Welcome to the PwC Middle East Supply Chain Sustainability page!
As a professional services firm, we purchase fewer materials than businesses in many other sectors. However, we strive to influence our sustainability impacts beyond our direct operations where we can. It’s an important part of our commitment to do the right thing, and, as a principle, we try to only ask our third party vendors to meet standards that we’d be willing to meet ourselves.
If you require any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us at AE_MEProcurement@pwc.com
Act today for a greener tomorrow
One of PwC’s targets is to drive down carbon emissions from its supply chain through innovation, engagement and collaboration. As a result, we have identified a number of ‘key’ third party vendors to form the basis of our programme, based on spend, potential sustainability impacts, and other operational factors. Together, these third party vendors account for the majority of our managed spend.
Our approach
Our main focus is on three main areas, ‘Collaboration’, ‘Engagement’ and ‘Commercial Integration’. The approach we are adopting promotes these values in order to actively support and develop our ESG agenda while pushing social and environmental governance to the forefront of all our business needs.
Our goal is to work, in partnership with our supply chain, not only to satisfy our business requirements but also to minimise negative and enhance positive impacts on the environment and society.
For this, our main aim is to ensure that our vendors are monitoring, reporting, and continuously improving their sustainability performance. A guidance on “net zero and ESG” is shared with our ‘key’ third party vendors to help them build their knowledge and ultimately improve their overall sustainability performance.
We actively encourage our ‘key’ third party vendors to conduct their businesses responsibly. We include ESG requirements in the bidding and contracting process and require all vendors to submit a questionnaire to assess and monitor our vendors’ environmental and social performance.
Across the region, we focus on embedding relevant social and sustainability considerations with ‘key’ third party vendors throughout our procurement activities - from developing our tendering documents and technical evaluation criteria, through to contract clauses, service level agreements and ongoing relationship management.
This demonstrates to our supply chain that social and sustainability considerations are important to us. This approach also encourages them to proactively propose new ideas and solutions which will benefit the environment and society as a whole. We will continue to build on our current sustainability requirements into our commercial arrangements as they renew.
ESG at PwC
ESG stands for Environmental, Social & Governance.
For many, the term “ESG” brings to mind environmental issues like climate change and resource scarcity. These form an element of ESG — and an important one — but the term means much more. It covers social issues like a company’s labour practices, talent management, product safety and data security.
We strive to encourage our value chains to always work in a sustainable way, addressing issues around resource use, waste and social impacts.
- Fair business
- Human rights & modern slavery
- Low carbon economy
- Circular economy
Fair business
We strive to be a ‘fair customer’ and to pay promptly, providing performance meets the terms agreed.
Human rights & modern slavery
As a leading professional services firm, we’re committed to respecting and upholding internationally recognised human rights. We focus on areas in our tird party vendors with the greatest risk of human rights infringements, and have detailed our policies, governance, risk management approach and related reporting in our Human Rights and Modern Slavery Statement. We use our vendor questionnaire to understand how many of our ‘key’ third party vendors have their own human rights policies in place.
Low carbon economy
We are working towards making progress in reducing the carbon footprint from our direct operations. However, our total impact analysis shows that carbon emissions are the biggest environmental impact in our supply chain, so we are working to be more engaged with our ‘key’ third party vendors to measure, report and set targets for reducing their emissions.
Circular economy
We are continuously challenging ourselves to think differently about the materials we use in our business. We’ve made great progress in progressively adopting the principles of the ‘circular economy’, by reducing consumption, and increasing the proportion of materials we divert to reuse or recycling. We’re also exploring circular solutions for the products and services that we purchase, as our waste and materials programme extends from our core operations to those of our ‘key’ third party vendors.
