Environment

We recognise that our business has both direct and indirect impacts on the environment through our own operations and the assets and properties that we invest in. Underpinning all our activities is our Group Environmental Policy.

Environmental Management System:

Our Environmental Management System (EMS), which is certified to ISO 14001:2004 in the UK, now covers over 75% of our operations by headcount. It:

• Acts as a mechanism for understanding the environmental impacts associated with our business operations and complying with legal requirements;
• Fosters a sense of responsibility for the environment amongst all employees;
• Acts as a tool for delivering continuous environmental performance improvement; and
• Enables the pro-active assessment of environmental impacts in the long-term business planning and decision-making process.

Through our EMS, we have undertaken a range of initiatives to reduce our negative environmental impacts. Examples include the introduction of software to ensure that all PCs are switched off overnight; conducting a review of our waste disposal practices to identify areas for improvement and incorporating a wide range of energy saving measures across existing and new offices.

Further examples of our activities, as well as data on our environmental performance, are detailed within our Corporate Responsibility report

We also report data on carbon dioxide emissions to the Environment Agency for the purposes of CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme compliance and to the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Setting targets

Last year we set three principal environmental targets, all of which we achieved:

• Reducing our carbon dioxide emissions by 3% per full time employee (FTE) for our UK offices
• Improving access to video conference facilities to provide an alternative to business travel
• Maintaining our recycling levels at our UK sites

In addition to our key target areas of carbon and waste, we have also sought to engage more widely with stakeholders to gain an understanding of the issues they are most interested in. We continue to work with organisations such as Business in the Community, WSP and students from Imperial College to reflect these efforts.

2012/2013

Over the past two years, we have set targets for our environmental performance, recognising that this helps to focus efforts and achieve improvements. These targets have always been relatively short-term, spanning only the year ahead and so, while we will continue to set annual goals, we believe that we should also start to focus on long term environmental goals for the business.

We currently have sufficient data on our carbon and energy emissions for our offices to set a goal for to 2015: to reduce our global office energy consumption and related carbon emissions by 20% from a 2009/2010 baseline.

In the coming year, we will be collating and analysing data in order to set other long term environmental goals.

Our targets for the year ahead are:

Carbon

• Reduce carbon emissions by 3% on prior year for all offices covered by our EMS
• Achieve Carbon Trust Certification in the UK

Business Travel

• Increase videoconferencing usage by 10% across the Group

Waste

• Decrease general waste by 3% in the UK
• Measure general and recyclable waste for our non UK offices

Stakeholder Engagement

• Establish environmental engagement programmes for operational staff globally
• Work with key stakeholders to improve the environmental management of our main events in the UK including Cowes Week and the Scottish Open
• Work with our external Global Data Centre to reduce emissions from this facility

Automated Data collection

• Implement an automated system to collect and record our environmental data for offices in our EMS

Please refer to our 2012 Corporate Responsibility report to find out more.