Our Environment

Taking action to change workplace practices for the better

A five-stage journey to sustainable impact

David Berry

Partner & General Counsel

Humankind’s impact on the planet reminds me of the five ages of man from Greek mythology. In short, our passage from the golden age of innocence and harmony, degenerating through to selfishness and destruction.

Our challenge is to turn those five stages on their head and reverse them, turning our current damagingly exploitative way of living into one of harmony with the planet. So what can Charles Russell Speechlys – or any other business or commercial organisation – do about the environment? Follow a five-stage journey.

Stage one

This might be characterised by a fairly basic recognition that an organisation should be seen to be doing something to help the environment and reduce waste. For us, that was probably 10-12 years ago with a new environmental policy. Other features would have included central recycling bins for waste paper, an attempt to have all individual office bins removed to encourage recycling and movement-activated lighting in offices to try and reduce energy wastage.

Stage two

For us, this began around four years ago when we set up our Environmental Sustainability Task Force (eFORCE). We opened it up to all volunteers, and currently it has a membership of 40 with representation across all of our UK offices and teams. eFORCE has led the way in helping the Firm on its journey to becoming an environmentally sustainable business. Initiatives include replacing plasticised paper cups with 'keep cups' and re-usable water bottles, and most recently, running a survey to try and understand our “export” of energy usage through home working during lockdown (read more in Understanding the future workplace).

Stage three

This is a recognition that everything done to date is worthy but a general ambition to reduce our environmental impact is not sufficient.

We knew we needed to do more to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions and we engaged an external expert consultancy to help demystify our next steps (read more in Transitioning to net-zero). This work has resulted in some valuable recommendations and milestones to achieve over the remainder of this decade. Specifically, a target of achieving net zero by 2030 as part of the Firm’s 2021 strategic review. This is by reference to independently verified GHG emissions from 2019 as our base year.

Like other professional services organisations, the biggest impact comes from the goods and services that we buy in our supply chain. Measuring and reducing the GHG emissions in our supply chain is our biggest challenge.

To that end, various members of eFORCE have participated in a pro bono project over the last two years known as The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP) – read more about how this is working to drive sustainable behaviour in business and communities here.

Stage four

For us, is achieving net zero through significant carbon reductions and investment into carbon offsetting schemes such as reforestation; remedying degraded land; and renewable schemes in developing countries – offsetting the carbon that we are unable to eliminate.

Stage five

This will be further reductions in our most difficult to eliminate carbon emissions (most likely in our supply chain) and going beyond net zero by offsetting or other contributions to become net positive in our contribution to GHG emissions reductions.

I hope you can find some useful ideas from the efforts we are making to change our workplace practices and, more importantly, suggest some things we ought to be doing too. Either way, we’d be delighted to hear your thoughts.

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