Our Impact
Our mission is to shape a vital living environment. We are committed to sustainability – not just for our employees, clients and partners but because it is crucial to our future. This section highlights the progress we made in 2024 in terms of sustainability and impact. Here we present the challenges we face, our strategic vision for those challenges and our achievements.
Working towards a vital living environment
The sustainability landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. We are faced with climate events such as extreme rainfall, heatwaves and droughts. These increasingly result in floods and wildfires. Geopolitical instability puts a strain on the availability of affordable energy and materials. These challenges are not abstract concepts: these are tangible realities that directly affect businesses. That is why sustainability is no longer a moral consideration. It has evolved into a critical factor to ensure the viability of organizations.
"Our goal as TAUW is appealing yet ambitious: creating a sustainable vital living environment and maximizing our impact as consulting engineers. We are still working towards that goal. We are not there yet, and that is okay. What truly matters is our unwavering commitment to our objectives and our steady progress towards them. As we navigate the sustainability transition, it's crucial to maintain perspective. The urgency is undeniable, but perfection isn't required overnight. We have time, and we must use it wisely to ensure a healthy, fair, and manageable transition. One step at a time."
- Jacolien Eijer, Director Sustainability
Accelerating impact
At TAUW we want to speed up the process of creating a sustainable world. We offer solutions to make sustainability tangible and feasible. We help our clients prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. Our approach is centred on understanding the dilemmas our clients face and by recognizing that every challenge is also an opportunity for sustainable innovation. To achieve that, we need a clear vision. That is why over the past years we have refined our concept of a future-proof, vital living environment.
That vision is built on founding a healthy biosphere, with balance and integration, and adaptability as our guiding principles for incorporating human activities. We firmly believe that the connection between human endeavours and local communities is essential to maintain a thriving living environment.
Our vision drives our actions, and our approach is both comprehensive and practical. With each project we undertake, we integrate sustainable solutions that benefit both the client and the broader ecosystem. By aligning human activities with community needs and environmental imperatives, we can accelerate the creation of resilient, vibrant spaces that will flourish for generations to come.
Netherlands in Transition: Our podcast
In “Nederland Transitieland,” we explore the Netherlands’ transition towards a sustainable future. For centuries, living in the Delta meant adapting to a dynamic environment. Now, we’re facing the limits of our control and must address our impact on climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity.
Our host Cor Lont discusses these challenges with experts, focusing on the systemic changes needed to adapt to irreversible effects like rising temperatures and sea levels. The podcast delves into societal challenges and the transitions required for a sustainable future.
Our handprint: impactful solutions in our services
As engineers we are dedicated to minimizing our footprint while maximizing our positive impact: that is our handprint. Through our work, we can make a significant difference to helping our clients reduce their own environmental footprint and adopt more sustainable practices. We are developing an innovative method to measure our handprint. That helps us understand and grow our impact. The approach we take is to assess both the sustainable outcomes of client projects and our efforts to amplify the positive effects. In 2025 we will begin testing this method on larger projects and we aim to reliably quantify our projects by 2028.
By quantifying our handprint, we can provide concrete evidence of how we contribute to sustainability, we can identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, inspire clients to adopt similar practices and set industry standards to measure environmental impact. In short, our method helps us not only to elevate our own sustainability performance but also to inspire broader positive change in the environmental consulting sector and beyond.
Our footprint: driving sustainable operations
In 2024, we made significant strides to reduce our carbon footprint through targeted initiatives. We expanded our electric vehicle fleet, improved sustainability in our offices and actively encouraged the use of public transport for commuting. We set up our own TAUW ESG Principles and implemented the TAUW Group Code of Conduct and strengthened our governance processes.
Looking ahead, we are preparing for the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) for instance by refining our greenhouse gas emission calculations. That will enable us to report in a transparent way and meet the highest standards of accountability reporting.
Carbon Footprint: GHG emissions
The total carbon footprint of the TAUW Group in 2024 is 9,109 t CO2 e. As an environmental engineering consultancy, we are well aware of that 87% falls within our upstream value chain. Our GHG emissions intensity per employee is 0.9 t CO2 e/ FTE in Scopes 1 and 2; 6.4 t CO2 e/ FTE in Scope 3; and 7.3 t CO2 e/ FTE in all scopes. Our GHG emissions intensity per turnover is 53 t CO2 e/ mio € and per EBITA 828 t CO2 e/ mio €.
Our ESG principles
In 2024, we established our TAUW ESG principles. These principles form the foundation of our commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance factors, guiding our operations and our interactions with clients, partners, and the communities we serve.
Committing to a sustainable future
As a leading European environmental consultancy, TAUW is committed to setting the standard for sustainability. We actively contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and align with the UN Global Compact Network, demonstrating our dedication to adopting and reporting on sustainable and socially responsible policies. We also joined the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) NetZero Standard. This commitment underscores our proactive approach, ensuring that our efforts are underpinned by rigorous scientific calculations and measurements.
TAUW Group has set ambitious targets to reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions:
- 50% absolute reduction in Scope 1 GHG emissions from owned assets by 2029
- 100% transition in Scope 2 GHG emissions to renewable electricity for owned assets by 2029
- 52% CO2 reduction in Scope 3 GHG emissions per full-time employee by 2029
- By 2025, transition from spend-based analysis to actual emissions for 10% of total procurement
- Achieve net-zero emissions across our entire value chain by 2050
To further enhance our sustainability efforts, TAUW utilizes two key assessment tools:
- EcoVadis: A globally recognized platform that provides a comprehensive evaluation of our sustainability performance across environmental, social, and ethical dimensions.
- CO2 Performance Ladder (Netherlands): This instrument specifically focuses on CO2 reduction and climate objectives, complementing our broader sustainability initiatives.
The use of these tools varies across our entities, resulting in different scores per country. This diversity reflects the unique challenges and opportunities in each country, as well as our commitment to continuous improvement across all operations. Our participation in these assessments is crucial because it enhances transparency and accountability, drives continuous improvement in our sustainability practices, aligns our efforts with global standards and best practices, and demonstrates our commitment to stakeholders and clients.
TAUW Netherlands
TAUW Italy
TAUW Germany
* EcoVadis medals are awarded to the top 35% of companies assessed by EcoVadis. Medals are awarded based on the percentile rank of a company which is calculated at the time of scorecard publication. It compares a company’s performance with all rated companies in our database over the previous 12 months. The percentile rank is calculated across all companies in all industries, not per industry.
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