• Jump to main content
  • Jump to main navigation
  • About us
  • Careers
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • Media Centre
  • Contact
  • The Brain
Hymans Robertson
  • Pensions
    • Back to Main Menu
    • Defined Benefit Consulting
      • DB Actuarial
      • DB Investment
      • DB Pensions Administration
      • DB Risk Transfer
      • DB Member Choice – At retirement
      • DB Governance
      • DB Consolidation
      • DB Wind-up
      • DB Endgame Strategy
      • Expert Actuarial Services
      • Fiduciary Oversight
      • Climate Change Services
      • Responsible Investment
      • Project Planning and Management
    • Defined Contribution Consulting
      • DC Pension Strategy
      • DC Scheme Structure
      • DC Investment
      • DC Engagement
      • DC Member Choice - At-retirement
      • DC Governance
      • Guided Outcomes
      • DC Master Trusts
      • Benefits and Rewards Strategy
      • Project Planning and Management
      • Climate Change Services
      • Responsible Investment
      • Communications
    • Public Sector Consulting
      • LGPS Actuarial
      • LGPS Investment
      • LGPS Governance, Administration and Projects
      • LGPS Employers
      • LGPS Online Learning Academy
      • Ill Health Liability Insurance
      • Climate Change Services
      • Responsible Investment
  • Financial Services
    • Back to Main Menu
    • Insurance
      • Longevity Management
      • Product Development
      • Risk and Capital Management
      • Investment and ALM
      • Property and Casualty
      • Regulated Roles
      • Insurance Transactions
      • Project Planning and Management
    • Pension Providers
      • Digital Tools and APIs
      • Competitive Benchmarking
      • Proposition development
      • Operational Support
    • Digital Wealth
      • GO™ For Investment Pathways
      • Economic Scenario Service
      • API Catalogue
      • Strategic Asset Allocation
  • Digital & Innovation
    • Back to Main Menu
    • Digital & Innovation
      • API Catalogue
      • Economic Scenario Service
      • Digital Products
      • PRISM - Digital Pension Administration
    • Economic Scenario Service
      Explore the consequences of today's business decisions
    • Digital and Innovation
      We apply data science, technology expertise and innovation to help our clients build a better financial future.
  • Insights
    • Back to Main Menu
    • See all Insights
      • Webinars
      • Podcasts
      • Research and Publications
      • Blogs
      • Case studies
      • Press Releases
      • Events
    • Webinars
      Register for upcoming webinars as well as visiting our extensive webinar replay library.
    • All Insights
      See our latest thinking.
  • Team
  • About us
  • Careers
  • Diversity & Inclusion
  • Media Centre
  • Contact
  • The Brain
  • Search

Our website uses cookies (what’s this?). These cookies allow us to distinguish you from other users of our website, which helps us improve our website and to deliver many of the functions that make your browser experience more user-friendly. Some of the cookies that we use are essential for parts of the website to operate. By using this website you agree to our use of cookies. To find out more, including how to opt out, please read our Cookies Policy.

OK

Blog

Our climate pledge and vision

The story behind our carbon footprint pledge

18 Jan 2021 - Estimated reading time: 4 mins

Peter Hennessey

by Peter Hennessey
Head of CSR

Subject: Better Futures, Climate change

Audiences: Employers, Insurance & Financial Services, Providers, Public Sector, Retail Advisory, Trustees

We’re proud and excited to launch our Climate Pledge, inspired by our ‘Together, building better futures’ purpose. It’s the perfect way to kick-off the firm’s one hundredth birthday celebrations.

The groundwork

Our carbon commitments are significant and ambitious, and certainly not undertaken lightly. They’re the culmination of more than a year’s work and consultation across the firm involving our equity and associate members, green champions, leadership teams and many more. All have endorsed our carbon reduction plans and - alongside everyone else in the firm - will play a key role in delivering them.  

We first teamed up with Enistic, our carbon management consultants to discuss our carbon reduction aspirations and objectives in 2019. Since then we’ve worked closely with them to understand and map our impact on the environment, to ensure we can accurately measure our carbon footprint and to develop our carbon reduction strategy.  It’s been challenging, enjoyable, educational and above all a steep learning curve; we couldn’t have done it without expert support.

Understanding and reducing our carbon footprint

We’re a consulting business with dispersed offices and clients across the UK and beyond. This means that travel (particularly domestic flights), commuting and energy make up the vast majority of our carbon footprint.

The baseline for our commitments is our 2019/20 carbon footprint of 1998 tonnes. We were able to make an immediate impact with certified renewable energy powering each of our offices, reducing our footprint by 357 tonnes. That leaves us over 660 tonnes of carbon to remove from our footprint by 2025. We expect a large proportion of that will come from reducing our travel, particularly by plane, and by switching from air to rail whenever possible when we do need to make a trip. Did you know that a train journey from Scotland to London has less than 20% of the carbon footprint of the equivalent journey by air?

One silver-lining of the covid pandemic is that it’s illustrated what we can achieve without travelling and commuting. We can’t wait to get back together with each other and with our clients. People, collaboration and relationships are what make our business, but we’re determined to also learn from the past year and to keep doing things more flexibly and smartly going forward.  We’ll also continue to address every other aspect of our footprint to help us deliver our ‘reduce by 50%’ commitment.

The role of carbon off-setting

The biggest impact we can have on the environment is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and therefore our carbon emissions. However, we also know that – for the foreseeable future at least – we’ll continue to have a carbon footprint, and this will need to be offset each year for us to reach our net zero carbon goal.  I’m delighted that the firm has also committed to offset our estimated lifetime carbon consumption by 2025, amounting to over 33,000 tonnes (a figure calculated with the help of Enistic).

An immediate goal is to identify the best way to do that. We’ll be using Gold Standard accreditation as our quality benchmark and will ensure that any off-setting schemes we use are fully verifiable, traceable and deliver additional benefits. Once our shortlisted options are agreed the plan is to involve our people to help select the projects that we support, while the firm has also pledged to help everyone in the business offset their own individual footprint by matching their contribution £ for £.

Only the end of the beginning…

We’ve come a long way already, but know the launch of our climate pledge is still just the beginning of our carbon reduction journey. The hard work starts now, and we hope to involve everyone connected with our firm – our people, clients, suppliers and friends – as we set out on a net zero future. Please join us and get involved! And finally, transparency and communication will be a key element of our mission; we’ll make sure we keep you informed along the way.

Thanks for reading, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Subscribe to our news and insights

Related content

Responsible Investment News and Views – August 2022

Publications 03 Aug 2022

Why Voice of Client can help you

Blogs 21 Jul 2022

Current Issues in Insurance & Financial Services – Summer 2022

Publications 07 Jul 2022

Hymans Robertson releases Stewardship guide for Pension Scheme Trustees

News 05 Jul 2022

0 comments on this post

Comment

  • Share this via Twitter
  • Share this via Linkedin
  • Share this via Email
Related content
Close related articles

Responsible Investment News and Views – August 2022

Publications

Why Voice of Client can help you

Blogs

Current Issues in Insurance & Financial Services – Summer 2022

Publications

Hymans Robertson releases Stewardship guide for Pension Scheme Trustees

News

Subscribe to our news and insights

Menu

About

    • Abelica Global
    • About us
    • Award-winning advice
    • Careers
    • CSR
    • Diversity & Inclusion
    • Our Centenary
    • Hymans Robertson Investment Services
    • Hymans Robertson Personal Wealth

Legal

  • Accessibility
  • Modern Slavery Act Transparency Statement
  • Trust centre
  • Privacy notice
  • Terms of use

Resources

  • Conflicts of Interest
  • Coronavirus (COVID-19)
  • Responsible Investment
  • Gender Pay Gap
  • Sitemap

Contact

  • Our offices
  • Get in touch
  • Subscribe
    • Visit us on Linkedin
    • Visit us on Twitter
    • Visit us on Instagram
    • Visit us on Vimeo
    • Visit us on Spreaker
Hymans Robertson

Copyright © 2022 Hymans Robertson LLP. All rights reserved.