Energy consumption has a significant environmental impact and is the biggest contributor to our overall greenhouse gas emissions. Since baseline year 2009, we have reduced our energy consumption by 21%. This reduction comes as the result of, for example, engineering teams ensuring that heating, air-conditioning and lighting controls of buildings we occupy are optimized. In addition, we apply externally verified standards to validate building performance.

Information technology (IT) consumes half of the electricity used by the Global business and our IT-driven initiatives contributed significantly to these energy savings. Consolidation and virtualization have reduced average IT server energy consumption by 22% since 2011. The Desktop Transformation Program initiated in 2010 and continued through 2012 is designed to reduce the number of personal computers by 14% whilst ensuring that new computers and monitors are more energy-efficient than the equipment they replace.