Our planet

Our commitment to Environment

We recognise that our business activities have global and local impacts on the environment and we're committed to measuring and reducing these. We do this through proactive management of our buildings and support activities, stakeholder and supplier engagement and by investment in emerging clean technologies.

Our environmental policy forms the cornerstone of our activities. It's there to help us minimise our contribution to climate change and pollution, and to support the environmental principles of the UN Global Compact. By engaging with our people, suppliers, communities and clients, we hope to foster change that stretches beyond our boundaries.

We are proud Executive members of the Legal Sustainability Alliance, a movement of law firms committed to taking action to improve the environmental sustainability of our processes.

Carbon reduction and Environmental Management

Carbon Neutrality status

We became the first international law firm to become Carbon Neutral in 2006, and since then have continued to improve our environmental profile across the network.

To retain our carbon neutral status we measure annually the carbon emissions from all our business activities, and offset a portion of these by investing in a managed portfolio of carbon reducing projects throughout the world. Examples of these projects are a Hydropower in Cote d’ Ivoire and a Mangrove restoration in Pakistan, both in year 2022. Our Scopes 1, 2 and 3 measurements are verified by an external Environment consultancy.

We use renewable energy in the majority of our buildings and one of our environmental objectives is extending the use of green energy to 100% of our buildings.

We hold environmental leading certifications in our buildings, such as LEED or BREEAM, and take environment considerations into account when signing a new lease or moving into new premises.

Next steps: Our near-term Science Based Targets (SBTs)

Climate science has moved on considerably since we became Carbon Neutral. We’re serious about the firm’s environmental impact and have decided to increase our ambition by committing to a pathway to achieve Science Based Targets (SBTs).

Targets are considered ‘science-based’ if they are in line with what the latest climate science deems necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement – limiting global warming to well-below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.

We submitted our SBTs to the Science-Based Targets initiative for verification in October 2022 and received their approval in May 2023. Our firm’s name is listed on the SBTi website as one of the companies taking action to fight climate change.

The firm is now committed to taking action to reduce its emissions in order to achieve our near-term Science Based Targets, as follows:

• reduce our absolute Scope 1 and 2 Greenhouse House Gas (GHG) emissions by 50% by 2030 (market-based) against a 2019 baseline year;
• reduce our absolute Scope 3 GHG emissions by 47% by 2030 against a 2019 baseline year.

After identifying our supplier chain and business travel as the biggest contributors to the firm’s emissions, to reduce those emissions and achieve our SBTs we are committed to:

• engaging with our top suppliers to ensure they are on the same environmental journey as us;
• taking action to reduce our business travel emissions, encouraging the use of alternative greener transport options over plane journeys, and progressively reviewing our travel policy to help achieve this.

We will disclose our progress against the above targets annually both internally and externally.

Our environment network: the green room

The green room is our environmental sustainability network – a space for expansive thinking about the climate emergency and actions we can take to reduce our own environmental footprint, for collaborating with clients to do the same and for achieving greater impact through scale. To be added to our mailing list for events, please contact Ali Crosthwaite, Elisa Bocianowski or Lucian Firth or email thegreenroom@simmons-simmons.com.