Corporate responsibility

Engaging our people

Our strategy continues to include financial support and volunteering, but increasingly we
recognise that we can provide more sustainable value to our charity partners by leveraging
our people’s business skills and expertise through capacity building, mentoring and skilled volunteering. The increase to $15 million in our capacity-building efforts is indicative of this
shift in focus.

Giving


Fluctuations in giving patterns reflect the impact of one-off appeals in response to emergencies (e.g. the Victorian bushfires, the earthquake in China and the cyclone in Myanmar).
The underlying trend in giving is upward.

Capacity building, mentoring and volunteering


In FY09, we shifted our focus towards enhancing the impact of strategic capacity building and mentoring – this is reflected in the strong increases in activity shown above. We are working to increase quality rather than quantity and therefore reduced our FY09 target for volunteer participation to 40 per cent. We do, however, remain committed to accommodating the demand from our people to volunteer and, as a result, exceeded this target with 46 per cent of our people undertaking a volunteering activity during the year.

Engaging our communities

Our aim is to make a positive change and sustainable impact on the communities in which we live and work. This approach requires deep relationships with our 23 charity partners, so that we can understand and support them in achieving their goals.

We are working to leverage our skills and position in the business community to impact on social change. The evolution of our approach to community engagement over the six years since the PwC Foundation was established is demonstrated in this chart.

Corporate Responsibility Index (CRI)

The CRI is a voluntary tool developed to assist companies in improving their corporate responsibility practices. It provides a systematic process to identifying non-financial risks, as well as developing and improving corporate responsibility in line with business strategy. The CRI sets a benchmark for companies that are committed to managing, measuring and reporting their impact on society and environment.

PwC is the first professional services firm to participate in the CRI and publicly report our results as part of our commitment to the transparency agenda. We were ranked 23rd out of the 35 Australian and New Zealand participants, giving us a stronger foundation on which to build our continued involvement. It highlights our strengths – for example, we scored 98 per cent for our Community Investment performance – in addition to confirming that the areas we were focusing on within our FY09 corporate responsibility strategy, such as our environmental management policies, were the right ones.

Environmental footprint

At PwC we are committed to managing our impact on the environment. As evident in this table, our strategy to reduce our carbon footprint is to first to reduce our impact, then supplement with renewable energy sources and, finally, purchase offsets to for any remaining emissions. With the changing nature of regulation in this area, we will ensure that we continue to demonstrate leading practice in our environmental management through purchasing accredited carbon offsets for any residual emissions.

We publicly disclosed our targets to reduce our carbon emissions before offsets by 10 per cent in FY09 and by 25 per cent over four years. We have substantially exceeded our first-year target, reducing these by 23 per cent and almost reaching our four-year target in one year. This partially reflects the impact of cost-control initiatives introduced at mid-year, but also corresponds to the introduction of new tools to encourage behavioural change in our people.

The most significant changes achieved were an increase of over 150 per cent in the use of video conferencing and a reduction of 24 per cent in paper usage, primarily through the introduction of default double-side printing.