The environment

We are striving to be a leader in climate change and sustainability action as we understand the importance of tackling the global challenge of climate change.

During 2021, we partnered with Ecologi, allowing us to reward our employees with trees being planted in their name into the ‘Audley Forest’. In 2021, we planted 600 trees into our Audley Forest.

Other environmental sustainability initiatives in 2021 include:

• Investing in electric vehicle charging points in 3.7% of car parking spaces across the operational Audley villages, with many more in the pipeline
• Decreasing water use by 7% to 52,401m³, like-for-like.
• Development of plans at Audley Scarcroft Park village (which is currently under development and due to be operational by December 2023) to re-sow excavated clean soil from the site during development and create a species-rich grassland comprising of various floral species. This has been projected to improve the biodiversity of the area by 27% (in terms of biodiversity unit increases).

Net zero carbon

We have committed to being operationally net zero carbon by 2030 (this includes the energy that we have direct control over), and to being materially net zero carbon by 2040 (this includes our owners’ emissions, and our supply chain).

We are making decisions to ensure we can achieve these targets by, if not before, our specified target years. All of our electricity is procured on REGO-backed renewable electricity, and we have recently begun procuring green gas tariffs. We will continue to ensure our energy tariffs are of the highest quality, and are continually working towards reducing our carbon footprint.

To help track the progress against our net zero carbon targets, we conducted quarterly energy, water and carbon monitoring, and will continue with bi-annual monitoring throughout 2022.