Green issues were placed squarely on the HR agenda when Ipsos MORI reported in 2007 that almost 90% of UK workers had stated their employer's environmental impact was important to them. Meanwhile, another study recently found employees exhibited the highest levels of concern about the environment during the month of August.
Why August? At first I thought it might be because of what the Met Office now call freak summer 'weather events'. That was until I discovered most of these seem to happen in July. But now I think I've found the answer. It's our kids. Across the UK, schools are out for most, if not the whole, of August and if the pupils I met at the Bishop Challoner School in London's Tower Hamlets recently are anything to go by, parents up and down the land will be having every aspect of their daily lives scrutinised for sustainability.
The Bishop Challoner School is an inspiring place, made all the more so by the fact that its multicultural catchment area means pupils speak 72 different languages.
Now, I know from my own children that the environment is at the top of their list of priorities. But what startled me about the talks I had with the youngsters at the school was the level to which they felt connected with the issues.
For them, the environmental disasters that are beginning to play out across the globe aren't things that are happening in some remote location - they are happening to the families and friends of their mates from school.
As a result they could all point to meaningful ways in which they had reduced their personal impact on the world around them. And I got the distinct impression that many of them couldn't wait to get through school and university so they could get stuck into transforming the world into a cleaner, more sustainable place.
And that's when it struck me. Earlier this year I had the honour of attending a meeting with Prince Charles where he spoke about the Prince's Rainforests Project - a project he launched in 2007 with my CEO, Steve Easterbrook, as a member of its steering committee. The project was established to tackle climate change and the destruction of the world's tropical rainforests - the issues being linked by the fact that as well as helping to keep our planet cool, tropical rainforests are also responsible for absorbing around one fifth of our CO2 emissions. Currently these rainforests are being destroyed at such a rapid rate that we are losing an area the size of a football pitch every four seconds.
That's a horrifying statistic in itself, but something the prince said at our meeting shocked me to the core. He said that without the rainforests it will be impossible to win the battle against climate change and that in just 100 months the destruction of the rainforests would reach the point where catastrophic global warming would become both inevitable and irreversible - 100 months is just a little over eight years.
And what struck me as I spoke to the 13-year olds at Bishop Challoner was that in eight years' time they would just be leaving university - just reaching the point where they could begin to make a real difference and just at the moment when, if we've failed to take action to protect the rainforests, the fate of our planet would already be sealed.
One of the main objectives of the Prince's Rainforests Project is to encourage as many people as possible to sign a petition urging world leaders to act against tropical deforestation when they meet in Copenhagen at the end of this year. So, could I urge you to encourage as many people as possible in your organisation to sign the prince's petition at www.rainforestsos.org.
Of course, it won't stop your kids giving you a hard time about sustainability - but at least you'll be able to look them in the eye while they're doing it.
- David Fairhurst is senior vice-president/chief people officer, McDonald's Restaurants Northern Europe
