Accelerating a planet positive future
Reflecting on the successful launch of Arcadis’s new three-year strategy last month, held at the iconic Lord’s cricket ground in London, my primary feeling is one of pride. Pride in the scale and scope of what we launched, pride in the reaction from our investors and clients and pride at the smooth and slick delivery of the event.
But my main pride stems from the immense amount of hard work and dedication from my Arcadis colleagues to ensure our new strategy was clear, compelling and captured the imagination. We have 36,000 employees around the globe all working to deliver our strategic priorities, and aligning all of the varied and complex projects we deliver was a considerable challenge. A challenge our teams rose to with distinction.
This will be the decade of change. And we need to ensure we are at the forefront. A business like ours can only be a success if we have the right people; working collaboratively. But more of that later…
Planet positive
Ultimately, our new strategy is founded on a key ambition – accelerating a planet positive future. For more than 135 years, Arcadis has focused on finding innovative and lasting solutions to the world’s biggest challenges, delivering sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy services for natural and built assets worldwide. Our new strategy really gets to the essence of what Arcadis does; advising and collaborating with key clients to allow them to embrace decarbonisation and improve quality of life in the communities in which they operate, tackling some of the biggest challenges we face globally. A few stats to illustrate this:
- On climate change… £2.75 trillion of investment is needed a year, every year to meet net zero by 2050.
- On urbanisation… £2.75 trillion to be spent on creating smart and connected cities by 2030.
- On evolving supply chains… £120bn on reshoring manufacturing.
- On infrastructure investment… £800bn to be spent on water infrastructure over the next decade.
Our new vision is based on three key principles that drive all of our global activity from 2024-2026: sustainable project choices, digital and human innovation and powered by our people. I’ll dive into these in a bit more detail.
Sustainable project choices
Our clients are the lifeblood of our business. We’re proud to work with so many, all over the world; clients of all sizes and from a vast range of sectors. What we will now do is deliberately focus on projects that align with our strategy. We will focus on projects that accelerate a planet positive future and adopt different solutions, and prioritise delivering real value and solutions for our 160+ key clients.
To give an example of what we do, take our recent work with the a global property and workplace provider. They wanted to develop their own net zero strategy to meet ESG targets. Our sustainability advisory team applied our consulting expertise in emission calculations and offsetting strategies, which will deliver a 35% reduction in carbon emissions across their entire portfolio by 2030. We have combined these services into a new digital tool – Net Zero Catalyst – and are currently advising 12 clients on similar net zero roadmaps.
Our advisory services are expanding to help our experts get closer to client business strategies from the start. I fully believe that Arcadis can become pioneers in sustainable design and engineering services and designing net positive facilities – making those sustainable project choices is central to that ambition.
Digital and Human innovation
Arcadis is a smart, digitally-enabled organization. I am excited about our digital journey and the progress we have made over the last three years in areas like intelligent transport systems and digital asset management tools. Over the next three years, we will continue investing in digital products to support smart cities and advance the energy transition and expand our offering to provide greater value and cost savings to clients.
An example is the AI-powered Transport Strategy Optimizer. This has recently been adopted by clients such as Birmingham City Council to help prioritize investments and support a more transparent and collaborative decision-making process.
Closer to home, we need to be able to practice what we preach. Within our own operations, we will double down on digitalisation, standardisation and automation of operating procedures. This will allow us to reduce cost, improve the robustness of business selection, and enhancing project planning and resourcing. Our digital journey will enable us to leverage automation, AI and our skilled teams, blending the best of digital and human innovation at Arcadis.
Powered by our People
Automation and digitisation are crucial to a thriving modern company like ours. But our continued progress, and the ultimate success of this new strategy, rests on the expertise, commitment and innovation of Arcadians all over the world. Our teams of consultants, architects, data analysts, designers, engineers, project planners, water and sustainability experts operate across 30 countries, and all of them have a vital role to play in delivering our future.
We are serious about our commitment to accelerate a planet positive future and tackle our clients’ pain points, and we can’t do it without the ingenuity of our people. At Arcadis, they are our greatest strength. I will empower our people to shape their own future and advance their careers. I want them to develop new skills and opportunities, to help them make choices based on their preferences and capabilities. This will allow us to continuously upskill our people and align our expertise to the needs of our clients and their projects around the world.
From 2024, we will invest in becoming a Skills Powered Organisation. This project, partly funded by our largest shareholder, the Lovinklaan foundation, will prioritize our people’s expertise, continuous learning, and adaptability over traditional structures and silos.
Over the next three years, we will also add more than 2,500 energy transition professionals to our team through our Energy Transition Academy. This will meet growing client needs in this important area.
Looking to the future
Arcadis is now a very different business than when we announced our previous strategy in 2020. We now have in place an attractive range of market-leading positions, strong capabilities, and our highly-talented people. This positions us well for the future and is the foundation to take our business forward in the next strategic cycle. We stand ready to bring our skills and expertise to address the world’s biggest challenges, and to accelerate a planet positive future.
Alan Brookes, Global CEO, Arcadis