What responsibilities do major businesses have for reducing environmental degradation and contributing to a more ethical world? What is our role as consumers, voters, parents, neighbours, and investors in encouraging behavioural change?

These will be among the issues discussed in this session.

The speaker is Mike Barry, a renowned environmental specialist who spent 19 years heading up Marks & Spencer’s sustainability work, most notably its multi-award winning 100-point eco and ethical programme, dubbed “Plan A because there is no Plan B” for the one Planet we have.

Mike’s remit stretched from Bangladeshi clothing factories, Indian cotton fields, Kenyan rose farms, Honduran prawn and Scottish salmon farms to ready-meal factories, warehouses and websites right on through to the M&S shops themselves.

With 32 million customers buying billions of items each year, Mike is fully engaged with the imperative for and the challenges and benefits of sustainable change.