Sustainable September: The PWC ESG Journey

At PwC Isle of Man minimising our impact on the environment is an important part of us operating as a responsible business. Our environmental efforts started over 15 years ago through our long standing Corporate Responsibility commitment with the team making simple and relatively inexpensive changes to guide behavioural changes of our people, such as removing desk waste bins to encourage communal recycling, removing all single-use plastic cups and supplying reusable options, and introducing print monitoring to help reduce our paper consumption.

We then expanded to include more complicated, costly changes such as moving from gas to an air source heat pump for temperature control, changing to LED lighting, deploying technology to reduce the need to travel off island and moving to cloud technology solutions that have allowed us to significantly reduce the run time of certain IT servers.

As you can see our priority of reducing our impact on the environment had been underway long before our worldwide science-based commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030 was announced in September 2020.

In 2020 we formed our net zero team to work together across four work streams which make up our net zero action plan: measurement and disclosure, emissions reduction, supply chain decarbonisation and renewable energy and carbon offsets.

Our emissions target was an absolute reduction of 50% by 2030. We set our baseline year as 2019 and the key challenge was establishing the level of emissions for that year, so we can monitor our progress for the future. The sources of this information were often held in multiple locations, which made it challenging to capture all applicable data and to the required level of accuracy. The team ensured that we identified all emissions within our scope, with the key sources being our office electricity and heating, business travel and accommodation. Performing this exercise has allowed us to identify changes we can make to our existing processes to allow us to capture all required information in a more standardised and centralised manner to simplify our continuing reporting requirements.

More recently the team has negotiated with the landlord of our office building to move to a renewable electricity tariff and we have made our first investments into carbon removal projects to offset our gas, electricity and business travel emissions. Next steps include developing a supplier program that encourages our supplies to decarbonize.

We endeavour to drive our environmental commitment through initiatives we are involved with where possible and were delighted to have the opportunity this summer to be the first nature partner for the Pride Festival. Helping the organisers make the event more sustainable and reducing single-use plastic through the sale of reusable cups resulted in only four wheelie bins of plastic being collected for an event that attracted 12,000 people. This initiative brought together our environment commitment and an important social pillar of our strategy, Diversity and Inclusion, as we strive to be an employer that values people's differences and have a workplace where everyone can be themselves.

Beyond our own efforts we are committed to helping our clients with their ESG (environmental, social and governance) transformations and goals to achieve sustainable outcomes. The first episode of our newly launched Business Talks podcast explores the topic of ESG and what businesses can do to take action.

Like many businesses we are on a journey, which involves upskilling and addressing challenges. Our team has embraced these challenges and we hope our efforts are a catalyst for change in the world around us.

PWC talked about this more over on Manx Radio. Hear the podcast here.