AEW Race to Zero

With the current focus on climate action during COP26, we have updated our business net zero ambitions to join the UN Race to Zero. We want to make sure that our corporate targets are robust, align with the current science and that our commitment helps drive global leadership on climate action.

Our commitment to the UN Race to Zero through the SME Climate Hub ensures that our targets cover our complete scope of business emissions including business travel. We’ve taken the step to include business travel in our carbon reduction targets ahead of our previous commitment to do so by 2023.

Our initial targets committed us to halve our office emissions (scope 1 & 2) by 2025, and we remain on track to meet this target. However, we are now also including all of our business travel (scope 3) and are committing to halve these total emissions by 2030. We are also committing to a long-term net zero goal of 2040, 10 years before the 2050 Paris targets, in line with The Climate Pledge.

We had committed to use credible offsets to compensate for our remaining carbon footprint from 2025, and will continue to do so, but want to demonstrate that a science-based net zero goal must include significant emissions reductions before any residual emissions are offset. As such we have shifted our net zero commitment to 2040 at which point, we will have reduced our emissions by 90% in line with the definitions of our SME Climate Hub and The Climate Pledge commitments.

We will fully detail our progress towards these goals and the context of our enhanced commitments against our initial targets in our next annual Carbon Report for the 2021 calendar year.

Although it is really important for AEW to show climate leadership and reduce our direct and business travel emissions, our annual corporate emissions could be as little as 2% of the embodied carbon of one of our major projects. So, to bolster our existing commitments to Architects Declare we have also joined the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge to help support our clients in setting ambitious but achievable performance targets for embodied carbon, operational energy and water use on our most significant schemes.