Delivering Sustainable Legacies: Our 2024 Sustainability Report

Fostering sustainability in our culture

Our employees are our greatest asset, and we have taken action to create the best workplace in our industry. This includes implementing requisite sustainability training programs to help our people work safely, sustainably and ethically. As part of this process our teams are trained on our global sustainability risk framework, aligned with our Sustainable Legacies strategy, which is critical to continually assessing project and environmental risks across every decision we make. We’ve achieved strong employee engagement and training completion for the fourth consecutive year.

Continuing to embrace diversity

We’re proud to be improving the diversity of our workforce and achieving our near-term goal of women comprising at least 20 percent of our leadership. We continue to make further progress against our 35 percent near-term target of women company-wide while also advancing our non-gender diversity targets within each region of our business. We also strengthened our professional development programs to help our employees build meaningful careers and foster talent.

Addressing climate change

Through our global climate change risk assessment conducted over the last year, we recognized numerous risks and opportunities related to climate change and the transition to net-zero carbon emissions. To identify these risks and opportunities over time and to manage the uncertainty around future changes to the climate, we have conducted scenario analysis using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) published in the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6).

Growing our ESG Advisory business

The increasing depth and scope of our capabilities is driving substantial growth in our ESG Advisory business, which assists clients in achieving their own ambitious net zero and sustainability agendas. Our perspectives and approaches, built upon our extensive first-hand experience, differentiate us and our clients are actively engaging and responding.

Driving our ScopeX^TM initiative

Most recently we implemented our ScopeX™ approach, which aims to ensure early engagement and alignment with project scope to maximize carbon reduction impact. ScopeX™ is a way of systemizing the methods, workflows and technologies needed to decarbonize the projects we deliver, and our recent ScopeX™ decarbonization policy formalizes how we can embed decarbonization principles into everything we do.

Revolutionizing the development of sustainable infrastructure

Our focus on sustainability drives us forward with the latest technology, particularly in our role leading the Sustainable Markets Initiative task force on measurement and transparency. This work has led us to build the innovative and collaborative SMI Nature Risk Tool, which was developed in partnership with stakeholders and industry experts to create a forward-looking, decision-ready solution to guide early-stage infrastructure decisions. As we embark on pilot projects, our aim is to significantly expand access to this transformative tool, advancing sustainable and resilient infrastructure worldwide.

Leading the industry

We were honored with the Terra Carta Seal by the Sustainable Market Initiative, underscoring our prominent role among private sector firms working toward a more sustainable future. In addition, as ranked by the Engineering-News Record, we were recognized as the top water, transportation and facilities design firm in April 2024. When combined with our existing number one positions in environmental engineering and environmental science, we have established ourselves as the leading firm across each of our end markets.