Environment

This commitment to reducing the impact on the environment extends to our day-to-day life at Clifford Chance, not only because it's what our clients - and our employees - expect from us, but because we believe it's the right thing to do.

In 2008, Clifford Chance's London office achieved ISO 14001 certification – and all of our offices around the world have also set up at least an informal environmental management system.

That same year, Clifford Chance published its Global Environmental Policy. Each office has a responsibility to collect data which is used to monitor our progress against the three-year targets we set ourselves. These include buying at least 10% of our energy from renewable sources where available, reducing paper consumption by 10% per employee and recycling at least 25% of general waste and 30% of office paper waste.

Each year, we adopt an international approach to marking and supporting the aims of initiatives like the UN's World Environment Day and the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour. Often, we work alongside our clients for the benefit of the environment; for example, our Hong Kong office currently joins forces with Credit Suisse for an annual beach clean-up for World Environment Day.

Small steps being taken across the firm in these and other areas are adding up into significant strides towards achieving our goals.  We report on the progress we have made in our annual Corporate Responsibility Report.