Environment and society

Infrastructure that benefits you, your communities, and the environment.

Developers, owners, and operators face evolving user needs and expectations, environmental and climate pressures, and regulatory requirements.

These challenges must be tackled while demonstrating value to taxpayers, customers, and investors, controlling operational costs, and addressing requirements for environmental protection, climate sensitivity, and social benefits.

Successfully navigating competing pressures is key to securing an essential social and environmental licence to operate, while unlocking shared opportunity.

What can we do for you?

Our global network of climate, environment, and social experts will support you and your project teams to achieve:

Sustainability throughout the project lifecycle

Our specialists understand the full scope of your sustainability challenges and provide essential expertise to improve the performance of projects. Climate, environmental, and social inputs are as important as technical engineering inputs for achieving sustainable infrastructure that provides lasting value for clients, society, and our environment. We work with you to improve outcomes at every stage of the project lifecycle — and the earlier we act the greater the benefits that are achieved.

A strong reputation with investors and stakeholders

We provide expert guidance on complex environmental, societal, and governance (ESG) requirements and best practice, helping you adopt new ways to manage communication with stakeholders on complex megaprojects and create opportunity with investors.

Innovative and cost-effective solutions

We have tools and solutions that improve climate risk management, embed nature-based solutions, enrich biodiversity, enable stakeholder engagement, drive social transformation, and provide quantitative insights on community and environmental impacts.

Services we provide

Shaping sustainable futures with environmental solutions

Setting projects up for success and strengthening ongoing operations requires multidisciplinary approaches and specialisms. We can help you build into your infrastructure projects environmental and social benefits, as well as sustainability and resilience, on a broad range of measures:

We help strengthen social license to operate by demonstrating due attention to the wellbeing of people and future generations. Through supporting you to embed social value into procurement and delivery, we enable you to add value for your communities and society — making you an employer of choice, attracting investment, and building goodwill that drives business development.

Our experience

Environment Agency, UK

We work with the Environment Agency to deliver better environmental and societal outcomes at every level. At project level, our work has supported outstanding projects such as the Boston Barrier in Lincolnshire and reinstatement of flood defences in Derbyshire. At strategic level, we are providing advice and expertise to develop the Environment Agency’s mapping and modelling framework for data and evidence driven investment decisions.
Heathrow Airport, London, UK

We provide extensive and integrated environment and society services for the UK’s largest airport. Recently, we have helped to design and deliver Heathrow Airport’s carbon reduction program, which is driving its progress towards net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Our support includes Heathrow Airport’s energy transition, operational and embodied carbon, adoption of PAS 2080, future fuels and its behavioral change program.
Newtown Creek, New York, USA

We helped to clean up Newtown Creek in Brooklyn by installing street-side bioswales – vegetated, shallow, landscaped depressions – to prevent contaminated stormwater run-off entering the combined sewer system. The solution alleviates pressure on New York City’s grey infrastructure, helping to reduce capital costs.
Severn Trent Water, UK

Working with Severn Trent Water, we’re delivering environment and society focused services at project, programme and organisational level. For projects like Witches Oak Water in Derbyshire, we’ve identified, designed and supported implementation of nature-based solutions for water treatment that result in joined-up beneficial outcomes, including a lower climate footprint, more resilient assets, better biodiversity and positive social outcomes for communities.
Sydney Metro, Australia

For Australia’s biggest public transport project, we’ve maintained our focus on considering social outcomes in all that we do. As one element of this, we’ve delivered diversity and inclusion programs as part of the Engineering Design Assurance Workforce Development & Industry Participation plan. This included supporting diversity of gender, age and culture, First Nations participation, and creating high quality new public spaces that lift and enhance areas at elevated stations.