Environmental stewardship

Collaborating for better solutions

We create value for our business and our communities by respecting the environment, and understanding and reducing our impact on the world around us. We also create value for clients through PwC’s sustainability and climate change practices.

Many PwC firms are working to develop more environmentally-efficient business practices for their own operations. Most of our firms are managing their environmental footprint by understanding and then mitigating their greatest impacts such as carbon measurement and reporting, and many are putting in place behavioural change programmes. However, our greatest potential for influence is to impact the environment positively through our work with clients.

We’re creating new client services. With a global network of 700 people in our Sustainability and Climate Change practice, we are a leading advisor on sustainability, climate change and green growth. Consultancy teams from across the PwC Network also get involved in global sustainable development summits such as the Rio+20 event in June 2012 where we share our perspective and experiences with others.

We’re creating new metrics for environmental value. By helping PUMA become the world’s first company to produce an environmental profit and loss account, we helped to establish a reporting milestone that encourages other businesses to connect financial and environmental performance.

We’re working with the UN to develop new ways of calculating the economic value of the world’s ecosystems and integrating these principles into business decision-making. And we’re providing continuing analysis of how the world’s largest companies are responding to climate change through the Carbon Disclosure Project.

We’re helping create analytical tools for investors. We’ve provided advice and report services to the Carbon Disclosure Project for five years, to help them deliver their aims to provide investors with a unique global view on how the world’s largest companies are responding to climate change.

We’re supporting the creation of new water management methods. PwC is a signatory to the UNGC CEO Water Mandate, a public–private initiative that aims to assist companies in the development, implementation, and disclosure of sustainability policies and practices around water.

We’re creating new sustainable office environments. Many of the firms in the PwC Network have drawn on the skills and expertise of their in-house Infrastructure and Procurement teams. For example, we’ve built 7 More London, a BREEAM outstanding office building for PwC UK, certified as the greenest in London. Other offices that meet environmental ‘gold standard’ or higher are Atlanta, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Prague, Shenzen and Toronto.

We’re calculating our global carbon footprint. Last year, we calculated our carbon footprint for 83% of our operations and many of our local firms used this information to set carbon reduction strategies, including Australia, Czech Republic and the UK. Globally, it is a strategic priority to improve our reporting, including the development of a global carbon footprint methodology for PwC firms – which we will report on in 2013.