a storm triggers a much bigger problem? And then there’s broader questions, like can we use nanomedicine to target medical interventions much more specifically, reducing the impact on patient’s overall health, and thereby the environmental impact of their care? And more generally, is the future of medicine not an important part of the future of our planet and our societies? And what role does race play in the just transition, especially given that we know that racism has real medical consequences?

At a less abstract level, the two more explicitly sustainability-related sessions yielded some interesting points:

• ‘Green skills’ are not adequately integrated into schools’ curriculums or their careers advice. This is surprising given how strong the ‘every job can be a green job’ message seems to have become, but also unsurprising given how much uncertainty there is around what these jobs will actually look like, and what skills they will actually require. There is room here for more flexible approaches like micro-certification. Collaboration between apparent competitors and sharing of best practice can also be highly effective.

• Although it is the biggest ‘up-front’ source of carbon, only 1/3 of the construction of a building is its embedded carbon on average. The other 2/3 is mainly from its operational energy costs (though this is shifting in more modern houses). This is expected to reverse as the energy grid decarbonises, so it behoves the construction industry to focus on construction emissions. Fortunately there is a fair amount of low-hanging fruit here as a significant proportion of the emissions comes from a small group of materials. That said, the replacements available (e.g. replacing steel with timber) involve trade-offs (e.g. greater fire risks).

• Building usage remains just as important, and designers can provide essential services to customers by helping them develop (then iteratively improve) energy performance plans. It is more effective to integrate the monitoring equipment in right from the design stage rather than adding later. Similarly, it’s important to invest in maintenance as part of the building’s plan.

• Refurbishment is normally more carbon-efficient than reconstructing, but when designing from scratch, clients must brief for net-zero from the beginning to avoid having to shoehorn lower-carbon solutions in later. It’s more important to get the basics, like insulation, done right than to invest in expensive equipment.

• The biodiversity net gain requirement does cast a new, sometimes counterintuitive, light on things. It seems like it should be easy to achieve an environmental benefit by building on a brownfield site over a greenfield site, but brownfields can actually be home to wildlife, whereas greenfield sites can actually be ‘green desserts’, with relatively little biodiversity.

• The role of the planners (who are already under massive strain) is essential here. Councils and council leadership need to have systems in place to incentivise them. Planning should be a democratic process (see for example the Greater London Assembly’s approach). At the same time, the carbon crisis is a societal problem, not a technological one, so collective societal action is essential.

And finally there were two more ‘typical’ events:

Whole Life Carbon Management for Buildings and Infrastructure: A Guide to Reducing Emissions (RSK’s First Thursday Club)

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlc-BFumgs4&list=PLnitr_yxGf0yyOuQwL1ZRNARiKGWt3XWI&index=2

I always enjoy these sessions because they normally provide a great deal of technical information in a really digestible format. This session focused on the complex process of producing a whole life-cycle carbon assessment and the stages involved. One important thing to take away from this is that project designers’ ability to influence the carbon impact of a project decreases as the project progresses, so it’s never too early to start thinking about the whole-life carbon impact. As seems to be a common theme with these things, it can be difficult to get hold of specific data to quantify that impact, but that shouldn’t deter designers. The session also looked at how to integrate carbon management into decision-making, particularly through the lens of PAS 2080:2023 - Carbon management in buildings and infrastructure.

Climate Change 3.0 and The Future of Sustainability (Midlands Innovation Network)

Recording: https://vimeo.com/878601804

Cards on the table, I wasn’t sure whether to include this since I basically disagree with the conclusion. However, I agree with the starting premise, and I can follow the logic of the argument, so I have to concede that it is a valid point of view, event if I don’t agree with it. The speaker, Christopher Barnatt, makes the argument that achieving the overall goal of <1.5 degrees of warming is not possible simply by regulating businesses alone. It requires a massive shift in attitude amongst the public, which would require much greater government regulation (or intrusion, depending on your political leaning) than most Western societies seem prepared to accept. The net result is that governments will continue to set unachievable targets for businesses that will ultimately be unsuccessful in achieving the goals set in international agreements.

So far so good. However, Barnatt’s solution to this is to abandon the attempts to change public attitudes and start focusing on what are called geoengineering technologies - direct large-scale interventions that will manually adjust the Earth’s atmospheric conditions. Some of these are becomingly increasingly mainstream, e.g. carbon-capture technologies, and I can see the logic of this. Some of them, however, are a little more, shall we say, ‘out there’. They include spraying aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, or installing giant solar reflectors in orbit to manually control how much sunlight actually makes it onto the Earth. These things may sound a little outlandish (or otherworldly, literally), and they are they are classic ‘Wizard’ solutions (see December 2023’s book review). To me personally, they sound less realistic than embedding societal changes. I also disagree with the assertion that sustainable development is impossible because I don’t agree that we live in a closed system. These are just my opinions, however, and the recording is provided above for you to make your own mind up!

Translation skills

Revision club

A revision club is a peer-learning exercise where a small group of translators get together to sharpen our translation skills. This normally involves one person translating a document as practice and the others reviewing it for potential improvements. It can also take the form of a ‘slam’, where everybody in the group translates the same text and then compares versions.

This month’s revision club was a slam, and the text was on using AI to improve the environmental management of coastal regions. Probably the most interesting thing that came out of it was a discussion about how French texts tend to go in for multiple introductory sections before diving in at the deep end of the subject, whereas English texts tend to have a shorter actual introduction then make a ‘softer’ start on the main point of the text. Translators can (and some would argue should) make this sort of rearrangement when working, but it requires clients being prepared to trust their translators to do so.