Collaborating towards a net-zero future
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our time, and we need to work together as businesses, governments, nations, and individuals to take action. Being a leading advisor of transformation to organisations worldwide, Deloitte is leading the way towards a lower-carbon future by guiding clients on their sustainability journeys – from a compliance as well as an innovation point of view.
With approximately 460,000 people working at Deloitte worldwide, we recognise our own responsibility to take meaningful, measurable, and transparent actions. As a result, we educate and encourage our people to engage by providing learning, tools, and resources to make a positive impact. And being dependent on a complex ecosystem of partners, we work with our global suppliers to reduce emissions collectively.
Biodiversity and nature
While our sustainability commitments have focused on climate change for the past decade, climate is just one aspect of nature, and we have been expanding our global sustainability efforts to also address the broader threats to nature and biodiversity. Biodiversity is crucial for healthy ecosystems and a healthy planet. However, much of the world’s biodiversity is at risk due to climate change, human consumption, and other impacts on nature. According to the World Economic Forum, 50 per cent of global GDP is dependent on nature. This means that disruptions to the Earth’s ecosystems affect our way of life – and that organisations have an important role to play in protecting nature.
In translating our environmental ambitions into action, Deloitte is globally examining our impact on nature and biodiversity. While Deloitte’s largest impacts on nature are indirect, we are committed to supporting nature-positive solutions and addressing impacts throughout our supply chain.
Making progress on our WorldClimate ambition
Addressing climate risk is crucial to the success of our business, our clients, and society as a whole. We are committed to reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and supporting our clients in doing the same. In FY24, we focused on developing our long-term, science-based, net-zero targets and climate transition plan.
Our emissions reduction targets call for significant changes within our business operations. That’s why we are implementing policies and programmes to accelerate decarbonisation, particularly in our highest emitting areas — travel, technology, and real estate. Recognising that the majority of our emissions originate from our supply chain, we are collaborating closely with our suppliers to set science-based targets, implement emissions reductions, and enhance product-level emissions reporting.
To do our part in helping the world achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, Deloitte launched WorldClimate in FY20, our strategy to drive responsible climate choices within our firm and beyond. This involves holistic thought and action, as well as setting measurable targets on our commitments for the future. As part of the WorldClimate ambition, Deloitte commits to science-based net-zero goals by 2030.
Internally in FY24, initiatives under WorldClimate included a food waste campaign and the launch of a sustainability community to facilitate knowledge-sharing across client-facing talents. In addition, we launched an internal WorldClimate page accessible to all employees, which contains information on current initiatives, a climate and sustainability FAQ, policies, as well as learning modules and case studies.
We are also continuously looking at ways we can lower emissions from our buildings. At the end of FY24 we therefore implemented smart sensors across our office in Copenhagen. The many sensors enable us to collect and analyse energy consumption and related CO2 emissions from electricity, district heating and cooling. Besides collecting vast amounts of data that will allow us to report accurately, the solution also provides us with disaggregated consumption data that can be used to identify potential reduction initiatives. Going forward we will use these insights to optimise our consumption and continuously measure and validate the impact of such initiatives. Initial data suggest that there is significant reduction potential within our lighting and ventilation systems, which we are looking into realising in FY25.
Business travel remains a key focus area. As meeting our clients globally is a crucial enabler for our work, we have committed to reducing our emissions from business travel by 50 per cent per FTE by 2030 from a 2019 base year.
FY24 saw us putting the finishing touches on our updated business travel policy, which has now been adopted and implemented from 1 June 2024. The policy makes clear our expectations – prioritising vehicular or public transport for domestic journeys, making economy class standard for flying, not allowing Business or First Class, and demanding written approval for deviations from this. On top of this, we have also changed our leasing procedures, such that directors and partners who have access to our company car scheme can only lease fully electric cars going forward.
With these targeted measures, we intend to encourage and accelerate progress towards our 2030 goals in our WorldClimate ambition and we are glad to see that our total emissions from business travel is starting to decrease.
As is shown in the Carbon Emissions table below, we track numerous metrics relating to our environmental impact, comparing our development across the years to hold us accountable and help us identify where we need to make further efforts.
ISO Certification
In Denmark, we achieved a big and important new milestone in FY24 on our way to realising our sustainability ambitions – we received two new ISO certifications: ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 for our Energy and Environmental Management Systems.
These are internationally recognised, externally validated standards which set out an extensive and detailed framework for companies to develop and operationalise their environmental and energy management systems. Thus professionalizing and structuring our climate and sustainability efforts and ensuring that we take proactive measures to improve our environmental impact, comply with relevant legal requirements, and progress towards our targets. The ISO framework ensures that we consider all relevant aspects of our business – from resource usage and waste management to tracking of our environmental performance and stakeholder involvement. Successfully achieving these certificates also sends an important message – to our people and our clients alike – that our energy and environmental initiatives are well-governed, prioritised, and documented to help drive progress across our organisation.
Carbon Emissions
In our carbon emissions account, you can find an overview of Deloitte Denmark’s carbon emissions, divided into Scope 1, 2, and 3.
This greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions statement has been calculated using an operational control consolidation approach as described in the GHG Protocol. The full methodology is outlined in the Basis of Reporting. In summary:
Scope 1 refers to direct emissions from gas usage; and our owned vehicles powered by internal combustion engines.
Scope 2 refers to indirect emissions from the generation of our purchased electricity; district heating and cooling; and owned electric vehicles.
Scope 3 includes our emissions from business travel; employee commuting and homeworking; and our purchased goods and services.
Carbon accounting is still a fairly young practice, which means that data quality and calculation methods are often improved and revised. In FY24, Deloitte therefore revised the methodology for calculating emissions from contingent labour – which were previously included in Purchased Goods & Services (PG&S) emissions – to improve the accuracy of these calculations.
Additionally, emissions from employee commuting have also been reduced as surveys show that Deloitte employees use public transportation to a much higher degree than initially assumed. As a result, we see a significant reduction within those categories.
Methodology and assurance
Limited assurance was provided by BDO LLP at a consolidated Deloitte regional level over all reported carbon metrics. This included consideration of the underlying country data in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Middle East, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK plus Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man and Gibraltar. View BDO’s limited assurance statement here.
Gross Total Emissions is a sum of direct emissions from owned vehicles powered by internal combustion engines (scope 1), market-based electricity, district heating, business travel without radiative forcing, employee commuting, homeworking and purchased goods and services. Location-based electricity and business travel with radiative forcing are included in the table to increase transparency of our reporting.
Our methodology for purchased goods and services (PG&S) data for Denmark is provided by our Deloitte regional sustainability team and is based largely on procurement spend data for a selection of six countries accounting for 74% of PG&S emissions. 6% of PG&S emissions under this methodology are based on actual supplier data (Scopes 1 and 2) submitted to CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project). The remainder of PG&S emissions are extrapolated. We apply a number of assumptions to the spend data, including how we allocate spend into procurement categories, how we treat our suppliers’ reported Scope 3 emissions, the CDP sector emission factors we apply to each spend category, and the extrapolation factors.
In FY24, Deloitte revised the methodology for calculating emissions from contingent labour that were previously included in PG&S emissions to increase the precision of these calculations. Additionally, Deloitte enhanced the spend-based PG&S calculations methodology to more precisely identify and exclude supplier spend items that are deemed non-emission generating (e.g., taxes, intercompany transactions, etc.). Additional details on the methodology used to calculate PG&S emissions and further details on this recalculation are provided in the Deloitte NSE FY24 Basis of Reporting. Deloitte will continue to review its approach to Scope 3 reporting in the future, aiming to continually improve the accuracy of its disclosures. When these enhancements lead to a material change in a reported figure, Deloitte will explain the nature of the change, the reasoning for its appropriateness, and the variance compared to the previous methodology.
For more details about our methodology, please refer to the footnotes and Deloitte North & South Europe’s GHG Emissions Basis of Reporting. Access Deloitte's Environment and Energy Policy Statement here.