Our history

Susan Alexander and David Ballard set up Alexander Ballard Ltd. in 2006 in answer to a growing need for boardroom level strategic advice on climate change and other aspects of the environmental sustainability challenge.

We worked for several years with members of the ESPACE partnership (European Spatial Planning: Adapting to Climate Events) and particularly with that project's lead partner, Hampshire County Council.

This work led to the well-known 5 A's model of change - see the 'articles' section of the website (under "learning").

Further research into organisational responses to climate change, in the second phase of ESPACE, led to the development of the PACT organisational response framework. Outputs from this were published in 2008 and can be downloaded from the ESPACE website. Some may also be downloaded from the 'articles' section of this website.

Following this project, we invested in IT to make the PACT process more widely available and to reduce the contact time needed to complete the assessment. This was achieved without compromising quality.

In 2010, in a review of 17 different frameworks for responding to climate change, the UK Climate Impacts Programme rated PACT ahead of all others available, stating in a report to the Adaptation Sub Committee of the Climate Change Committee that 'it is fortunate that in the UK a sufficiently sophisticated tool (PACT) with a strong conceptual framework has already been co-developed'.

Collaboration over this period continued with Hampshire County Council and also increasingly with Climate South East. We also extended our global reach through exciting and fruitful work with the Universidad del Medio Ambiente in Mexico State.

As the value of PACT began to gain international recognition, we were selected to undertake the review of the UK's 'adaptive capacity' to respond to climate change in 2009, work that used the PACT framework and that was completed in early 2011 to general acclaim. We were invited to act as 'climate capacity advisers' to the Gesellschaft der Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ - the German international development agency) in 2010.

David and Susan were joined as owners of Alexander Ballard Ltd in 2010 by Doogie Black with whom they had enjoyed several years of joint working in his previous role as ESPACE officer for Hampshire County Council and then as Director of Climate Sense.

We were equally delighted when Callum MacGregor joined us as a fellow shareholder in early 2011: he has undertaken the outstanding systems design work that underpins the PACT process.

Throughout this period, Alexander Ballard Ltd's reputation has developed as a significant and original contributor to business strategy and change for sustainability.