| Environmental Principles and Social Performance | Reducing our carbon footprint
We are committed to reducing our own carbon footprint. The most effective way to achieve this is to mitigate our direct impacts – primarily air travel but also space heating, equipment use and use of paper. Over this past year we have:
- Put in place a new global intranet to help staff share their knowledge and experience and reduce the need for meetings.
- Held over 1,600 internal meetings using web-enabled tools (a 350% increase on the previous year).
- Replaced our hard copy client newsletters with electronic versions.
We estimate our carbon footprint for 2006 was 13 thousand tones of CO2e (around 4.3 tones of CO2e per employee). To reduce this further during the coming year we are focusing on additional reductions in our travel by minimizing the number of administrative meetings. We are also examining ways of reducing the use of electricity and gas in our offices.
Supporting low carbon enterprises
We recognize that the principal contribution ERM can make to sustainable development is the expertise and advice that we can bring to the work we do with our clients.
We plan to contribute our skills to reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions by establishing a pro-bono program funded to a level equivalent to the external purchasing of carbon offset.
The pro-bono program, managed by the ERM Foundation, will be used to provide our expertise to help entrepreneurs in the emerging economies establish enterprises to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions.
In effect, our goal is to leverage the pro-bono time of our consultants to reduce carbon by at least the amount we would gain through offsets. We are also examining the possibility of supporting a fund designed to finance small-scale low carbon ventures in the emerging world.
We will establish the pro-bono program from October 2007 on a pilot basis and measure our effect from April 2008.
Our People
Our people are the foundation of everything we do. We are
committed to providing the opportunities and resources to help them achieve their differing career aspirations and play to their different strengths. Our internal surveys make it clear to us that the key issues we need to address continue to be career progression and engagement with both ERM and its strategy.
Our training programs provide consultants at all levels with the opportunity to develop their skills with training for the year focused strongly on Project Management Excellence.
We now employ more than 3,000 people, over 14% more than in the previous year. The highest growth has been in our Europe, Middle East and Africa region. We currently have over 340 Worldwide Partners who are all shareholders and the leaders of our people. Last year we hired 24 new Partners and promoted another 27 ERMers to that level. Over 130 people are currently participating in our Partner-in-Training Program, with a view to being promoted to Partner in the next few years.
ERM Foundation
The ERM Foundation supports social and environmental projects around the world, led by ERM employees who volunteer their time to undertake the majority of fundraising and practical involvement.
In the past 12 years the North American ERM Foundation has raised over US$1million to support a wide variety of projects globally. The ERM Foundation is also now well established in Australia, the UK and South Africa. Many of the projects funded and supported by the ERM Foundation are based in our local communities. For example the coastal clean-up projects on the West Coast of North America and an adopt-a-highway program to clean-up trash from the roadside on the East Coast. In Australia 10 members of the Sydney office became mentors to local school children and provided technical expertise to the World Wildlife Fund on projects aimed at supporting the global environment. In Puerto Rico ERM joined local young mothers-to-be for lunch to donate 18 baskets of baby products and in South Africa we teamed up with Sunrise on African Peaks Kidz to provide environmental education through a range of focused activities.
We have also helped to fund projects including Water for People’s work to provide health education and cleaner water; a program providing chemotherapy for children from underserved communities in Mexico; a water reservoir in Bolivia; a scholarship at a university in the US for incoming professional science masters students who would otherwise be unable to pursue their studies; and in the UK, a project to improve and preserve a nature reserve and fund a school tree program.
ERM Foundation Global Social Entrepreneurialship Fund
This fund was set up in 2005 based on a donation of US$500,000 by ERM Partners around the world to support local entrepreneurs implement projects which support sustainable development. Instead of awarding grants to charitable organizations, the fund provides loans to local entrepreneurs who are unable to obtain funding in other ways. We have currently provided social investment loans to a Jatropha project in Madagascar and a Sustainable Forestry project in Ecuador.
Rebuilding Tsunami-affected Regions
With the Rotary Foundation as a partner and vehicle to deliver ERM’s funds directly to local projects, restoration has begun of 25 tsunami-damaged public schools in Sri Lanka. The ERM Foundation is focusing its funding on school science laboratory refurbishment by restocking necessary supplies for science labs. In Thailand, ERM funds supported the rebuilding of a kindergarten school building damaged by the tsunami in the Phuket Province, and in India funding was spread among several villages to maximize rebuilding efforts including a new primary school and two clean drinking water supply systems. In addition, sanitation systems were constructed in two coastal fishing villages.
To read more about the projects the ERM Foundation
is supporting please go to www.erm.com/foundation.
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