Corporate sustainability

Our people are essential to our success and our objective is to create an inclusive culture where the best talent from all backgrounds can thrive. This commitment and the actions we take includes every part of our business as we champion inclusivity, enhance diversity, and support colleague development.

Our belief is that diverse perspectives are fundamental to the success of our business and that our people need to be empowered to deliver for our clients, and better support our communities.

Our targets and related actions clearly align to our two core priorities of Gender and Ethnicity. We are taking meaningful actions in both the short and medium term to drive sustainable change within our business, for all our colleagues. We report progress annually with more detail in our 2024 Sustainability and TCFD report.

We also support the fair pay landscape as UK Living Wage and Living Hours employers, which is a commitment extended to third party suppliers working on our UK premises. With wider support for our communities being a key component of our charitable giving strategy, we create Powerful Partnerships supporting education, employment, and financial wellness.

In 2024, we launched our ‘Savings Ladder’ campaign to get Britain investing. Our campaign highlights the growing need for the nation to embrace a ‘savings ladder’ culture where saving, investing and pensions become a bigger part of how people view their finances.

Our operational emissions intensity is comparatively small versus the intensity of the investments we manage on behalf of our clients. In 2024, we remained on track to meet our interim objective of a 50% reduction in reported operational emissions by 2025. We reported a 74% reduction versus our 2018 base year. This reduction continues to be driven largely by a fall in our business travel since 2018 and office consolidation.

Each year, we take action to refine our processes, engage colleagues and deliver meaningful impacts. In 2024, we carried out net zero audits for some of our major offices. We engaged with relevant stakeholders required to deliver the energy efficiency initiatives identified in these audits, and this process will continue in 2025.

Our operational emissions are only one source of environmental impact, and we are committed to addressing broader environmental impacts, as sources of emissions considered to be less material can still intersect climate and nature. Our 2024 Sustainability and TCFD report details our progress.

Doing the right thing by our clients, colleagues, and communities is a core responsibility of all our people and is embedded within our Global Code of Conduct. It is the ethical standard that we expect and helps us to understand our responsibilities, accountabilities, and our duty to speak up.

We apply this thinking to our work as we navigate the nuanced and changing expectations of our sustainability-related impacts and opportunities. We channel our day-to-day efforts and expertise through our sustainability working groups, whilst enabling effective oversight for our Board, and embedding accountability for performance with our Directors' Remuneration Policy. Our Sustainability and TCFD report provides further detail on this in practice.

We also must also engage with our stakeholders to determine what the right thing is for them. This is something we do every day as we manage our relationships, but we also assess views periodically in line with our responsibilities and understanding of best practice. We completed our latest sustainability materiality assessment in 2023 which reflects our understanding of significant sustainability topics for our business and helps support our forward-looking sustainability strategy.

Supporting social mobility and creating an inclusive organisation  

Building a business that supports social mobility and financial well-being for our clients, people, communities and tomorrow’s generation. Creating a more equitable organisation includes every part of our business as we champion inclusivity, enhance diversity, and support colleague development.

We have been an accredited UK Living Wage employer since 2014 and in 2020 were one of the first companies to be accredited as a Living Hours employer.

What this means in practice is that we ensure all our UK colleagues (approximately 80% of our global workforce) are paid above, or in line with, the UK Living Wage and that all colleagues are paid above the minimum wage in their country of work, globally.

We extend this commitment to third party suppliers working on our UK premises and our Global Third Party Code of Conduct (PDF) details our linked expectations for any global third parties that we work with.

Driving meaningful reductions in the environmental impacts of our business.

This page focuses on our operational impacts. You can find out more about how we approach climate change through our investments in our latest Sustainability and TCFD report (PDF).

We are a global business helping our clients to plan, save, and invest for the future. Our environmental impacts reflect this, as we keep offices and work flexibly to better deliver for our global clients.

Our operational emissions intensity is comparatively small versus the intensity of the investments we manage on behalf of our clients, but we are committed to play our part in driving meaningful reductions in our reported emissions.

We are targeting operational net zero by 2040 and working towards a 50% reduction in reported emissions by 2025 versus our 2018 baseline.

Our emissions target includes Scope 1, 2, and Scope 3 categories – but we still have more to do to collect data for some material Scope 3 categories, such as emissions related to our supply chain. We are working to develop a more complete picture of our Scope 3 data and will report transparently on our related impacts and progress.

In 2024, we remained on track to meet our interim objective of a 50% reduction in reported operational emissions by 2025. We reported a 74% reduction versus our 2018 base year. This reduction continues to be driven largely by a fall in our business travel since 2018 and office consolidation.

The nature of our business means that our largest source of operational emissions relates to where we work, and how we connect with our clients and colleagues.

We are therefore focused on reducing the energy use in our offices and need to drive long-term reductions in business travel.

Our priority is to reduce our impact in absolute terms, with the elimination and reduction of emissions.

Below is a chart illustrating our operational emissions (tCO2e) from the past two years  and our baseline year broken down by scope and category. For further information, please visit this year's Sustainability and TCFD Report.

Our objective operationally is to play our part in protecting and enhancing our natural world.

We approach this through the Aberdeen Group Charitable Foundation, our employee engagement programme, including our colleague networks and volunteering policy and through active management of sites and offices.

We recently became a Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) adopter, building on our early membership of the TNFD Forum and our commitment to the Finance for Biodiversity pledge. 

Further considerations of our impacts on nature - both operationally and through our investments - is available in our 2024 Sustainability and TCFD report (PDF).

Our office environments are relatively low-risk spaces, but the standard of care we hold ourselves to remains high.

We conduct risk assessments for our work activities, with our goal being zero reportable workplace accidents and 95% of risks to be controlled at the point of audit. All accidents and incidents are investigated and our Sustainability and TCFD report (PDF) provides more detail.

We know it is critical to embed respect for human rights throughout our business.

Our sector has a key role to play in combatting modern slavery and forced labour. We take an active approach and work across our operations, through our investments, with third parties, and with our wider sector to drive positive change.

We report our actions and progress annual in line with the UK Modern Slavery Act. Our objective is to go beyond required reporting, with our efforts aiming to tangibly improve our operational practices.

We have more to do to fully understand and address potential risks linked to modern slavery and have outlined three main objectives to 2025:

• Integrate modern slavery considerations into our investment processes
• Raise further awareness amongst colleagues
• Complete modern slavery risk assessment of suppliers

Our latest report details the steps we have taken to progress these objectives and we are determined to be transparent as we acknowledge the severity of this issue.

Understanding the sustainability topics that are most significant to our business and stakeholders is essential as we further embed sustainability into our thinking and processes.

We completed an independent double materiality assessment in 2023 to refresh our understanding and to support our forward-looking sustainability priorities and throughout 2024, we reviewed our sustainability strategy to ensure a cohesive approach across our business, aligned to our purpose of enabling our clients to be better investors.

We have also been reflecting on our long-term plans for conducting sustainability materiality assessments now that the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) are subject to implementation.

Our Sustainability and TCFD report (PDF) provides more detail on the process we followed and the topics considered most significant to our business and stakeholders.