We will provide new information, guidance, tools, and procedures to help staff embed low carbon thinking in their daily decision-making and will make low carbon a top priority for all our operations and business planning. We will actively promote carbon literacy and support staff to embed low carbon thinking in their day-to-day activities through new guidance, training, and knowledge sharing.

We will collaborate with our landlords to agree 100% renewable energy contracts for all of our offices. Several of our offices already benefit from renewable electricity. However, we need all of our offices to run on renewable energy – both electricity and gas.

We will minimise our energy use, increase the energy efficiency of our office spaces, and seek opportunities to generate our own energy. We need to reduce the amount of energy we use, even as JBA continues to grow. We’ll investigate ways to make our office spaces more energy efficient and will prioritise energy efficiency in all our office refurbishments and relocations. We’ll also explore options to generate our own electricity, both at our offices and through investment in community renewable energy schemes.

We will minimise what we buy and ensure that what we do buy is more sustainable, prioritising products with a low environmental and climate impact and products that meet circular economy principles, minimising waste and the use of raw materials, energy, and other resources.

We will encourage and support our suppliers to set their own science-based emissions reduction targets and will prioritise suppliers who are committed to taking meaningful action to minimise their climate impacts. Emissions from subconsultants and contractors undertaking work on our behalf represent a very significant part of our carbon footprint.

We will choose business service providers – including insurance, financial, telecoms, IT equipment, and couriers – who have robust science-based emission reduction targets. We’ll make sustainability and low carbon a priority when choosing who we use to provide business services.

We will take steps to minimise the waste we produce, by buying less and buying better, and will recycle everything that remains so that we achieve zero waste to landfill at all of our offices. We will establish new initiatives to help us to cut down on the waste we generate and recycle everything else that remains.

We will put in place a range of new initiatives so that our land-based business travel is by public transport or ultra-low emissions vehicles and will take steps to further discourage air travel. We’ll roll out a range of new initiatives to help staff choose low carbon – ideally zero carbon – travel whenever they need to go out-and-about. We encourage staff to only travel when necessary.

We will provide practical advice, guidance, and other support to help staff to reduce emissions from commuting and agile working. Proactively supporting staff to take steps to cut their emissions, enhancing our agile working practices, advising on ways to reduce home energy use, and using travel planning more to help with lower carbon commutes.

We will further embed low carbon thinking in our projects, prioritising local delivery, promoting low carbon and circular economy design principles, and encouraging low carbon innovation. Not only will we cut the emissions we produce through our everyday working practices, we will also deliver projects that embed low carbon design principles at their core. Not only do we have a duty to support our clients’ net zero ambitions, creating designs that embrace natural and low carbon materials and circular economy principles, we will champion low carbon design because it makes JBA stronger, improves our resilience and our performance, and demonstrates our culture.