Practising what we preach
WWF's mission is to conserve the natural world by building a future in which people live in harmony with nature. As we work to achieve this, there is some inevitable environmental impact caused by our activities.
Very mindful of this, we strive to reduce that impact to a minimum. Since 1999 we have employed an Environmental Management System that covers such aspects as energy consumption, purchasing, waste, CO2 emissions from travel, and our corporate investment policies.
Our membership of the WWF Global Forest and Trade Network (GFTN) requires us to eliminate all unknown or unwanted timber sources from our supply chain, so that any timber we use comes from an FSC-certified source if new, or from a recycled or reused source otherwise. Our first full report to the FTN showed that only 0.15% of what we used was from unknown or unwanted sources.
We continued with our programme of installing energy-saving or renewable energy technologies at our headquarters in Godalming, and are continually looking at further ways of reducing our CO2 emissions from energy. Overall electricity consumption in all our UK offices reduced by 4% and emissions from gas by 2.7 tonnes.
Much of our global conservation work involves international air travel. The past year saw a small increase in the overall amount of CO2 emitted from staff flights, but this did include three exceptional events. The first, in September 2006, was the tragic helicopter crash in Nepal which resulted in the untimely death of two UK colleagues and required several senior members of staff to fly to Nepal.
The second was a happier event: setting up our new HSBC-funded conservation programme involving several trips to China. And the third event was our involvement in the global production of the ITV Extinct series which raised more than £775,000 for our conservation work with the tiger and other endangered species). Even so, overall emissions from travel reduced by a further 10% to 399 tonnes, which puts us well on course to meet our declared objective of a 25% reduction in travel generated emissions by 2010.
We continue to place emphasis on how we influence and work with our suppliers and service providers, so that they can achieve higher standards in their own corporate environmental behaviour. This year we have focused on our print and paper activities in line with the FTN requirement: a new and more efficient method of procuring these will be introduced in the coming year.
It was agreed by our management team that we should seek to become certified to ISO14001, the international environmental standard. We hope that this certification will be achieved during the coming year.
Read our Environmental Report for 2007.