Enhancing Society Together
Our purpose as a company is Enhancing Society Together. Our aim is to deliver positive impact through our projects, and in our own operations, by addressing five Enhancing Society Together themes: Climate change, Biodiversity & Natural systems, Resources & Circularity, Social value & Equality, and Safety & Well-being. These are the areas where we believe, as consultants, engineers, and project managers, we can make the biggest difference in delivering benefits for people and the planet.
We use our Purpose Matrix to demonstrate the tangible progress we are making. During 2024, the matrix has been applied to 2,403 projects, representing 65% of our project revenue. This compared to our target of assessing projects representing at least 60% of our revenue.
As well as tracking progress, the Purpose Matrix guides decision making around whether a project fits our purpose. It led to us choosing not to work on a number of projects in 2024, such as an industrial development that included a coal-powered power plant, aviation infrastructure that failed to mitigate biodiversity impact, and a bridge inspection project that offered inadequate safety for our inspection team. We have also developed position papers which provide a framework for decision making and governance connected to potentially controversial markets and geographies. The position papers on fossil energy, nuclear and working in Saudi Arabia facilitate open dialogues on pros and cons and are living documents to be updated when new insights arise.
Our employees are motivated by a strong commitment to our purpose and play a vital role in accelerating our progress. We focused on raising awareness through communication, knowledge sharing and learning in 2024. Enhancing Society Together is a permanent module in our Leading Stronger 25 management development programme. We introduced new training materials across our 5 themes and expanded our Enhancing Society Together Academy. We shared good practice and smart ideas that develop out of discussions and conversations within project teams and with clients. The success of these activities delivered a significant increase in entries for our Enhancing Society Together Award compared to 2023 (56 in 2024, 36 in 2023).
We are committed to occupying a leadership role in reducing our own climate impact and made good progress on our own ambitious targets to reduce our carbon footprint. In 2024, we reduced Scope 1 and 2 emissions to stay ahead of annual projections to achieve a 95% reduction by 2030 compared to a 2019 base year. Scope 3 emissions decreased ahead of target despite increased flying.
Read more in Sustainability Performance.