We are the reliable facilitator for the transition to a sustainable future – for the benefit of our clients and society.
Our client portfolio is extremely diverse and we do everything in our power to help grow local economies where we operate. We take steps to reduce and/or mitigate our impact on the environment through our own activities and in the design of our value chain for resource management, continually seeking ways to improve our sales and purchasing processes and create secure employment opportunities for our global workforce.
Our motivation
All our sustainability ambitions are conditional on our continued success as a company. Enhancing KAEFER’s economic performance in both the short- and long-term means pursuing continuous improvement and managing risk. Increasingly, our clients – as well as financial markets – measure economic performance according to ESG criteria, as well as purely financial criteria.
Today’s industrial assets must change to meet future requirements. As an industrial service provider with technical know-how and expertise in realising complex projects, KAEFER has an important role to play in this transition. At a bare minimum, this means engaging with social, legislative and regulatory developments in order to anticipate and plan for upcoming changes. Our goal, however, is to set the pace, pioneering change and actively assisting our clients to realise opportunities and avoid threats.
Actions
Sustainability commitment To be ranked in the first quartile of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investment ratings within our sector by 2025
At KAEFER, analysis by the Sustainalytics rating agency serves as one of the bases for assessing our sustainability performance. In the Sustainalytics rating, KAEFER was assessed with a moderate ESG risk, a lower ESG risk than in the previous year mainly due to our expanded ESG strategy and governance.
This is mainly the result of our considerable efforts to meet the evolving expectations of different stakeholders through a stronger focus on our binding frameworks. KAEFER’s new Environmental Policy fosters environmentally friendly work practices and sets out our commitment to environmental protection through the identification, reduction, and monitoring of environmental impacts within our business activities. At the same time, our new ESG Policy sets out KAEFER’s overall plan to integrate environmental protection, social responsibility, and good governance throughout the value chain.
Outlook
In 2022, we began a comprehensive ESG Risk & Opportunity Assessment across all KAEFER activities – up to and including existing and planned regulatory frameworks, exploring how these have (and will have) an impact on our business model (see Double materiality & risk assessment). Moving forward, we intend to place a stronger focus on identifying climate-related financial risks and opportunities for our business.
EU Taxonomy disclosure
KAEFER supports the transformational objectives of EU Taxonomy Regulation, which match our ambition to help accelerate our industry’s transition to a Net Zero world. In establishing eligibility and alignment with EU Taxonomy, we take the following factors into account.
For good reasons, the Regulation currently prioritises activities with a large share of overall emissions and reduction potential, including manufacturing, transportation and construction. This approach excludes many activities in our industry, where the potential impact of the Regulation could also be significant but that are not covered by the current guidelines. We estimate, given that for 2022 the EU Taxonomy focuses only on activities related to two of the six environmental objectives (climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation), the potential percentage of eligible activities for KAEFER would probably not be representative of our contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Looking ahead, we hope the role of industrial service providers with manual worker expertise will be better reflected in the Taxonomy Regulation in order to fully leverage the transformational benefits we all aspire to.
At KAEFER, we are evaluating our internal reporting processes and systems in order to align them with EU Taxonomy requirements, in particular the auditability requirements as defined in the Taxonomy.