Environmental
Transitioning our business while protecting and supporting our customers and partners
When it comes to climate change, we recognise that there is more work to be done to address its impacts and that we must play a role in encouraging a responsible transition to a low-carbon economy.
Our wider group, Liberty Mutual, is committed to serving as a force for progress in combating climate change and acknowledge that climate adaptation is critical to the success of our business and our policyholders. Led by our values, the group is proactively adopting climate strategies which are based on our purpose — to help people embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow — and proactively supporting the responsible transition to a low-carbon economy.
In Europe we are following these strategies and aim to contribute to Liberty Mutual’s ambition of climate resiliency and supporting a global energy transition, while putting people first — our customers and policyholders, employees, investors and communities.
A thoughtful transition
We are thoughtfully transitioning our business while protecting and supporting the interests of our policyholders and capital providers. To reach these goals, we will continue to decrease our operational carbon footprint by taking actions to increase operational efficiencies and identifying renewable energy opportunities across our real estate portfolio.
Enterprise wide we have adopted five Climate Aspirations to guide our low-carbon and energy transition strategy. We favor a ‘3-Rs’ strategy to transition our operations to a low-carbon future:
- Reducing our emissions through improved efficiency
- Investing in renewable/alternative technologies and businesses
- Utilizing RECs (renewable energy credits) and offsets.
Guided by these aspirations, in 2021, we committed to a 50% reduction of Scope 1 and 2 global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from 2019 levels by 2030, taking another step in our long-term strategy toward a low-carbon future, as well as our overall ESG journey.
Read about our long-term strategy toward a low-carbon future in our Global Emissions Commitment.
Our approach in Europe
In Europe, 2021 was the starting point in our journey in sustainability, building our environmental approach. Over 2021, WEM developed ESG workshops with the Executive Team and working closely with the Sustainability Office to start building a Sustainability Plan for our European operations, this is fully aligned with the overall Liberty Mutual Strategy and ambitions but also with the UN Sustainability Development Goals. Here are the initial initiatives we have completed with a view to contributing our enterprise wide Global Emissions Commitment.
- During 2021 we digitalized 80% of our communications in Europe, moving to a paper-less model which has generated significant savings of paper.
- The Liberty Digital Way initiative, launched in 2020 contributed significantly to reducing facilities footprint, as 2000 employees shifted to working-from-home.
- This new working model built along with employees as a flexible, efficient, and sustainable system has also been key in reducing our carbon footprint by elimination long distance travel, daily commuting and reducing the energy consumption necessary for the maintenance of buildings. This will trigger a significant reduction in energy consumption in 2022 versus 2019 baseline.
- As part of our commitment to reducing facilities footprint, we established a working group in Europe, that is responsible for collecting and documenting energy consumption. The output of the work from this group will be a list of local strategies to reduce energy consumption and contribute to Liberty Mutual commitments to global emissions reduction.