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Bain & Company plans to reduce its Scope 3 emissions from business travel by 35% over the next five years. The news is the latest example of sustained pressure from the world’s leading strategy firms to make their businesses greener.

Bain & Company has achieved carbon neutral status for the past 10 years in a row and is determined to find new ways to improve its climate impact. The company is firmly linked to the Science-Based Targets Initiative’s “Business Ambition for 1.5 ° C”, which the company signed in 2020 when it pledged to achieve zero net climate impact by the end of the decade .

So far, the company has eliminated 68% of its Scope 1 and 2 emissions (emissions from the combustion of fuels or purchased electricity) in the last ten years – by switching to 100% renewable electricity and improving the energy efficiency of its offices and insights. reduce the waste from its operations. Bain now hopes to tackle its Scope 3 emissions over the next five years.

“We haven’t picked low-hanging fruit for a long time and we follow the same advice we give our customers: set bold goals that are realistic and measurable,” said Sam Israelit, Bain’s chief sustainability officer. “Our company is very focused on reducing the impact of our emissions on the environment and accelerating our carbon transition. We continue to lead our own industries and equip our customers and nonprofits to do the same.”

Scope 3 emissions include purchased goods and services, waste disposal, use of sold products, investments and transportation of employees and products. In the travel-intensive consulting industry in particular, business flights make a significant contribution to climate change. To improve its environmental footprint in this regard, Bain has announced bold new plans to reduce emissions from business travel by 35%.

“Like most companies, the pandemic has given us the opportunity to take a step back and rethink the way we have worked in the past,” said Torsten Lichtenau, Global Head of Carbon Transition Impact Area at Bain his consulting practice for sustainability and responsibility.

According to Lichtenau, the pandemic has shown that there are times when advisors can still be effective with clients by using technology rather than visiting locations in person. Bain will therefore work together in a hybrid work environment whenever possible.

Bain’s sustainability and responsibility consulting practice has grown significantly over the past decade and has completed more than 500 client projects in the past two years alone. Meanwhile, in early 2021, Bain announced that it had received a gold rating from EcoVadis, the leading environmental, social and ethical performance appraisal platform, placing Bain in the top 2% of professional service companies for its sustainability practices. It’s not the only major advisory brand looking to improve its environmental footprint, however.

MBB rival Boston Consulting Group recently announced it would be spending $ 400 million on its climate-positive goals for 2030. One way to achieve this is to have flights operated by BCG employees in the Nordic countries on SAS and Finnair flights with sustainable aviation fuel. The program is part of a new agreement with the Finnish renewable solutions provider Neste. With aviation accounting for nearly 3% of global CO2 emissions, Neste’s solution is a big impact option for companies with net zero goals. The company anticipated this demand and plans to increase production to 1.5 million tons by the end of 2023.

Elsewhere, the entire Big Four have also committed to various net-zero targets before 2030, with KPMG being the last to announce such a target in 2020. One of the company’s goals is to reduce KPMG’s direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions by 50%.