A New Dawn for Earth Day 2021

Restoring our planet through intelligent digital transformation

Last year, global emissions fell by 17% and vibrations caused by human activity decreased by 50%. Yet within months, activity has returned close to original levels. While the pandemic enforced a temporary pause in activities, the start of 2021 has seen momentum building with renewed will to drive innovation towards a more permanent reset in priorities. This April’s Earth Day, President Biden will bring world leaders together to galvanize climate change efforts in the inaugural Leaders’ Summit on Climate. The G7 meeting in June similarly has the pandemic and climate change top of the agenda. And COP26 in Glasgow is focused on accelerating action towards the Paris Agreement goals. Sustainability has never been higher on the policy and corporate agenda. But what does this mean for AVEVA?

Translating principles into action
With solutions spanning the engineering and operations lifecycles, we are well positioned to support sustainable digital transformation. Our software is already helping customers increase energy efficiency, minimize noxious emissions and optimize the use of valuable natural resources and we’re proud to be advancing sustainable development across diverse sectors.

We believe that a principled approach to people, the planet and profits go hand-in-hand. We have recently joined the United Nations Global Compact and Business for Social Responsibility. Partnering with them and taking guidance from our customers, we are working to align our strategy and operations with universal principles on human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption. In listening to our customers, there are four recurring areas driving their sustainability efforts where our software has a key role to play: tackling climate change, the need to boost circularity, the energy transition to renewables, and the drive for enhanced transparency and traceability in operations and supply chains. We are committed to helping industries drive sustainability in those areas while also striving to exemplify sustainable business practices within our operations.

Our footprint – and our handprint
We are committed to measuring and reporting on our environmental stewardship efforts for our operations as well as the impact that our technology solutions can have on our customers’ environmental performance. We frame these concepts as the “prints” we leave behind on the world – our footprint and our handprint.

We recently conducted a detailed assessment to determine the Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) issues that are most material to our business as a prelude to setting a comprehensive set of goals. We have also conducted a review of our GHG emissions, which we have reported publicly for several years, in order to set a baseline year for company-wide reductions targets in preparation of making a credible net zero commitment. Alongside the steps we are taking to reduce the environmental footprint of our operations, we are accelerating our efforts to grow our handprint, which is how our software can enable and drive sustainability within the industries we serve. In fact, it is through our technology handprint that we believe we have the biggest opportunity to have a truly global impact.

Most sustainability challenges demand collective action, new technology and scalable solutions to help accelerate progress. A PWC survey recently identified that technology like ours can directly impact over 70 of the UN Sustainable Development targets. For example, by providing real-time energy data and predictive analytics that support improved operational efficiency, we can help hundreds if not thousands of our customers to reduce their carbon footprints. We are currently working closely with our customers to demonstrate the value we can bring to their businesses and are proud to be working with some of the world’s most sustainable companies – including Danone, Neste and Schneider Electric.

The decade of action
The next ten years will be critical to our success in tackling climate change to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals – it’s been named the Decade of Action. As it begins, it has never been more important for industries to harness the full potential of technology to accelerate progress.  At AVEVA, we have the expertise, the network and the capabilities to realize sustainable industries of the future. We take our responsibility seriously and we’re excited to work alongside our partners and customers to drive the change we need to restore the planet and deliver more equitable economic growth.

For more information about AVEVA’s sustainability priorities and the sustainability benefits of our software visit www.aveva.com/sustainability.

This April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the US’s modern environmental movement in 1970, focused on raising awareness about environmental issues and transforming public attitudes and policy reform. Today, Earth Day is widely recognized as the largest environmental observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people every year as a day of action to change human behaviour and create global, national and local policy changes. Find out more at: https://www.earthday.org/earth-day-2021/