2009 Corporate Responsibility Review
Addressing our broader responsibility to society
ENVIRONMENT
Working to manage the direct impact of our operations and the indirect impacts we have through our customers.
Summary of the year
A healthy environment is crucial to the prosperity of our employees, customers and communities. With this in mind we have continued to focus on environmental concerns throughout a challenging year, and are pleased with our progress on a number of significant initiatives.
The initial focus of our environment strategy has been to reduce our carbon footprint. We set a Group (excluding our US operations) emissions reduction target of 33,000 tCO2-e by 2010 for our building portfolios, vehicle fleets and air travel; and this year reduced emissions by around 14,380 tCO2-e. As they come online in 2010, our pipeline of energy efficiency projects is expected to deliver the rest of our targeted reduction. In addition, we have prepared to purchase offsets for the greenhouse emissions we can't avoid so we can become carbon neutral by the end of September 2010.
In September 2008, we were listed as leaders in the Global 500 in the CDP 'Climate Disclosure Leadership Index (CDLI), achieving the highest ranking (with a score of 98% alongside Barclays, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Munich Re) of the non-carbon intensive companies surveyed.
One of our priorities has been to engage with relevant national governments on the emerging regulatory response to climate change. We understand that transparently reporting greenhouse information is critical both to managing risk and making good investment decisions. We now report under the Australian Government's National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act and will report under the UK Government's CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme from April 2010.
We are also committed to sharing our experience with customers. Our Environmental Finance Solutions Group has expanded its engagement with customers, and has been working with stakeholders on product developments we hope to see come to fruition over the next year.
We believe it is important for everyone to have the opportunity to put forward their views on global climate change policy. For this reason we signed both the Poznan and Copenhagen Communiqués, and helped to give young people and everyday citizens a voice through campaigns such as Youth Decide in Australia and World Wide Views on Global Warming.
Lastly, our people play a critical role in everything we do. We engage them in our initiatives, and they continue to involve themselves in voluntary programs across the Group.
