How we deliver on our purpose

In 2016, together with our stakeholders, we identified 15 sustainability topics that are crucial for our firm to address: seven priority challenges and eight additional challenges. Since then, our CR & Sustainability leader, Valérie Arnold, embarked on a journey together with our CEO and the leadership team, to align those sustainability topics with our business model.

Learn about our sustainability vision and strategy from our CR & Sustainability leader directly, in this video. 

To achieve our ambition of embedding sustainability systematically across our firm, a centralised management approach is not sufficient.

As our sustainability topics are diverse and touch upon a whole range of strategic dimensions, it is key to get leaders from throughout the company to implement them in various departments: market and clients, risk management and independence, human resources, learning and development, communications, and procurement, to name a few. We also aim at onboarding all our partners by increasing their awareness and participation in the firm’s sustainability journey. This way, they are able to set the tone from the top for our people, engage our clients and inspire other stakeholders.

^{This material references Disclosures 102-19, 102-20, 102-44, 102-46b and 102-47.}

Being part of a bigger sustainability action plan: The UN SDGs

We are all part of a world that is faced with a variety of sustainability challenges. To address them effectively, 196 member states of the United Nations committed to a common agenda that works towards sustainable development: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They are the world’s sustainability blueprint, providing a set of 17 ambitious goals and 169 measurable targets to tackle people, planet and prosperity related issues. The Goals and targets are all to be achieved by 2030.

However, the burden of the agenda cannot solely be placed on the shoulders of the government. Businesses like ours are also key players in this world and we have both the duty and the power to play an active role in making a change for the better. 

At a global level, our firm already contributes to the global sustainability agenda, including respect for human rights, by having a long-standing partnership and being actively involved in the World Economic Forum, and by strategically supporting the GRI-UNGC working group to encourage corporates to report on the SDGs.

At PwC Luxembourg level, we decided to progressively move towards SDGs by using them as a lens to assess opportunities and threats to our business, and to subsequently understand our risks and opportunities in the context of global change. In return, this will help us define our business goals and sustainability priorities based on external societal and global needs, and allow us to do our part in bridging the gap between current and required business performance.

Our multi-stakeholder approach

Our sustainability topics were co-defined by our stakeholders in 2016, and reconfirmed by them in 2017 (for more detail on how we identify and select our stakeholder, see our Annual Review 2018, page 42). As such, they continue to apply to this year’s Annual Review. Stakeholder groups we consulted include our employees, clients, suppliers, academics, representatives from media and public regulators, as well as NGOs.

Today, we are in the middle of a materiality transformation process, moving from our existing sustainability priorities to UN SDGs. The SDGs being the world’s list of material sustainability topics, we believe that we should measure our sustainability impact through their lens, and use them as the ultimate sustainability-impact indicators of our firm. This does not mean that we will replace our materiality matrix by SDGs, quite the contrary. We will be able to map all our material sustainability topics through the SDG framework.

We want to test the appropriateness of this new materiality approach with our stakeholders and will ask them for their expectations and interests regarding our role in achieving the SDGs. However, at this stage, it is still too early for us and we are not concrete enough yet in how we see PwC Luxembourg playing a role in achieving SDGs  to enter into dialogue with our stakeholders about this. We will be doing so in the months to come.

^{This material references Disclosures 102-21, 102-40, 102-42, 102-43 and 102-46.}