Formatted Title
Project Demonstration: Aligning a Remediation Project to Corporate Sustainability Goals
Background/Objectives
Background/Objectives. The consideration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities, alongside financial factors, has rapidly become integral to the investment decision-making process of a company. Additionally, the United Nations 17 global sustainable development goals (SDGs) have become the most visual measuring stick for sustainability success. Although most organizations are evaluating their ESG priorities and have publicly committed to the SDGs, it is not always obvious how an environmental remediation project contributes to achieving these goals.
Approach/Activities
Approach/Activities. To address this challenge at one remediation project site, two Jacobs processes, Evolve and ESG Mapping, were used to leverage established sustainability frameworks, SDGs and ESG priorities, respectively. Evolve and ESG Mapping (both described below) allowed the project team to identify the most relevant, meaningful, and achievable sustainability opportunities and metrics for a specific project, directly aligning remedial actions to the appropriate SDGs and ESG priorities.
The Evolve tool is an interactive dashboard allowing projects to benchmark and measure sustainability goals based on indicator performance, against each SDG. Although the approach can be adapted to individual project types, scales, and needs, the following guidelines were incorporated into the project specific Evolve set-up process: (1) conducted a team/stakeholder survey identifying areas of highest importance on the topics of economy, society, and environment relative to the project, (2) facilitated discussions to confirm project-specific priorities and identified opportunities/actions to address project sustainability, (3) defined ultimate goals and measures of success that the project would strive to achieve when implemented, (4) reviewed project performance against identified SDGs and corporate sustainability goals, and (5) continued to re-evaluate priorities during project conception through to completion to track and demonstrate progress.
The second approach, ESG Mapping, was utilized to demonstrate the potential influences of the remediation project on ESG criteria. This approach assists in characterizing the many components of ESG priorities while utilizing and incorporating information collected during the setup required for the Evolve tool. The ESG criteria were selected, defined, and weighted based on industry and company specific priorities. Once the criteria were set, the remediation project alternatives were scored based on their potential impacts to ESGs.
Results/Lessons Learned
Results/Lessons Learned. This project demonstrated successful linkage between remediation activities and progress towards the UN SDGs, demonstration of ESG priorities, and commitment to achieving corporate sustainability goals. This presentation will provide a detailed overview of these tools and review a specific remediation project example where both approaches were used to provide insight in selecting and implementing a remedial alternative based on its positive impact to SDGs and ESG.
Each process demonstrates the broad scope of sustainability opportunities aligned to remediation projects and the potential for significant variance between project decisions and remedial alternatives. The need to address and communicate sustainability practices to stakeholders is becoming common business practice. These approaches demonstrate a streamlined process enabling teams to measure and communicate progress toward sustainability during all phases of a project, qualitatively and quantitatively.