Aurecon South Africa becomes an Implementation Partner for GRI

Aurecon has made a major stride towards improving its sustainability profile, having attained the status of Implementation Partner in the Competitive Business Programme at the Global Reporting Initiative in South Africa. The firm is the first of its kind to be represented in the programme.

Established in 2009, Aurecon is an Australian multi-disciplinary engineering and infrastructure consultancy, which offers a broad range of services including project management, design, advisory & asset management, built environment as well as support in the domain of energy & resources.

The firm has now become the first from the engineering and infrastructure domain to become an Implementation Partner of the Competitive Business Programme. The Global Reporting Initiative is essentially an international entity established to promote sustainability across the globe.

The initiative acts as a platform for those with excellent sustainability practices to communicate the benefits of integrating these measures, while simultaneously allowing other stakeholders to incorporate such practices. Aurecon will now be an active participant of this programme.

Commenting on its new partnership, Head of Quality, Environment & Sustainability at Aurecon Sonja de Klerk said, “Thousands of large companies around the world already reap the benefits of sustainability reporting, like lower energy costs, and more productive employees. With the new tool, companies of all sizes can access these benefits.”

“The user-friendly Competitive Business Reporting Tool that has been launched gives companies an introduction to sustainability reporting along with templates for people to use. It has been designed for SMEs to enter global value chains and it has a strong emphasis on working in the different country-specific contexts,” she added.

Aurecon will act as a partner specifically in the South African market, where it has grown increasingly active in recent times.Earlier this year, the firm was ranked the 10th best engineering company to work for in South Africa by Stockholm-based branding and market research firm Universum.

“Stock exchanges and governments across the globe are bringing in new layers of regulation for environmental, social and governance disclosure. Aurecon is not listed on the stock exchange but, because it’s the right thing to do, we have committed to reporting and disclosure to set an example for our clients, peers, sub-consultants and others in our supply chain,” added de Klerk.