Our responsibility 2016
WS Atkins plc
This content has been extracted from
pages 46 to 51 of our Annual Report 2016
Sustainability is an integral part of our purpose. Within our corporate sustainability reporting we showcase the expertise and drive that exists within Atkins to support our clients to tackle sustainability challenges, such as population growth, urbanisation, resource scarcity, skills
shortages, energy security and climate change. In order to measure our impacts on society, the environment and the economy, we theme our sustainability activities around three pillars; a society for our future, an environment with a future and a responsible business of the future.
Nested below these pillars are a total of 11 sustainability principles. We provide detail of our progress against each of these principles on our website www.atkinsglobal.com/ responsibility and highlight some of the most significant developments within this report.
the expertise and drive that exists within Atkins to
support our clients to tackle sustainability challenges.
The future depends on what we do today.
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As one of the world's major design, engineering and project management consultancies, we help to provide the minds and ideas behind transforming the world’s built environment and play a central role as stewards of society’s economic, social and environmental fabric. This can be considered our indirect contribution. Our direct contribution is who we are and how we behave as an organisation, demonstrating responsibility and accountability to our stakeholders. We believe we have a responsibility to help enable a sustainable future through our leadership role, our operations and the services we provide.
By far our greatest contribution to sustainable development is through the work we carry out for clients and so much of our reporting relates to our indirect contribution.
Leadership
As part of our commitment to becoming a more responsible and sustainable organisation we continue to share best practice with senior leaders throughout the Group. Kelvin TOPSET training has been rolled out across the Group (excluding mainland Europe). TOPSET teaches companies how to investigate incidents, to understand the causes and to prevent incident recurrence, while helping to standardise and simplify incident investigation procedures. As part of our behavioural safety programme, safe by
leadership training has been rolled out to senior managers and directors Group wide as we seek to lead and positively influence our industry and set its standards. We continue to place great emphasis on our technical leadership through Atkins Fellows, a group of experts in their fields, and our technical networks. Much of our technical leadership is highly relevant to the sustainability challenges that society faces. An example is a report we have published on Journeys of the Future – Introducing Mobility as a Service. This looks at how technology will be a critical driver of change in the transport sector in the coming years and how traditional assumptions regarding transportation will be challenged.
Raising safety and welfare standards
We continue to promote improvements in health and safety standards across our industry. An important channel for this is the global network of Consultants’ Health and Safety Forums which we have often been instrumental in establishing. Our people also play their part in driving up standards through engagement in industry leadership and participation in professional forums and conferences.
This is the sixth year that health and safety standards in our UK business have been recognised by a Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents Gold Medal.
A society for our future
Inspiring the next generation
We recognise that inspiring the next generation of engineers to build a sustainable future is critical and our careers website advertises all of our early career opportunities with dedicated graduate pages. We also run a variety of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) outreach programmes focused on encouraging young people to study STEM topics and consider related careers. Further information about our approach and the number of people attracted to our graduate and apprenticeship programmes can be found within Our people (page 42).
Supporting our people’s development
We are committed to supporting our people’s development, equipping them to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions. We have held a series of webinars about carbon critical buildings, open to all employees Group wide and hosted by our own sustainability experts, and challenged our people to contribute to the debate about whether, and how, we can make buildings zero carbon by 2020.
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Social and community investment
We encourage and support our people to make an even greater contribution to the social, environmental and economic health of our communities. Across each segment, we focus our efforts where we believe our skills can do the most good. For example in North America, The Atkins Foundation, which funds STEM related activities, student scholarships, and community-based programmes, donated over $96,000 to fund projects across America. In Asia Pacific, our Indian offices have raised funds for the SUKRUPA education centre, which provides free schooling, food and basic health care for pre-school children, and also supported a local orphanage. In the UK, we received the Gold Defence Employer Recognition Scheme award from the Ministry of Defence in recognition of our support for staff who are Armed Forces Reservists.
A healthy, safe and secure workplace
We are committed to providing and maintaining a safe and healthy working environment for our employees and ensuring the safety of others affected by our operations and services.
Through our corporate Wellbeing programme, we have adopted a range of strategies to improve employee health and wellbeing. For example, we have started to pilot desks that enable people to stand as they work, generating a range of health benefits, as part of our agile working initiative. We have also launched WellbriefingTM, a tool that helps
our clients put people’s wellbeing at the heart of building design. It focuses on nine interconnected physical and psychological aspects and provides a useful benchmark for post occupancy evaluation of the building, assessing whether our designs have been effective in improving occupants’ wellbeing.
Atkins operating safely, a bespoke system designed to help keep our people safe when they are visiting sites and unfamiliar offices, was successfully launched in 2014/15 in the UK and the system is now being used in North America and the Middle East.
We are focused on promoting our security principles across the Group to build our security culture. Part of our code of conduct focuses on the safety behaviours of our employees, highlighting the importance of reporting any health and safety issues or near misses. We continue to work with colleagues, clients and our supply chain to try to ensure that health, safety and security are fully integrated into our decision-making processes.
Safety performance
The accident incidence rate (AIR) is an industry measure of the number of reportable accidents per 100,000 staff. Our AIR figures summarise employee and supply chain performance. This performance is categorised into working in offices, in engineering environments (e.g. on-site support activity) and in construction, involving installation or construction activity. In each case, our level of performance compares well with industry averages.
Our office and construction AIRs have improved again this year, however there has been a very small increase in the engineering AIR. This is due to one additional accident in this category being reported.
AIR (staff & contractors)
11–12 12–13 13–14 14–15 Year N u mb er 15–16 1000 800 600 400 0 200
An environment with a future
A low carbon economy
We have continued our work to become a low carbon organisation.
Measuring and reporting emissions to stakeholders and investors
We have disclosed data to CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), the global platform for organisational disclosure of investor-relevant climate change data, for the last seven years.
The Group again achieved certification to the ISO 14064 international standard for quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. We report on gas, electricity and liquid fuel consumption, and travel emissions. Table 1 shows total emissions by region split between scopes one, two and three, as defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.
Reducing our emissions
We have consolidated office space and moved to agile office environments to help to reduce the energy we consume in our offices. We are also making better use of telecommunications and video conferencing to reduce travel related emissions, in particular with the introduction of Skype for business.
Transition to a low carbon economy
We are taking action to reduce the environmental impact of our own offices. For example, in the UK, we have designed a new 1,000 person purpose-built office for our teams, allowing us to exit and demolish an energy inefficient 1950s office block. In Tianjin province of China, the Atkins designed TEDA H2 building won a certificate of excellence in the A&D Trophy Awards 2015 under the category of Green or Sustainable. This is the world’s first low-carbon building to have been accredited with four green building certificates under different assessment schemes: the US LEED (Gold), the Chinese 3-Star (3 stars), the Japanese CASBEE (S Class) and the UK BREEAM (Very Good). The building was also named the Best Green Development by China Property Awards 2015.
Affordable, reliable and clean energy
As well as working to reduce emissions from our own operations, we also use our technical expertise in this area to help clients incorporate energy efficiency and low carbon design into their projects. For example, we are working with clients on the installation and use of combined heat and power (CHP) generation systems. The project aims to turn the excess biogas produced into useful energy. Being able to use both renewable and fossil fuels, CHP plants can provide electricity with efficiency ratings in excess of 80%, helping to reduce
A multidisciplinary Atkins team recently carried out a research project for the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) which forms part of a new report into the future development of the UK’s energy systems. The Power Plant Siting Study provided analysis into the siting constraints of potential locations for new low carbon and nuclear power stations and promoted the benefits of a mix of generation options including conventional nuclear reactors and small modular reactors (SMRs), carbon capture and storage and other low carbon technologies to produce a more robust and fit for purpose system. According to the report, published by ETI, both large scale new nuclear plants and SMRs will potentially play a major role in the move to an affordable low carbon economy. As discussed in our Energy segmental performance review (page 33), we have developed for Hexicon an innovative multi-turbine offshore wind floating platform. It will be tethered to the seabed by an innovative active mooring system, allowing the whole structure to be rotated by up to 45 degrees to maximise the energy capture and minimise wake effects from the adjacent turbines.
Atkins in Norway has a central role in the planning and development of five solar power plants in Egypt where the Government plans to supply 20% of installed capacity for renewable energy.
Table 1: Total emissions by source, region and scope in tonnes of CO2 for the years ended 31 March 2016 and 2015
Region Scope 1 Scope 2 Scope 3 2016 2015
Source Gas
Liquid
fuels Refrigerants Road Electricity Heat Rail Air
Regional total Regional total UK 1,243 57 8,186 7,307 1,174 4,052 22,019 22,582 Europe 4 228 471 56 108 104 971 1,118 North America 27 53 1,713 1 1,680 3,474 23,430 Middle East 638 1,906 1,921 4,465 4,735 Asia Pacific 6,937 7,623 3,458 18,018 4,556 Source totals 1,247 27 57 16,042 19,020 56 1,283 11,215 48,947 56,421
2016 Total 17,373 Total 19,076 Total 12,498
2015 Total 17,826 24,778 13,816
Expressing the emissions using employees as a ratio gives us a figure of 2.7 tonnes CO2e per employee. This is a reduction on the ratio for the year ended 31 March 2015 of 3.1 tonnes CO2e per employee.
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In Jeddah, KSA, we are working in partnership with Al Muhaidib, Vinci and the National Water Company, designing the Briman Strategic Water Reservoir, the world’s largest drinking water storage facility.
Respect for the environment
Managing resources
Our office sustainability programme, RACE2, is designed to get all of our people thinking and acting more sustainably and has continued to put our sustainability principles into action in our offices worldwide. Awards for contributions to the programme are being opened up across the Group for the first time in 2016.
Environmental projects for clients
In North America, we designed South Pointe Park Pier which was named as Project of the Year by the Miami-Dade Branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers in the $10m or less construction cost category. Protecting corals and water quality was pivotal to the project.
A responsible business
of the future
Technical excellence
We continue to provide sustainable value and technical excellence for our clients, using management standards to develop more collaborative client relationships. For example, our Right First Time behavioural programme, builds on the technical assurance standard that we have developed to define the requirements for all technical deliverables across the Group.
We are using new materials to achieve the kind of technical excellence required to drive the development of sustainable infrastructure. For example we won the Civil Engineering Project of the Year at the British Construction Industry Awards for Church Bridge Reconstruction, in South Gloucestershire. Through the use of adapted composite technology, familiar to us through our advanced engineering work for the wings of advanced civilian aircraft, our team designed and created one of the UK’s largest composite road bridges made entirely out of glass and carbon fibre. In the long term it is hoped this could help pave the way for a new generation of structures which cost substantially less over their lifetime than their concrete and steel equivalents.
Our technical networks support people in achieving technical excellence. Urban planners from around the Group met in Shanghai in October for the annual conference of Atkins’ Urban Planning Technical Network. Innovative projects ranged from planning for rapid urbanisation, tourism and industrial development in Asia Pacific to infrastructure-driven regeneration projects in the UK and small scale urban design interventions in Scandinavia.
Economic and environmental resilience
We work with our clients and other partners to translate investment in infrastructure and technology into economic and environmental resilience. We are collaborating to produce research to inform and influence decisions about the best steps to ensure future economic prosperity. In the UK, our future proofing cities team worked in partnership with Oxford Economics and Centre for London to identify that London is significantly underestimating the level of investment in infrastructure required to keep up with the city’s growth over the coming decades.
Strong governance and accountability
Our commitment to behaving as a responsible business, demonstrating transparency and fairness, is outlined by our Group policy statements and sustainability principles. Our code of conduct, Behaving the Atkins Way, which sets out what it means to think and behave as part of Atkins, has been firmly embedded across the Group.
Respect for human rights is critical to us and we seek to have a positive influence wherever we operate. We are proud of Atkins’ minimum requirements (AMR), which we developed a few years ago to enable us to influence clients and contractors in the Middle East to raise standards of health, safety and welfare during construction projects. The principles of AMR have now been adopted by a range of clients, consultants, contractors and others across our industry. The UK Modern Slavery Act resonates with our values and approach.
Respect for human rights is critical to us and we seek
to have a positive influence wherever we operate.
Strategic engagement for innovation
Across our worldwide business, we are playing our part in strategic engagement, aimed at developing innovative, sustainable infrastructure, responding effectively to climate change and initiating environmental protection initiatives.
We are delighted to have been appointed as the lead consultant for developing sustainable infrastructure under the new Infrastructure Project Preparation Framework established by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Over a three-year period (2015–2017), we will work to improve the efficiency and replicability of infrastructure projects for the benefit of the Bank’s clients. Our knowledge partnership with
Connect4Climate, a World Bank-sponsored initiative dedicated to raising awareness about climate change issues globally, is based upon our future proofing cities work, which creates a framework for understanding and addressing the risks that cities face.
In the UK, we have launched a centre for research and innovation with the University of Birmingham, Imperial College London and the British Geological Survey. Over the next five years, the centre will bring together academics, researchers and industry to build an integrated approach to managing the economic and environmental impact of groundwater infiltration into infrastructure. The long-term aim is to develop preventative techniques that will reduce ongoing asset management costs and improve environmental standards for the industry while reducing the risk of flooding in towns and cities.
We are very proud of our people’s commitment to Atkins’ sustainability principles and of their growing effect on our activities and operations. We have a central role as stewards of society’s economic, social and environmental fabric and, as a result, have a direct impact on the future through the work we do and the way that we do it. Playing our part as a responsible business is important to us, and we look forward to making further progress in the year ahead.
This Strategic Report was approved by the Board and signed on its behalf by
Prof Dr Uwe Krueger
CEO 15 June 2016 GOVERNANCE FINANCIAL ST A TEMENTS TION STRA TEGIC REPOR T 00 Strategic Report > Our responsibility
