Climate change and the environment

Around 1000 people took part in team challenges, working on environmental and community projects across the world

'We see evidence of steady growth in responsible business activity across the international network of offices' - The Corporate Citizenship Company

'Climate change is one of the most important issues facing humankind today. We aim to reduce our impact on the environment on an ongoing basis and mitigate our contribution to climate change; we also seek to support initiatives that will help us all to adapt to climate change, such as carbon capture and storage. Reducing our impact is not easy – much of it requires changes in the way we work and this takes time as well as management and changes in policy. As such, reducing our firm's greenhouse gas emissions is challenging but rewarding and – we believe – essential in the light of the worrying problems being caused by climate change.'
John Blain, chair of our environmental working group, member of our CSR strategy group, and member of the CSR Working Group of the Council of Bars and Law Societies in Europe

We have taken a firmwide approach to what we recognise to be an important global issue and are committed to minimising our impact on the environment. This requires measuring our greenhouse gas emissions, setting reduction action plans for each of our offices with the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management and – this is more difficult – changing and adapting working practices. The latter means cutting down on paper use, reducing our air travel, using video and telephone conferencing wherever possible, and increasing our waste recycling.

Although there has been little change in terms of our total greenhouse emissions, since 2005/2006 we have seen a reduction of around 4.6 per cent per person in greenhouse gas emissions – we hope this trend will continue

We have seen some success in reducing our electricity usage firmwide by over 2m kilowatts in the past year, but business travel has proved more difficult to reduce. There are several reasons for this: we have seen significant business growth in parts of Africa, Asia, eastern Europe and South America; we have established new offices in the Middle East; we are an international business with offices and clients around the world; and our legal work often requires face-to-face meetings when gathering evidence or at lengthy meetings with multiple parties lasting several days, so making video conferencing impractical.

To help tackle this we are strengthening our travel policy and have increased our investment in video conferencing and are working to reduce the number of internal conferences and make them more environmentally friendly.

Graph of Our environmental impact 2005/6 - 2007/8

^{1 Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Bratislava, Brussels, Cologne, Düsseldorf,
Frankfurt, Hamburg, Madrid, Milan, Moscow, Munich, Paris, Rome, Vienna}
^{2 Beijing, Dubai, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo}
^{3 New York, Washington, DC}
^{4 Premises includes electricity, gas, heating oil and district heating consumption,
back-up generator fuel use, refrigerant gas loss, fire extinguishers and waste disposal}
^{5 Business travel includes hire cars, employee-owned cars, taxis, air, rail and
hotel night stays}

To minimise our impact on the environment, we are certified CarbonNeutral® across all our offices which means we offset or neutralise our greenhouse gas emissions.

Our clients

Climate change presents risks, opportunities and an increase in regulation – for us and for our clients. We have a carbon economy team which was established to help businesses prepare for a low-carbon international economy. Find out more.

Memberships

We are founding members of the Legal Sector Alliance on sustainability and climate change (together with Business in the Community (BITC) and the Law Society). Along with other members of the Alliance, we have used our experience of collecting international data on greenhouse gas emissions to help develop a carbon footprinting tool for the legal sector.

We are part of BITC's May Day Network, a group of companies committed to taking action on climate change. Both groups encourage businesses to share their experiences in tackling the issue and to engage suppliers, customers and sector peers to do the same. Our head of CSR is also on the Managing Partners' Forum Sustainability Panel.

We are on the 2008 Managing Partners' Forum Carbon Verified List, and have provided information and advice for a series of new briefing notes by the Law Society aimed at helping firms adapt to climate change.

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All data provided on this page has been independently reviewed by the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management.