As Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters are increasingly important considerations in our "business as usual" activities, I am pleased to see the progress we have made as a committee to increase awareness and commitment within BG&E as a business over the past 12 months.
We do this by consciously focusing on the ESG aspects of our work in a systematic way, and understanding how they are related to our core business, and to the positive impacts we are able to make as engineers.
This year we have:
- Reset our Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) and have an endorsed Reflect RAP.
- Developed and rolled out a tool to help our engineers calculate embodied carbon in their designs. This can initially be done at a very early stage of design so that the information can be used to identify a preferred concept with a lower carbon footprint. We have also increased our capabilities in developing a more formal life-cycle assessment of carbon to meet client requirements, to benchmark our projects and to make sure we are continually innovating and improving.
- Rolled out training across the business, in particular unconscious bias training for our staff as part of our broader strategies to support gender equality and diversity and inclusion.
Over the next year, the committee is looking forward to progressing in the following areas:
- Promoting Social contributions and philanthropy.
- Implementing our RAP action plan with a view to advancing to an 'Innovate RAP' in coming years.
- Assessing our own carbon footprint and seeking to minimise impact.
- Developing our ESG reporting framework to highlight our current performance in areas we impact that are of most interest to our stakeholders – our employees, clients, suppliers and the wider community. We are currently reporting on some key areas of interest and impact here so we can have visibility of external trends, where we are performing well and where we need to improve. The past year has given our committee a good understanding of our baseline and priorities, and where we need more data. This year’s report focuses on this initial baseline, which will be further informed over the next year to allow our improvements to be measured.
