Although we are growing organically and by acquisition, we will still strive to reduce our emissions per full-time equivalent employee. Our aim is to reduce the impact of our activities on the environment by taking steps to be more energy-efficient, carbon conscious and climate-friendly.

In 2007, our efforts delivered a 10.8% global reduction in CO₂ emissions across our existing businesses. We are reporting on five new businesses this year in the USA, Russia, Malaysia, Taiwan and our global services business in India.

Our carbon footprint is made up of emissions from our business travel and energy use in our buildings. We endeavour to collect all applicable data but acknowledge that some data may not always be available. To compensate, we add a 5% margin of error to our emissions total when purchasing offsets.

Early in 2007, the newly formed Energy Steering Group issued a UK energy policy and a ‘5, 4, 3’ strategy to reduce like-for-like usage of electricity by 5%, gas and CO₂ by 4%, and water by 3%. More than 50 energy-saving initiatives have been employed, including removing backlights from drinks machines, trialling a device that stops boilers firing up unnecessarily and investigating automated power-saving modes on PCs.

The reductions achieved have generally exceeded expectations: water use was reduced by 4.8% and gas by 12.3%. Electricity use also fell, by 3.9%, and although we use zero emission electricity, the equivalent saving is still more than 314 tonnes of CO₂.

To save energy, Aviva Australia phased out the use of screensavers during the year, and all computers now switch to ‘sleep’ mode after 10 minutes of idle activity.

In 2008, we have set ourselves a global reduction target on carbon emissions of 5%.

Case study

Zero emission electricity

In 2007, 61% of our worldwide electricity was purchased from suppliers providing renewable and zero emission electricity generated by wind, solar, biomass, hydro, and combined heat and power (CHP) sources, an increase of 6% from last year. We expect this percentage to increase in 2008 as our businesses either increase their use of zero emission electricity or switch from electricity generated from fossil fuels to renewable sources.

In Australia, we signed a contract in late 2007 to begin using 25% ‘green energy’ for our Melbourne premises while Hibernian in Ireland plans to purchase 100% renewable energy for its branches in 2008.