The climate challenge is a collective responsibility

Our Net Zero ambition
We are the largest professional services firm in the world – our 457,000 people make an impact every day in the work that they do, and this impact can well and truly be felt when it comes to our climate. With size and scale comes responsibility – we have both a duty and a desire to help the world achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.

That is why we launched WorldClimate back in FY20: our strategy to drive responsible climate choices both within our organisation and beyond it. The changing climate is a threat to us all – extreme weather events are becoming more and more frequent, threatening everything from global food yields to drinking water supplies.

Both businesses and governments are recognising that the costs of inaction are likely to be disastrous. The benefits accrued from acting decisively and early will not only set us on a sustainable path but will also deliver innovation and prosperity.

Global civil society is demanding leaders at all levels take action, with climate laggards attracting negative media attention. For any firm looking to have a future, embracing sustainability is a requirement.

At our firm, there are three prisms through which we can catalyse change – through our engagements with clients; through the initiatives and efforts we make within our firm; and through the outward-facing work we do that shapes the society we live in.

Deloitte’s near-term (2030) greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals have been validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) as 1.5 degrees Celsius-aligned, science-based targets. Deloitte has also committed itself to setting long-term emissions reduction targets using the SBTi’s Net-Zero Standard (2021).

We work with companies large and small, local and global, Danish and international – and despite differences in scale and sector, sustainability will affect all of them, both in terms of challenges and opportunities. We want to help them on this journey – through our interactions with and influence on these partners, we can leverage an impact far greater than that of our firm alone.

This is why we now have more than 80 talents dedicated to sustainability in a multidisciplinary team working to service our clients, no matter what point they are at on their sustainability journey. In an era where ESG is becoming fundamental to business operations, we are expanding our expertise – not least through our Global Centre for Sustainable Progress and Sustainability & Climate Practice – to ensure our clients get to where they need to be. 


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From the training we provide to the trays of food served in our canteens, there are few areas of Deloitte’s talents journey that aren’t coloured by our climate commitments. And we buttress this work with internal, firm-wide initiatives.

In FY23 we began the launch of our Sustainable Delivery Framework – containing practical tools to help our people set up and deliver projects in more sustainable ways: through behavioural change, travel emissions forecasting, and support for exploring more sustainable ways of working.

As part of this work, we also added Clause Zero – our Sustainable Delivery Clause – to our client engagement letters and standard contracts, centring on delivering our projects in a more sustainable way – for example by prioritising digital options such as virtual meetings and using tools developed by Deloitte to help make more sustainable choices when travel is required. The intention of this clause is to open a dialogue with our clients from initial pursuit through to completion of a project, ensuring sustainability remains top of mind.

Last year was also the year when we established the sounding board for our Climate Champions Network, which will be rolled out across the broader organisation through FY24, with a focus on embedding sustainability into policies and practices across our firm, whilst setting in train initiatives to both empower individuals and engage our ecosystems.

On top of these initiatives, and in collaboration with our canteen caterers Meyers, we launched Deloitte’s first ever Food Loss and Sustainability Awareness Weeks – a two-week campaign focusing on this important issue coinciding with Denmark’s National Food Waste Day.

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As business travel accounts for a significant part of our CO2 emissions, we have committed ourselves to reducing our travel emissions by 50 per cent per full-time employee by 2030 compared to FY19 levels, as described in our WorldClimate strategy.

Through FY23 we saw an increase in business travel – albeit not to pre-COVID levels in terms of flight emissions. Nevertheless, our travel emissions are currently above what we are aiming for with our 2030 ambition. This underpins the importance of further embedding our Sustainable Delivery Framework and thereby working hand-in-hand with our clients to deliver projects in more sustainable ways. All of this means we will continue to keep a strong focus on our travel activities to ensure we meet our aims and continue to play our part in tackling the climate crisis, whilst recognising that, in many cases, travel can be a key enabler for our work.

Through the collaborations we undertake, the partnerships we develop, and the initiatives we progress, we can have an impact in society when it comes to promoting sustainability and progressing solutions related to climate change. We take our role and our responsibility seriously in shaping the agenda on climate.

We are lucky in Denmark, insofar as there is broad societal and political support for action on climate change. But even against this backdrop, somebody has to lead the way. And leading the way is one of our key shared values.

We are committed to making a societal impact, and helping steer sustainable solutions – this is why, in 2020, as part of our Small Great Nation project, we called for a 70% reduction in emissions: backed up by a concrete plan to get this done.

And we have continued to leverage our expertise – last year, working together with Geelmuyden Kiese, we produced The UnSustainability Report. This publication focuses not on the areas where Denmark is leading, but where we have work to do. The focus isn’t on doom and gloom – but on pinpointing where and how we can improve: because getting to where we want to be requires efforts of business, government, and consumers.

Taking The UnSustainability Report to Folkemødet Beyond our successful launch event, and extensive press coverage of the report, we also went further by hosting an event at Folkemødet – Denmark’s annual democracy festival, which takes place on the island of Bornholm – with the well-known figures Svend Brinkmann, psychologist and speaker, and Peter Lund Madsen, author and doctor, to further spread the message of this work.

Our carbon footprint
We continuously work to include additional data and improve the data quality to get a more complete greenhouse gas inventory. 
As a result, we expanded the scope of reporting in FY22 to include purchased goods and services, which, understandably, increased our total emissions both in FY22 and this year, FY23, in relation to previous years. As in previous years, Deloitte North South Europe, of which Deloitte Denmark is a part, has purchased Energy Attribute Certificates, meaning we once again have sourced 100 per cent renewable electricity. Our work to ensure accuracy in our reporting means slight changes have been reported in the FY21 and FY22 figures, predominantly due to retrospective additions of data pertaining to commuting and homeworking.

At Deloitte Denmark, we emitted a total of 14,626 tons of CO2 equivalent in FY23, equalling 4.84 tons of CO2 per employee. 
Our Nordic integration – which ultimately allows us to serve large clients and take them on a sustainability journey – has deepened. And Deloitte is fundamentally a people business.

Deloitte is not a firm of digital nomads. It has a unique culture. And whilst ensuring flexibility for our talents is high on our agenda, we also know the importance of togetherness – not just for building our winning culture, but for sparking the intellectual alchemy and teamwork which allows us to deliver high quality work to our clients.

And amidst this we are, as noted in this report, moving at pace towards deeper, and more meaningful Nordic integration. Many firms are no longer bound to single geographies, and the organisations that serve them cannot be either.

How do you build a winning culture with colleagues you have never met beyond a web conference? How can we implement the sense of psychological safety which we want to underpin our talents’ time at Deloitte, without giving space for sociability?

There is a delicate balance to be struck here. We are disappointed to see that our emissions have risen in FY23, albeit not in such a way as to take us entirely off course of our ambitious WorldClimate goals. Our emissions from business travel by air in FY23 were on par with those of FY20 – the first year partially impacted by COVID – and slightly below that of FY19, which is the baseline year for our WorldClimate ambitions.

This report is awash with stories of the impact we have made, with clients, internally, and at the societal level. And we are of the strong belief that our firm can make an impact through our work with clients which will amplify societal efforts to decarbonise and tackle the climate crisis.

Does that mean we can return back to “business as normal”? That we give ourselves carte blanche to pollute, on the basis that our work is a net-positive for society’s effort to tackle the climate crisis? Of course not.

So here is what we will do. We will make responsible choices about the ways in which we travel and ensure that travel occurs for the meetings that truly matter.

Going forward, the primary occasions on which we will travel by aeroplane are client meetings – having first discussed the possibility for said meeting to take place virtually. We will restrict ourselves – as much as possible – to travelling only on Economy flights which are considerably less carbon-intensive than when flying in Business or First-Class.

We want to show how a professional services firm can integrate regionally whilst respecting planetary boundaries – and we’ll be transparent every step of the way.

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 & cooling; and owned electric vehicles.

Scope 3
includes our emissions from business travel; employee commuting and homeworking; and our purchased goods and services.

Limited assurance was provided by BDO LLP at a consolidated Deloitte NSE 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 market-based electricity data, district heating, business travel data without radiative forcing, and purchased goods and services. Location-based electricity data and business travel data with radiative forcing are included in the table to increase transparency of our reporting.

For the details of our methodology, please refer to the footnotes and Deloitte North & South Europe’s GHG Emissions Basis of Reporting. Access Deloitte Denmark's Environment and Energy Policy Statement here.

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