Green From The Inside Out

Reflecting on our sustainability journey

Leaders, experts, and activists from around the globe have been gathering at COP26 in Glasgow to accelerate climate action, but these talks are not just happening in government buildings amongst policy makers.

They’re being discussed in boardrooms, classrooms, and living rooms. It’s on the agenda during my meetings with clients, and is often a topic of conversation between my family and friends.

Clearly, this is an issue that cannot be ignored or postponed.

Deloitte Belgium has led the way for many years now in terms of its focus on sustainability. When I became CEO in 2016, these ambitions became my personal goals, as I sought to shift the needle even further and do more to green up our organisation from the inside out. To do this, it meant we first needed to look in the mirror and learn where we currently stood.

So we took stock of our business, but this wasn’t your typical audit. We looked for the areas that caused the greatest amount of CO2 emissions, and the results made us address what was at that time the unthinkable: our mobility situation.

The internal assessment confirmed our suspicions—70% of our CO2 emissions came from our fleet. We needed to overhaul our mobility strategy, but this wouldn’t be a simple task…it meant a complete cultural and behavioral shift.

Driving change

Belgians spend the most time in traffic out of all Europeans, after the United Kingdom, with an average of more than one working week spent in congestion per year (European Commission, 2017).

While we strongly believe in multimodal transport and green alternatives, and encourage our people to drive less, we also understand that cars still have their place in a modern mobility plan. Keeping cars as part of our renewed mobility programme was necessary, but so was making them more sustainable.

So we started with an awareness campaign and built up our multimodal mobility programme layer by layer, driving down emissions with our Responsible Mileage and Smart Parking initiatives. Over time, the impossible felt finally within reach as we noticed what’s good for the planet overruled long-held habits.

This isn’t a passing trend. Over the summer, close to 85% of employees who ordered a new company car chose an electric or hybrid vehicle. Today, 10% of our entire fleet is made up of electric (EV) and hybrid vehicles and by 2026, this will jump to 100%.

Bike zone

We also encourage Deloitters to explore and combine alternative methods of transport with our bike programme and cycling allowance, which incentivize our people to get on their bikes. By 2030, we predict 35% of our staff will cycle to the office as part of their daily commute.

We make progress in our mobility ambitions every day, but this isn’t the only impact area we’ve zoomed in on. Infrastructure alongside international business travel and what we call ‘green our firm’ are all in focus.

Rethink travel

We’re an international organisation, and on some occasions, a face-to-face meeting abroad is required. For those moments, we’ve implemented a new business travel policy that mandates train usage to neighbouring countries within a 500km radius.

Our ultimate goal is to achieve a 70% reduction in travel-related emissions per employee by 2030, irrespective of our business or workforce growth.

Digital first

Building sustainably with a keen awareness of energy usage are some of the ways we limit the CO2 emissions in our infrastructure. We’ve also prioritised the locations of our offices, positioning them centrally near public transport to ensure accessibility.?

For us, it’s about more than reducing or offsetting emissions. We’ve employed a digital first mindset to address our paper consumption, incorporating new technologies into our practice to cut down the waste.

Rewrite our future, together

These activities and initiatives have helped us shift the needle in our journey to becoming completely carbon-neutral by 2030, but we still needed to shift the engagement of our people.

Real change comes from a collective effort, so we launched a mandatory education programme in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to boost climate change literacy in our people. By educating and inspiring our people, we can help drive collective action.

It’s also about bringing our clients on board, and we’re doing this through a variety of service offerings that help them define objectives and initiatives that actively contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Another part of this commitment is being transparent about where we came from, where we are now, and where we want to go. In October, we launched our second edition of the Deloitte Belgium Sustainability Report, a progress report highlighting our green efforts from our 2021 fiscal year.

In it you’ll learn that we are on track to meet or exceed our sustainability ambitions across the board, however, the COVID-19 pandemic did play a role in accelerating our headway in many areas.

Lessons learned

The pandemic taught us a lot, and we carry those lessons forward in our decisions and actions, especially in terms of our environmental impact.

While the greatest minds of our time are working around the clock to resolve the COVID-19 crisis, the climate emergency cannot be solved with a vaccine.

COP26 ends today but the threat to our planet remains and the window to mitigate the worst of climate change through meaningful action grows smaller with each passing day.

Ultimately, we are all faced with millions of choices. I know what my choices are and I hope you consider yours.

Thank you for reading.

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