Sustainability

GHD recognises the rapidly increasing urgency for society and business to address the global sustainability challenges of efficient use of natural and human capital, loss of biodiversity, poverty and population growth.

Our response to these challenges is to manage the social, economic and environmental consequences of our projects, provide positive outcomes wherever possible and avoid serious negative impacts.

GHD has identified climate change, biodiversity protection and community impacts as core sustainability issues for clients and stakeholders. Last year, the company launched a new Climate Change Service Line, to develop a business in greenhouse gas abatement and climate change risk adaptation. This team has won several important commissions including a strategic study for the Asian Development Bank.

GHD is an active member of the Australian Green Infrastructure Council and is coordinating the development of the Council’s sustainability rating tool. We are also members of Green Building Councils in Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, the UK and now the USA.

Our Sustainability and Environment policy reflects GHD’s commitment to being a responsible corporate citizen. GHD recognises its corporate responsibility to contribute to the goals of sustainable development and is committed to managing the social, economic and environmental impacts of our operations, and assisting our clients to manage theirs in the provision of our professional consulting services. We recognise innovation as the key to realising this aspiration.

Our policy commitments are given effect through examples such as:

• Environmental Management System (EMS) – GHD is certified to international standard ISO 14001 by Lloyds Register Quality Assurance (LRQA)
• Sustainability Project Impact Assessments – To date, our Project Impact Assessment (PIA) methodology has been used on nearly 50 jobs and we are rolling it out across the company. PIA is a process used by GHD business development and project teams to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts of projects and as a way to brainstorm project improvement strategies. One of the bigger PIA projects involves engineering services for VicUrban’s Melbourne Docklands project. Melbourne Docklands is the city’s newest waterfront precinct, urban renewal project and Australia’s largest construction project. PIA has enabled GHD to suggest possible sustainability improvement strategies in energy, water, tram stops, material use and reuse, waste and vegetation.

In 2008, we established a Sustainability Advisory Group (SAG) to guide the implementation of our sustainability strategy.

SAG’s role is to:

• Identify global and local sustainability issues and determine how they might be addressed by GHD.
• Establish though-change, direction and policy for incorporation into GHD’s business.
• Monitor and provide feedback on EMS performance.
• Influence, review and report on GHD’s own sustainability performance.
• Investigate innovation opportunities, which advance sustainability in our business and services.
• Develop partnerships that assist in the instigation of and access to new technology and business.

Meeting regularly, SAG is quickly establishing an excellent overview of sustainability initiatives across GHD’s markets and areas of operation.

SAG is also identifying strategies, such as the need to leverage partner relationships to enhance access to knowledge, on a global scale.

Most significantly, SAG recognises it can become an effective communication agent to identify, receive and promote information on key issues such as energy security, emissions, trading, water conservation and management, allocation of natural resources and waste management. This assists GHD to realise opportunities for clients and for our people.

Managing our environmental impacts

The impacts of our operations are a consequence of our business activities in our buildings, transport and on-site activities for our clients. In this context our environmental impacts are considered to be water use, electricity use, paper use, waste production and recycling, fuel use and our greenhouse emissions.

Electricity Use

GHD continues to reduce its total electricity use in our offices¹.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions

GHD has developed a Life Cycle Assessment methodology to identify and quantify greenhouse gas emissions attributable to our services over their life cycle. Previous greenhouse assessments were based on available data for Australia, for which reliable emission factors exist, and extrapolated to the whole company. For the 2008 financial year, data for offices worldwide, where available, was included.

Our greenhouse gas emissions for 2008 are 4.7 tonnes CO2-e emissions/per employee/per annum, compared to 5.2 tonnes for 2007. Our inventory for this year is not directly comparable to previous years, as data collection improvements have been made and more accurate (lower) emission factors used for offices outside Australia. The largest sources of greenhouse emissions continue to be electricity use in our office buildings and those associated with air travel.

In order to reduce these major emission sources, each GHD office is introducing a range of measures to improve the energy and greenhouse intensity of our operations.

1. Includes only offices with reported data.
2. This figure is a correction of the figure of 6.4 tonnes per employee stated in our 2006/07 Annual Review.

Paper Use

A reduction of approximately 20 percent per person was achieved in 2008. This exceeds the target of 5 percent reduction and shows our ongoing commitment to reducing paper consumption.

A number of paper reduction measures were initiated including:

• Evaluation of 100% recycled paper supply for printer/copier paper across Australia.
• Evaluation of the environmental credentials of paper content of our major publications - GHD News and Annual Review.
• Provision of electronic greeting cards for Christmas and Chinese New Year instead of traditional paper cards.
• Printing restrictions on internal newsletters.
• Provision of paperless pay summaries.
• Joining the Project Paperless initiative in May 2008.

EMS Re-certification

GHD has an Environmental Management System certified to ISO 14001:2004. In 2008, we successfully completed our tri-annual re-certification audit.