With 40 offices around New Zealand and some 2100 staff, WSP’s work touches all corners of New Zealand. This requires planning for how the different sectors they work on can decarbonise whether it is building schools, hospitals, energy systems or transport infrastructure. Their decarbonisation plans are thus “a significant change management program across the business that requires a lot of different initiatives to be undertaken in the right order, for the right outcome.” WSP’s decarbonisation blueprint already has 45 current initiatives with many more in the pipeline for future years. 

For Robert personally, his interest in the environment began early in life. As a five year old he remembers watching David Attenborough and through it seeing how humans were impacting the environment. This developed an “inherent interest” in climate change issues in his career where he worked across a number of different sectors, before joining WSP. Robert had been familiar with Net-Zero for decades and believes that, with its decarbonisation commitment, WSP has “made the hard call to do what’s right”. That said WSP New Zealand is not alone in its journey, other WSP regions around the globe have also made similar decarbonisation commitments.

While Net-Zero is the “ultimate goal”, Robert stressed that it’s essential that organisations are able to “put their hands on their hearts” and know they’ll get there. For this reason, 2030 is the major target in his books. Even so, given the long timescales in engineering projects, in order to reach WSP’s 2030 goal, most of the change has to be front loaded in the next four or five years. This is because a “very significant translation of effort is required between strategic intent and actually having your engineers on the floor plate do things differently”. The journey is one that begins with “informed client conversations to get agreement about the direction projects need to go in”. In fact, WSP has found it refreshing that many of their clients are no longer interested in their decarbonisation work just being on powerpoint slides- they want to know what they are actually out there doing. This is important as any decarbonisation efforts businesses make have to “pass the red-face test”.

To Robert there is still a danger that Net-Zero has become a catchphrase. He believes that to reach a Net-Zero New Zealand we need to counter our “she’ll be right” attitude. In fact, with a small island population that punches well above its weight internationally, he states New Zealand has the opportunity to really accelerate climate action. Modernising our transport fleet, as well as ageing and poorly insulated infrastructure, are some ways he suggests we can do this. However, he cautions that Net-Zero shouldn’t be our aim. Instead, we should be aiming for “overdraft mode” where we are actually sequester carbon. This entails a broad shift away from consumerism to environmentalism. What might this look like for communities? It could mean having a range of facilities closer to home, just a walk or cycle away. It could also mean consuming more plant-based food and ensuring sustainable growth models for businesses.

In sum, to WSP getting decarbonisation started means “lifting the bonnet” on plans to reach Net-Zero and getting stuck in. You can keep up to date with how WSP continue to decarbonise New Zealand’s built environment here.