Texan by Nature is excited to recognize WSP as a 2024 TxN 20 honoree for their leadership in conservation and sustainability. WSP‘s commitment to conservation, their projects, programs, best practices, and lessons learned are an example and inspiration for us all.

Honoree Name: WSP

Honoree Industry and Size: Architecture, Design, & Development, Enterprise 

Company Overview: WSP is one of the world’s leading engineering, environment, and professional services firms in the world. Recognized on Fast Company’s Brands that Matter List for 2022 as a top Community-Minded Business, WSP brings together engineers, planners, technical experts, strategic advisors, and construction management professionals who are dedicated to collaborating in the best interests of serving local communities. WSP provides strategic advisory, engineering, and design services to clients seeking sustainable solutions in the transportation, infrastructure, environment, building, energy, water, and mining sectors. Its 67,200 trusted professionals are united by the common purpose of creating positive, long-lasting impacts on the communities it serves through a culture of innovation, integrity, and inclusion.

What is WSP’s conservation and sustainability mission and why is it important to your culture?
WSP is fueled by taking the necessary steps—big and small—for our teams, our clients, and our communities to thrive in a more equitable, inclusive, and net zero world. WSP is committed to measuring and improving our environmental performance. WSP’s targets are focused on reducing GHG emissions, conserving natural resources, and taking all actions necessary to transition to a low-carbon economy and limit global warming to 1.5°C. Actions we are taking include progressing towards SBTi-approved GHG reduction targets, sourcing 100% of energy consumption from renewable generation methods by 2030 or earlier, implementing energy efficiency measures in existing offices, fleet, and procedures, and engaging with suppliers to reduce carbon emissions in our supply chain. In addition to improving the sustainability of our own business operations, WSP is committed to incorporating our focus on environmental health and prosperity into the services that we provide. As such, WSP regularly assists clients through our Earth and Environment department by providing sustainable and environmentally sound solutions to the challenges they face. 

John Durant Dell Hospital. 

What steps is WSP taking to address global natural resource challenges, and how are these efforts integrated into WSP’s overall business strategy?
WSP is taking ambitious climate action through a commitment to achieve net zero emissions across our value chain by 2040, supported by science-based GHG emissions reduction targets. Our science-based targets (SBTs) have been approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).

Our 2023 targets include: 

• By 2024, earn over 50% of total annualized gross revenues from SDG-Linked Revenues, defined as revenues earned from services that support the UN SDGs
• Reduce absolute scope 1 and 2 market-based GHG emissions 40% by 2024 from a 2018 base year (60% by 2030)
• Reduce absolute scope 3 GHG emissions 15% over the same timeframe (30% by 2030)
• Source 50% renewable electricity by 2024 (100% by 2030) 
• By 2024, achieve a 20% decrease in real estate cost and footprint, measured as the percent reduction in total rentable square feet due for renewal in the reporting year, excluding acquisitions

Regional Commitments
Some of our operating regions have made commitments above and beyond our global targets to decarbonize faster and across a broader set of activities. While WSP is proud to have set SBTs for our own climate impacts, we also recognize that SBTi and GHG Protocol guidance does not mandate our sector to cut emissions from the advice and designs we give to our clients. Recognizing that this is the largest impact that WSP has, our Sweden, Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand operations joined the UK in committing to halve the carbon of our advice and designs by 2030.

How We Will Get There
Since 2019, we have formally engaged with leaders from each of our global operating regions to coordinate plans and actions to collectively achieve energy and emissions reductions. Global corporate function leaders contribute to strategies reducing emissions from our workplace fit-outs and operations, fleet selection, and procurement activities. Building on reductions achieved to date, all WSP operating regions will implement measures over the coming years to reduce emissions from our operations and supply chain and increase our proportion of electricity from renewable sources, in support of our targets.

Who in WSP is leading your conservation and sustainability efforts and what are some examples of employee engagement in conservation and sustainability at your company?
Our sustainability program is led by André-Martin Bouchard, Global Director, Earth & Environment and Global Executive Director, ESG. For the second consecutive year, WSP received the Sustainability Impact award at Environment Analyst’s Sustainability Delivery Awards for “walking the talk” in advancing our climate leadership and ESG journey.  André-Martin Bouchard was recognized in the Sustainability Leader of the Year category for his pivotal role in championing sustainability and inspiring new ideas and positive change with long-term impact.  

Our people are anchored by a shared belief that for societies to thrive, we must hold ourselves accountable for tomorrow. Our community engagement approach unites us, driving us to achieve common goals and leave a positive impact everywhere we are present. Our aspirations extend beyond industry leadership− we strive to be trailblazers in social impact and make a real difference. As environmental stewards, we are actively involved in diverse local and global initiatives that align with our purpose to future-proof our cities and environment. The stories that follow highlight a selection of the initiatives we have undertaken in 2023.

Accessing Clean Water
WSP is proud to continue to support Water For People, an international non-profit organization that promotes the development of high-quality drinking water and sanitation services, accessible to all. In 2023, WSP teams in the USA, Canada, the UK, the Middle East, and New Zealand led the initiative with an impressive line-up of awareness-building and fundraising activities that complement the corporate commitment. 

Providing Services to Neighborhoods
In 2023, WSP’s Habitat for Humanity Build Day marked a milestone in the USA with 300 volunteers across 10 states, from Arizona to Washington. Launched in our Seattle office in 2019, the initiative quickly expanded to 15 locations and reflects WSP’s focus on fostering community well-being and resilience. Teams of employees, clients, and partners joined forces to construct homes and playhouses, strengthening communities and embodying WSP’s commitment to resilience and equity. This collaboration with Habitat for Humanity underscores a shared dedication to housing accessibility and community development worldwide.

Building Bridges to Better Lives
Since 2010, WSP has been collaborating with Bridges to Prosperity (B2P), a US-based non-profit organization, to better lives in rural communities by providing volunteer design and construction services. To date, this collaboration has resulted in the delivery of 18 bridges in Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and Rwanda. In 2023, two teams of WSP volunteers traveled to Rwanda as part of the program.

Reviving a River
A team from WSP in Chile partnered with the Mapocho Vivo Foundation to help clean up the largest river in the city of Santiago de Chile. More than 70 employees took part in the initiative, collecting over 1,100 kilos of garbage that had accumulated on the hillside about 200 meters from the Parque San Damian office.

Restoring Coastal Ecosystems
In May, WSP in Australia and our client, Westport, sprang into action at Point Peron in Western Australia. Together, we planted over 500 seedlings and eliminated a significant amount of invasive weeds in an effort to contribute to coastal conservation and urban revegetation.

Sprucing up our Forest
In May 2023, about 60 employees from WSP in Taiwan and their family members joined a forest clean-up at Wucheng Mountain in New Taipei City. This sustainability-driven initiative reduced waste, restored ecosystems, and fostered community spirit.

WSP employees at Habitat for Humanity volunteer event in Austin. 

“WSP’s commitment to sustainability goes beyond protecting the environment; it’s about creating resilient communities, fostering economic growth, and ensuring a healthier future for generations to come. We are honored to be recognized by Texas by Nature for our dedication to innovative solutions that balance progress with responsibility.”

– Anne Williamson, Vice President Corporate Sustainability & Environment, U.S. Region

What conservation and sustainability programs and projects does WSP lead and participate in?
Sustainable Workplaces
In 2023, approximately 17% of WSP’s rentable square footage was certified under at least one sustainability certification system and approximately 9% was covered under a green lease, which is a type of lease agreement designed to align landlord and tenant interests around energy and resource efficiency. In addition, we reduced our total rentable square footage that was due for renewal in 2023 by 13.8%, and corresponding real estate costs by 9.5%. As a key initiative of our Climate Transition Plan, we continue to consolidate office locations into agile and sustainable workplaces, with a focus on reducing resource consumption, improving well-being, locating offices near mass and active transportation options, and enhancing access to electric vehicle charging. Our workplace sustainability guidelines apply to all of our office fit-outs and include specifications for LED lighting and occupancy sensors, IT equipment specifications, and consideration of other sustainability features such as transitioning to cloud-based IT services.

Boosting Biodiversity & Environmental Resilience
WSP was part of an initiative to restore 2,500 acres of peat bogs in central England and North-east Wales as a healthy ecosystem. In addition to boosting biodiversity, this ambitious project will improve the local environment’s resilience to the impacts of climate change, including flood risks. 

Designated a National Nature Reserve, the Marches Mosses in North Shropshire and Wrexham rank as the UK’s third-largest area of lowland raised peat bog—one of the planet’s rarest habitats. Although peat bogs can prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change, nearly 96 percent of lowland raised bogs have been destroyed in the UK through peat cutting, agriculture, and drainage, impeding net zero efforts. 

Acting like giant sponges, peat bogs slow the flow of water from nearby hills. Due to higher storm intensity and frequency, sea levels are expected to rise under all climate change projections and pose the greatest threat to coastal populations. WSP’s water engineers managed the construction sites and the project contractors as part of a collaborative approach. While fulfilling our responsibilities for worker/public health and safety, the engineering projects ensured that the restoration work did not adversely affect neighboring agricultural land or increase flood risks to nearby properties. 

Steps were taken to minimize impacts on the fragile landscape and the wildlife it hosts, including maintaining exclusion zones around badger setts. Additional measures were taken to protect watercourses and to reverse water quality decline.

The Marches Mosses now have a more naturally functioning hydrological cycle, which will enable this delicate ecosystem to regenerate. They are also more resilient: now that their amazing store of carbon has been safeguarded, they are fulfilling their key role in flood risk reduction.

Environmental Scientist, Will Mather, taking water quality samples. 

What strategies does WSP use to educate and raise awareness among employees, customers, and stakeholders about the importance of conservation and sustainability?
WSP regularly engages internal and external stakeholders to inform our business strategy and enhance our management of the organization’s ESG-related risks, opportunities, and impacts. We conducted extensive stakeholder engagement as part of our materiality assessment, as described in Managing our ESG Impacts. 

WSP’s Global Environmental Leaders Team (formerly the Global Environmental Management Committee), which includes representatives from around 20 countries, met on a quarterly basis in 2023 to share environmental management best practices and facilitate environmental protection and performance improvements. In 2023, this team was also instrumental in development of the new Global HSEQ manual; this ensures their support of the new program through our businesses, as well as preparedness to implement changes as we progress into 2024.

Can you share specific examples of successful partnerships or innovative collaborations WSP has formed with other organizations to enhance sustainability and conservation outcomes?
WSP built a calculation model for tracking greenhouse gas emissions for the City of Helsinki based on today and the business-as-usual (BAU) trajectory. Analyzing scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, this ground-breaking model provides a consistent means of gauging future action. It also allows annual follow-up and facilitates region-by-region comparisons. 

WSP’s calculation model is tailored to the needs of a large city. The model also handles emissions from consumption outside the city limits. The study utilizes international standards, the Helsinki master plan implementation program, and spatial data. Before creating the methodology, we carried out a separate study on transport emissions in Helsinki and assessed the adequacy of the emission reduction measures in light of the city’s stated goals. WSP’s findings showed that carbon sinks, like biodiversity, are critical to meeting net zero carbon goals by 2030, which is the City of Helsinki’s target. 

The City of Helsinki’s BAU emissions scenario, prepared by WSP’s experts together with the City of Helsinki Climate Unit, was completed in March 2023. The study conducted by WSP provided the city with an overview of the emissions generated within the city and those generated elsewhere as a result of its own activities. 

The results of WSP’s study cover all emission categories and show the relative proportion of different categories, rather than absolute emissions. 

According to Kaisa-Reeta Koskinen, Head of Climate Unit, City of Helsinki, “The City of Helsinki aims to be carbon neutral by 2030 and carbon negative by 2050. With this calculation, we wanted to get an idea of the scale of all emissions, especially indirect emissions. This will help us to understand which emissions urgently need to be addressed and how global trends affect the various proportions. The outcome of this work will be very useful for climate governance.”

How does WSP quantify investment and return on conservation and sustainability?
At WSP, calculating our direct impacts across a large and diverse project portfolio is challenging, so we use the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a proxy to measure and communicate impacts. Our SDG-Linked Revue reflects the designs and advice we provide that support the 17 UN SDGs, including those addressing multiple aspects of conservation and sustainability. See our white paper on the subject, Measuring Sustainability Impacts. 

WSP primarily contributes to the SDGs through our client work — from connecting communities to critical infrastructure to decarbonizing essential industries and protecting and restoring biodiversity. Every project results in multiple types and varying degrees of impact, and therefore WSP has adopted the SDGs as a framework for measuring the impact of our endeavors. We developed a metric called SDG-Linked Revenues, defined as revenues earned from services that support the SDGs, to estimate our indirect impact on the SDGs across our global project portfolio. Throughout this Report, we highlight examples of projects and programs that illustrate our contributions.

In 2023, approximately 63.4% of WSP’s total annualized gross revenues were earned from services that support the SDGs in WSP’s global operations. For each of our global market sectors, we have identified services that are aligned with the SDGs. We have also further categorized our 2023 SDG-Linked Revenues to illustrate the contribution made to specific SDG goals and targets. While many of our projects contribute to multiple SDGs, for this exercise we chose to map each of our core services to a single, principal SDG to which it most closely aligns. For example, revenue from renewable energy projects aligns with SDG 7, Affordable and clean energy; revenue from stormwater projects aligns with SDG 6, Clean water and sanitation.

How do you see the future of conservation and sustainability evolving, and what role will WSP play in that progress?
Reversing biodiversity loss and restoring the earth’s ecosystems are inherently linked to carbon reduction goals and are critically important. Quite simply, without strong, resilient, and protected natural capital, we cannot be economically viable. Society at large is now starting to understand that our economies depend on healthy and properly functioning natural systems for their stability. WSP is passionate about these issues, which were referred to repeatedly when we spoke to ESG stakeholders in 2023, including our investors, clients, and employees. 

WSP boasts a wealth of expertise in this area, thanks to its thousands of specialists worldwide, including biologists, ecologists, marine/aquatic specialists, and biodiversity experts. We are proud to be driving the agenda in this field. As an early supporter of the Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), we are now beginning to evaluate our nature-based risks and opportunities, as described in this Report under “Biodiversity & Natural Capital”. 

We are uniquely positioned to drive nature-positive outcomes in our client work, whether undertaking the closure of a coal-fired power plant, rehabilitating a mine site, constructing a data center, or carrying out an urban regeneration project. We aim to deploy nature-based solutions everywhere we can. To help our clients and the business community understand what’s at stake and why nature is so critical to business continuity, we issued a guidebook in 2023 entitled Bridging Business and Nature. What motivates us is the knowledge that nature is strong and, given the chance, landscapes can regenerate themselves within a generation. WSP can help accelerate these processes. 

We seize every opportunity to deploy new technologies to support those outcomes. WSP’s teams across the world are developing bespoke and innovative solutions to facilitate informed decision-making. We have an entire team of researchers and scientists at our Innovation Lab in Sherbrooke, Canada, tasked with developing tools and solutions that bring fresh insights to our clients’ projects while helping our practitioners to work more safely and efficiently. Examples include an AI-driven fish counter; a 3D radar to detect birds and bats remotely; and a mobile unit to treat water and soil. Another example is our work for the Canadian Space Agency, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Transport Canada to develop a detection and predictive modeling technology to help minimize the risk of collision between shipping and endangered North Atlantic right whales in Canadian waters.  

What is the one lesson that WSP has learned from your conservation and sustainability efforts that others can take back and think about applying within their own space?
We know the future will be different from today, and we know our projects and advice can leave a long legacy. We also know that it is difficult to think outside the present, and design codes and standards take time to evolve— which is why at WSP we aim to be proactive. Future Ready® gives us a systematic way to identify the key trends relevant to a project and to work with clients to address them— giving more innovative, sustainable, and resilient advice in a rapidly changing world. Through our Future Ready® program, we challenge our people to advise and design for the future as well as today. 

Future Ready® provides our employees with purpose, knowledge, and tools, giving teams a sense of meaning in their contributions. We established Future Ready® seven years ago, and have since embedded the principles throughout our business, showcasing our unique capabilities. Today, Future Ready® is at the heart of our innovative culture. We are proud of what we have achieved, establishing leadership and recognition within the industry.

Why is Texas an important home or base of operations for WSP?
WSP creates Future Ready® solutions that overcome the biggest challenges and deliver lasting value in Texas and beyond. As the world’s ninth-largest economy, Texas continues to lead the United States in population growth. This continued growth will strain Texas cities, roadways, the energy grid, and water resources for years to come. With increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, sea-level rise, and more frequent and intense severe weather events, planning and managing critical infrastructure with a Future Ready® lens will be needed to keep Texans safe. WSP is here to help governing agencies and communities think about how we can prepare Texas for the future with equitable connectivity, technology-focused innovations, and resiliency in mind.

Is there anything else you’d like to share that makes WSP’s strategy and approach to conservation and environmental sustainability unique?
WSP is taking a proactive stance and is preparing for future reporting in accordance with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), as well as other emerging disclosure frameworks and regulations. In 2023, we completed a double materiality assessment, i.e. evaluating ESG topics in terms of potential material financial effects on WSP, as well as potential material impacts on people and the environment. In this context, we were able to identify and prioritize the most relevant topics and associated impacts, risks, and opportunities for our business. In the coming years, we will continue to work towards alignment with new regulatory requirements. Beyond compliance, we will be leveraging our materiality assessment to enhance our ESG program with a view to informing our next triennial Global Strategic Action Plan.

Find out more about WSP’s conservation and sustainability efforts here.

Glossary

ESG – Environmental, Social, and Governance, a framework that assesses a company’s sustainability and ethical behavior by evaluating its performance in the three areas.
Scope 1 GHG – Direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions owned or controlled by an organization, e.g. burning fuel in fleet vehicles.
Scope 2 GHG – Indirect Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are the result of an organization’s energy use, e.g. emissions generated from the electricity we use in office buildings.
Scope 3 GHG – Indirect emissions from activities that are not owned or controlled by a reporting organization, but that the organization indirectly affects.