Carbon Footprint Reporting

What we include in scopes 1, 2 and 3

Our scope 1 and 2 emissions comprise our corporate offices and leased vehicle fleet. In scope 3, we include material emission sources that are most relevant for our business and for which methodologies and data are accessible: business travel, Financial Advisor offices, commuting and working from home, and Information Technology (IT) assets and services.

Our 2024 performance

At the end of 2024, our greenhouse gas emissions were 32% below 2019 base-year levels. As we pursue our net-zero targets, we continue to maintain carbon neutrality through carbon offsets that have been verified to a recognized standard and listed on a public registry to ensure quality. Additionally, we review the project documents and undertake a media scan to further ensure that we’re focusing our purchases on renewable energy certificates and offset projects that have not been identified as having quality concerns. Our offset purchases in 2024 included a waste composting facility and an IT assets reuse project.

Our operational emissions were higher in 2024 than in 2023. Increases were seen in air travel, IT assets, IT services, commuting and working from home, which are all related to increased business activity. These were partially counteracted by decreases associated with office space consolidation, including the move to our new headquarters in Guelph. While we expected a significant increase in emissions from IT assets, we saw only a small increase because our major vendor revised its product carbon footprint methodology.

In 2024 we continued to work within business areas across the enterprise to identify and implement initiatives to drive us towards our net zero commitment. We conducted a targeted IT vendor survey, incorporated carbon footprint data in IT asset selection, and updated our travel policy and booking messages to encourage lower impacts from travel. Reaching our targets will require a collective effort from across our organization, as well as action in society as a whole, and we’ll continue to seek opportunities to reduce emissions internally while advocating for value chain and societal change.

Linking net zero targets to executive compensation

Net zero targets have been set as part of our long-term goals and are among the top priority targets for our organization. To incentivize emissions reduction and hold our organization to account, we have linked our net zero operations target to executive compensation. Beginning in 2023 our president and CEO’s long-term incentive plan included net zero operations targets, and the inclusion of these targets was expanded to all vice presidents and above in 2024.