Environment

Climate change and environmental sustainability present challenges for Accenture, our clients and our suppliers. We are committed to understanding and addressing environmental impacts—including carbon, waste and water—resulting from our operations and to fostering environmentally sustainable growth among our stakeholders, including employees, clients and suppliers. Our environmental strategy spans our entire business operation and comprises four areas: running efficient operations, working sustainably, enabling client sustainability and providing insights to advance sustainability.

Environmental stewardship is ingrained in our Code of Business Ethics (COBE) and our core values, specifically Stewardship. These inform our Environmental Responsibility Policy, which we established in 2007, updated in 2009 and review annually. Accountability for our environmental strategy starts with our Chairman & CEO and cascades through our business, to our Chief Leadership Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Global Geographic Services Managing Director, and to their respective teams across Corporate Citizenship, Workplace Solutions and Environmental Operations.

We have a clear governance structure to drive performance toward our goals and to articulate roles and responsibilities for our environmental efforts. Our Environmental Steering Group meets quarterly to monitor our environmental performance and identify improvement areas. It also supports a dedicated subcommittee of our Global Management Committee (GMC)—the Accenture Corporate Citizenship Committee (ACCC)—in making strategic recommendations on our sustainability initiatives. The ACCC approves major initiatives, including our carbon-reduction targets, and monitors our Environmental Responsibility Policy. At the same time, the GMC, ACCC, our Chief Leadership Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Board of Directors—which includes our Chairman & CEO—are accountable for our corporate objective of fostering environmentally sustainable growth.

We run and grow our business on an environmentally sustainable basis, cultivating eco-efficient practices that include energy management and resource conservation. Environment leads across our geographies actively manage and monitor our resource conservation and energy, water and waste management practices.

Because more than 80 percent of our environmental footprint consists of carbon emissions generated from air travel and electricity, we are committed to addressing both of these as we work to improve our environmental performance.

We met our fiscal 2012 target of reducing our per employee carbon emissions approximately 30 percent from our fiscal 2007 baseline, achieving a more than 33 percent reduction. Our efforts to encourage the adoption of virtual-collaboration technologies continue to help us manage air travel, even as we have expanded into growth markets and increased our fiscal year-end headcount by 87,000 employees, or approximately 50 percent, since 2007. We remain focused on improving our performance and have set a new target: by the end of fiscal 2015, we plan to reduce our per employee carbon emissions 35 percent against our fiscal 2007 baseline. View our environmental performance chart.

Energy management

We proactively manage energy use throughout our locations. Since fiscal 2009, our energy efficiency programs have helped us save approximately 250,000 Megawatt hours of electricity, which also avoided nearly 160,000 tons of carbon. In addition, in fiscal 2012, Accenture's global ISO 14001 certification was renewed for the 66 sites in scope, including five new sites. We have tailored our Environmental Management System (EMS) to each site, allowing for the monitoring of local priorities in addition to our global performance measures. Many Accenture offices around the world hold green building certifications, including Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) and Green Star 6.

To reduce our use of office electricity, we began implementing Remote Energy Monitoring (REM) technologies in fiscal 2010, prioritizing high-consumption locations. These have yielded up to a 10 percent energy efficiency improvement in some locations within weeks. We ended fiscal 2012 with more than 140 "smart meters" in 19 targeted office locations across 11 countries and expect this number to reach more than 200 in fiscal 2013. Through real-time monitoring, smart meters enable us to make more-informed decisions about our energy consumption.

We also procure more than 10 percent of our office electricity from renewable sources. For example, in fiscal 2012 we purchased renewable wind electricity for our largest office in Chennai, India, totaling 11,340,900 kWh, which enabled us to avoid more than 10,000 tons of carbon. In light of market constraints around the availability of renewable energy, going forward we will continue to source it where possible while also exploring other green energy options as part of our carbon-reduction effort.

Waste and water management

Across our company, we are committed to ensuring the proper disposal of electronic waste (e-waste)—which may contain toxic materials such as lead, mercury and cadmium. To achieve this, we diligently manage our equipment through its life cycle using a global tracking application and partner with responsible disposal vendors. In fiscal 2012, we tracked the disposal of more than 58,000 laptop and desktop computers comprising more than 273 metric tons of equipment, an increase of approximately 100 metric tons over fiscal 2011, which reflects accelerated hardware refresh programs. Approximately 99 percent of these were disposed of in a method avoiding landfill, primarily through management by responsible disposal vendors. We strengthened our e-waste disposal program in 2012 by implementing a global policy that mandates a no-landfill requirement in situations where it can be avoided and that specifies security guidelines for data removal. In addition, we identified new vendors who meet our quality and responsibility standards in additional geographies and took further measures to promote vendor accountability.

Although we recognize the increasing importance of water scarcity and availability, our operations, by their nature, are not water-intensive. In fiscal 2011, using the Global Water Tool provided by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, we performed an analysis of water consumption in our offices located in areas of water scarcity. We estimate that our per-workstation consumption in these locations is less than 10 meters³ annually. We continue to monitor our consumption on an annual basis and promote the careful use of water, implementing improvements where necessary.

Learn more about Accenture's environmental performance.

As business travel continues to be at the heart of Accenture's  delivery model, we are teaming with clients, when appropriate, to implement smart work and alternative travel arrangements so we can stay connected and deliver value with maximum efficiency, regardless of where our people are located.

Our Smart Work program—which promotes flexible work options—and investment in collaborative technologies are helping us reduce the environmental impacts and costs associated with business travel as we redefine how we work. In fact, Smart Work and collaboration technologies contributed to a 10 percent reduction in per person air travel intensity in fiscal 2012 compared with fiscal 2011. Virtual collaboration, which leverages our extensive video conferencing and social networking capabilities, has become the norm at Accenture.

In fiscal 2012, we successfully migrated all Accenture people to Microsoft® Lync®, a powerful communication and collaboration platform, which enables our people to interact as if they were in the same office. By the end of fiscal 2012, approximately 150,000 of our professionals were enabled to conduct video calls from their laptops with a single click. We expect this number to surpass 200,000 before the end of fiscal 2013. Currently, our people log more than 43 million video conferencing minutes per year. In addition, more than 100 of our client organizations are connected with Accenture in secure virtual collaboration and/or communication networks, enabling us to reduce the need for travel.

Our Smart Work program helps reduce our travel footprint by having employees work one or more weeks per month from their local office or home-office locations, as appropriate, and the remainder of the month at the client site. Additionally, in fiscal 2012 Accenture introduced a new travel policy encouraging virtual collaboration over in-person travel, as well as an associated personalized Web tool, which makes it easier for our people to understand their travel-related carbon impact by providing a monthly and year-to-date summary of their carbon emissions and encouraging them to leverage virtual meeting technologies. Further, our local offices develop programs aimed at decreasing carbon emissions through alternative travel arrangements, such as carpooling and public transportation.

Engaging our employees

Our people enthusiastically create and adopt innovative approaches to eco-smart work practices, notably in our global Eco Challenge competitions, which encourage embedding eco-smart work practices into Accenture projects.

Our Eco Champion networks create innovative approaches to eco-smart work practices and support our efforts to drive their adoption across our geographies. We have more than 300 eco teams in 40 countries, encompassing approximately 4,000 employee volunteers. Our people lead local efforts that include addressing office waste and emissions, promoting telecommuting and alternative travel options and organizing Earth Day and UN World Environment Day events.

In 2009, employees participated in Accenture's first global Eco Challenge, designed to help employees estimate their carbon footprints online and pledge to reduce their impact. In 2010, more than 100 project teams submitted environmental impact reduction case studies and in 2011, more than 160 teams representing more than 1,400 employees committed to reduce their carbon footprints by more than 3,300 metric tons. Our fourth annual global Eco Challenge in fiscal 2012 helped us extend our reach, not only to our people, but to our recruits and other stakeholders worldwide. We challenged them to participate in the "Are You a Green Superhero?" interactive game and test their knowledge regarding Accenture's sustainability commitments, performance and offerings, as well as general environmental information. The game was played 50,000 times in more than 60 countries during the global employee competition in June.

A sustainable supply chain

As we strive to improve the sustainability of our own operations, Accenture also seeks to use our knowledge, experience and technologies to encourage our suppliers' sustainability efforts.

Since 2007, we have asked all new suppliers in our Procurement process questions about their environmental performance. In fiscal 2012, 97 percent of RFPs issued by Procurement included environmental questionnaires—beating our 95 percent target for fiscal 2012. Further, we expect our suppliers to comply with our Supplier Standards of Conduct, which include environmental criteria and are now part of our sourcing and contracting process. We are also committed to helping our suppliers comply with these standards and, in turn, expect our suppliers to apply these standards to their own suppliers. 

In addition, we have been corporate members of CDP’s Supply Chain program since 2010, which enables us to take a strategic, standardized approach to communicating with our most-critical suppliers on their climate-change strategies. In fiscal 2012 we increased the number of suppliers and expanded the category, size and location of the suppliers we asked to participate. We are pleased to have reached a 73 percent response rate. This year, we are increasing the number of suppliers we review and implementing measures to better leverage the sustainability performance information we receive from our suppliers.

Accenture is committed to helping forward-thinking organizations position sustainability as a key lever to long-term success. Our Sustainability professionals help clients leverage their assets and capabilities to drive innovation and profitable growth, while striving for positive economic, environmental and social impacts. For example, in Portugal, we worked collaboratively with 15 consumer goods companies and retailers in GS1 Portugal—a forum of consumer goods manufacturers and retailers—to optimize the industry supply chain and transport networks and reduce carbon emissions.

We are also working with Vodafone globally to deploy mobile solutions that boost incomes for smallholder farmers while reducing environmental impact from carbon emissions and freshwater withdrawals.

For another of our clients, we are rolling out an innovative “sustainability delivery methodology” that embeds sustainability throughout our existing and new engagements, directly supporting this client in achieving its global related objectives. The three-way approach involves partnering to identify ways that existing programs can deliver sustainability outcomes, offering innovative solutions to make transformational changes and proactively working to minimize the environmental impacts, such as travel and office energy consumption, associated with our solution delivery.

In addition, we invest in technologies and solutions-—including intelligent infrastructure, cloud computing and smart grid solutions—that we believe will be the drivers of our clients' growth as well as helping meet climate change objectives. In fiscal 2012 we invested US$560 million in research and development to help create, commercialize and disseminate innovative business strategies and technology solutions.

For these and our other clients, we combine a comprehensive set of assets, offerings and tools with our insights and deep experience to help them achieve high performance.

We strive to contribute to the overall environmental agenda, helping to gain insight into issues and working with other businesses and organizations on solutions that will help make the world a better place. In 2010, we partnered with the UNGC to conduct the CEO study, "A New Era of Sustainability." We are teaming again for the next triennial edition, due to be published later in 2013.

Additionally, Accenture is playing a leadership role in the development of the UNGC's Sustainable Energy for All initiative, a strategy on the future of global energy. As part of our effort to engage the broader business community, Accenture and the UNGC jointly launched a series of landmark thought leadership reports detailing how organizations can capture business value from sustainable energy initiatives. In addition, we remain intimately involved in the development of private-sector partnerships to create energy-access initiatives. We are a founding member, and our Chairman & CEO is an executive board member, of the Green Growth Action Alliance, a World Economic Forum initiative that supports environmentally and economically sustainable growth through the collaboration of more than 50 leading financial institutions, corporations, governments and nongovernmental organizations.

Finally, Accenture has a long-standing relationship with CDP as its Global Implementation Partner. We play an important role in helping expand the organization's reach and make robust and meaningful data available to corporations and other stakeholders as they strive to reduce their carbon footprints. We also work with CDP to produce a number of key reports annually, such as the Supply Chain report, the Global and European Cities reports and specific country reports.