Environmental & Social Information • May 12, 2020
Environmental & Social Information
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sustainability across all our events
Our colleagues' shared culture
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Informa exists to champion the specialist, connecting people with knowledge to help them learn more, know more and do more. We champion and connect specialists all over the world through events, intelligence products and scholarly publishing. We're a FTSE 100 company with hundreds of powerful brands helping customers in dozens of specialist markets to succeed.
For more information, see our Annual Report informa.com/investors/annual-reports
Our divisions are underpinned by: Global Support. Global Support supports each operating division
their business, including managing the increasing impacts of climate change, is presenting itself more and more clearly. This is also something that is now much more frequently on the agenda of investors too. We're privileged to have relationships with some of the brightest people in the world within the many specialist customers markets we serve, and most have strong views on sustainability. In a competitive marketplace, it gives us an edge to be regarded as a leader on an issue that is becoming increasingly important. The largest opportunity, perhaps, is to get this right for colleagues and future talent. Our business is only as good as the people we attract, retain and engage, and part of that is down to listening to and harnessing the interests and passions of our colleagues. It is easy to fall back on platitudes on issues of sustainability. Instinctively, if I see something that needs doing, I find a way to do it, and as a business Informa prides itself on ambition allied to acting small and rolling up our sleeves. Our new FasterForward programme has set Informa on a path to be a Champion of Sustainability – one that
sustainable too.
Further progress and improvement is, of course, still ahead of us. The Board will be closely monitoring developments and ensuring the business has the capabilities and the support to achieve our ambitions. The main reason I know we will succeed is that, as the stories in this report show, our colleagues everywhere have the energy and determination that achieving these new goals will require.
can support suppliers, partners and competitors to be more
I'm delighted to introduce Informa's 2019 Sustainability Report. There are many ways a business can communicate what it's doing on sustainability. Personally, I'm always inspired by hearing first-hand from colleagues on what they are seeing in their markets and roles, and what they are putting into place every day. This report captures those stories and shares them, hopefully acting as a catalyst for
One of the things 2019 will be remembered for is as the year the environmental agenda came to the forefront of society's attention. At Informa, it was a year of further progress and improvement, when we also took the opportunity to build on our approach and
The opportunity to help our customers act more sustainably in
further sustainable change within our business.
commitments to sustainability.
Worked with Unilever to amplify sustainable business practices in the natural foods industry (p25)
Events industry partnership crowdfunds impact study
(p30)
scores in the first 4 months
chapters on our new SDG Online product from T&F. 10% freely available at any time (p12)
increase in sign ups for our AgraME event when we associated with the UN SDGs (p13)
new laptops for kids now include some of our STEM content for free (p17)
of event attendees say that it matters to them that events are run in a responsible and sustainable way (p20)
attendees tell us that the event makes them more able to address the big challenges their sector is seeking to solve (p20)
recent immigrants to Toronto were bought a ticket to our One of a Kind Show by a fellow attendee (p22)
of colleagues volunteered
Partnerships around the world deliver value for us and non-profits (p32)
to challenges like climate change. Digital connectivity sustains relationships, but in-person connections help ensure relationships are trusted and effective and, therefore, new ideas are adopted faster.
The platforms we create allow for highly efficient in-person connections, helping our customers limit their own carbon footprint. Surveys of our customer groups tell us that being able to meet important contacts, access education, network and do deals all in one place saves significant time and cost and helps cut back on numerous other travel obligations that would otherwise be taken.
It is efficient for them, it is efficient for their business, and it is effective for the wider environment.
As a convener, facilitator and connector, the role we play, the thing we must keep sight of, is that we exist to help others. Many specialist industries will provide the solutions, but every industry will have to adapt. We exist to champion the people who will create solutions, and to help industries make progress efficiently, including our own.
In that sense, in 2019 we demonstrated the strength of the platform we have invested in over the last six or seven years. This made it the perfect time to refresh and crystallise our Purpose and Guiding Principles as a Company, in what you and I now call the Informa Constitution. We defined who we are as a business today and, as a result, who we will be has become clearer to ourselves and our Shareholders.
Ben: The introduction of the Constitution, with a clear purpose and set of guiding principles, felt like a significant development in our culture to many of us.
Stephen: Yes. Describing how we go about doing business is a powerful thing.
We have talked before about Informa being a people business, a face-to-face business, and a human business. When I spend time with the thousands of colleagues who provided input and ideas to help develop our Constitution, I saw colleagues who in many ways are very different from each other, working in different geographies and different businesses. However, all have a set of shared values and beliefs, which are now enshrined in our shared Constitution.
It is important, because it says so much to current and future colleagues and to shareholders, partners and suppliers, about the kind of people we are at Informa, and the kind of business we want to be.
Ben: It certainly feels to me like there is a growing feeling of connection, and ambition as well. Not least of which is in the launch of our new FasterForward programme which sets us on an ambitious path to support the shift to an ever more sustainable way of doing things. How is this important to our culture?
Stephen: We have always said one of our long-term objectives is that when colleagues move on from Informa, and they are interviewing for another job, the hiring manager will say "you were doing that at Informa, that's impressive!" Of course, that will result partly from Informa being a successful business – by being a good place to work, by serving customers, and creating jobs.
Being a successful business also means being successful in creating benefits for our customers, our communities and the wider societies we operate in. We are now at a stage where we can set some ambitious targets for our environmental, social and economic impacts as a business, and I believe this focus on sustainability will become an increasingly important component of our culture and our commercial offering.
Ben: Many of us are excited about these plans. Why do you think this is the right time for Informa?
Stephen: It goes back to the business we have built over the last six or seven years. Our investments and progressive improvements, the talent we have brought in, the commercial success, all of those things give us both the capability and the licence to go further now. When we look at the initiatives and stories from around the business, we see a growing ambition and willingness to lead by example, The Informa Way. The vast majority of people in Informa want to do the best thing for their customers and for their communities.
Our Walk the World programme is something we are all very proud of at Informa – but the innovation I see from many of our colleagues, in how we produce our products and help our customers achieve their goals, including addressing social and environmental impacts – these are all key to how we will contribute positively to change going forward.
I have always believed in business as a force for good.
At Informa, we are one of the world's leading knowledge and information providers which creates significant opportunities to help our specialist markets address their own challenges, against a backdrop of growing environmental and social pressures. Every business needs to play its role and whilst, as a knowledge and information company, our direct impact is limited this does not remove the imperative and the opportunity to be a better and more sustainable business.
Ben: Businesses of our scale are scrutinized not only for our direct impact, but for our indirect impact too. And as you know, some of our businesses rely on customers taking flights to attend events. Are you concerned about the risk to our business if people decide to cut back on flying?
Stephen: That is a great question. Those businesses in Informa that create, manage, operate and curate major events, actually reduce flights, save travel, and increase connectivity. That is the power of our large-scale branded portfolio. It is the reach and ability of a large scale to bring whole specialist communities together in one place, at one time.
Our events also connect directly to the power of human ingenuity. Our future, as a species, depends upon ideas rapidly spreading across continents, and that is even more important when it comes
Ben Wielgus Head of Sustainability
A conversation between Stephen A. Carter, Group Chief Executive, and Ben Wielgus, Head of Sustainability.
Ben: As an Informa colleague, I found it an exciting, busy and fulfilling year, with all the many activities going on around the Accelerated Integration Plan, including the launch of the Informa Constitution. How would you describe the year?
Stephen: I saw 2019 as something of a tipping point. It was the year we fulfilled the promises we made to our shareholders in return for their confidence and support to further expand the Group. We brought many teams and colleagues together into one business, we made the enlarged Group more efficient, and we just achieved another year of growth. That builds external trust and internal confidence.
A shared purpose is a powerful thing for a business like ours, now made up of over 11,000 colleagues around the world. It can unite us behind a common reason for being, delivered by a shared set of principles. With the progressive growth in Informa over the last five years, there was a clear opportunity to reflect on what it is that bonds all our colleagues and each of the Group's businesses together.
Between late 2018 and early 2019, 2,000 colleagues participated in face-to-face and online workshops, one-to-one interviews and an online survey. The result was a new articulation of why Informa exists – our purpose – and four guiding principles which describe key aspects of our culture and guide how businesses, teams and individuals work day-to-day.
Together, we call this the Informa Constitution.
The Informa Constitution reinforces the story that has been at the heart of our approach to sustainability for many years – that we make our biggest impacts in the world by connecting people with the networks and knowledge they need to be successful in solving challenges in their specialist markets. We believe that there are no bigger opportunities than those that come from solving those challenges around sustainable development in all its many forms.
This provides meaningful and engaging work for all our colleagues and a future growth platform for the business.
Our Purpose
To Champion the Specialist, connecting people with knowledge to help them learn more, know more and do more.
"Specialism is our strength, that's why we decided to focus on specialism in our statement of purpose." Stephen A Carter, CEO
Living the Informa Constitution The Constitution was the major focus of our June 2019 international management conference, ReInvent, where 150 of our leaders took part in discussions and activities around our values, and committed to upholding the Constitution. Our CEO Stephen Carter then launched the Constitution to all colleagues, and copies of the Constitution, signed by leaders at the conference, were delivered to all
Informa offices.
In 2020, we'll be further embedding the Constitution into our daily working life – into recruitment processes, performance reviews, customer relationship practices and into Informa's public-facing brand. The annual Informa Awards will recognise outstanding examples of colleagues living the Constitution, and we are incorporating the new principles into our Code of Conduct and global policies.
"This aligns nicely to a phrase that's used in sustainability a lot: 'Think Global, Act Local' and paints a picture of colleagues all over the world each making local changes that contribute towards a bigger collective goal."
"For me, this means caring about the bigger picture but not letting that distract from the task in hand – it's the small things that make a big difference."
Trust Must be Earned What do our colleagues say?
"It's important to me to be a trusted and valued member of the market I work in. We're not just a vendor, we're a part of the community."
"I think this is the reason people love coming to work at Informa: they really trust and believe in what we do, and I certainly feel this every day in my team."
• We get to better answers by combining skills and talents, joining forces and embracing ideas, wherever they come from. This broadens perspectives, expands horizons, sparks innovation and keeps our thinking fresh.
"Through stewardship and partnerships with our stakeholders, we really aim to foster inclusivity, collaboration and innovation to make the industries we work in more sustainable."
"We always think of our clients as part of our team. So, when they have an idea, I work with them to make it happen."
"Everyone can achieve more when allowed freedom to operate and innovate according to their skills, ideas, experiences, personalities, needs and networks. This lets us flex how we respond to local needs within our communities and our markets."
"I try to give my team the authority to make their own decisions."
Growing demand for greater sustainability It's very clear that the opportunities and expectations around sustainability have grown significantly over the last year. We've seen colleagues, customers and investors all asking more detailed questions, with a greater level of sophistication, and increasing expectations over time. Personally, I really welcome this deeper conversation. Four years ago, Informa chose to invest more significantly in our internal sustainability programme and that's been paying dividends in terms of the range and level of sustainable initiatives and practices across the Group, as well as increasing recognition in external indices and surveys. A growing number of our different stakeholders are also now complementing us in the progress we are making in becoming an increasingly sustainable business. This investment and progress provides a strong foundation for the future, both in continuing to run our business more
sustainably and in the new business opportunities this brings. This is what gave the Executive Management Team the confidence to be more ambitious in our approach, setting out a bolder path and set of commitments for sustainability in our business. We call this FasterForward.
FasterForward: Our new focus for sustainability
FasterForward is Informa's approach to sustainable business. It commits us to a series of activities between 2020-2025 that will ensure we move FasterForward to become an ever more sustainable, positive impact business. We are moving FasterForward to embed sustainability into everything we do and help our customers and specialist markets do the same. Delivering on this will help us champion specialists in new and more engaging ways. When it comes to sustainability, we're moving FasterForward.
To help meet the urgent challenges of a changing world, we are moving faster to reduce our carbon and waste footprint with the aim of becoming a zero waste and net zero carbon business by 2030.
Wherever we can, we will also actively help our partners, customers and wider markets to achieve the same.
Embedding sustainability inside every one of our brands to help our customers accelerate sustainable development in their specialist markets
Informa exists to connect people with knowledge and our greatest impact in the world is through the content and connections we deliver for our customers.
To help our customers go faster, and to accelerate the sustainable progress of the specialist markets we serve, we are embedding relevant sustainability content inside each of our brands.
Whether it's through events, intelligence, research or training, we'll provide our customers with the content and connections that can drive a more sustainable future for their specialist markets.
Multiplying the positive impact we can create when we improve access to knowledge, help people connect more efficiently and invest in our communities
Through the content we provide, we can help connect and inform those who struggle to access knowledge and networks.
When they connect at our events and online, we can help customers be event smarter and more efficient with their time and travel.
Where we work in a specialist or local community, we can partner with them and invest in ways that help them succeed and create more positive impacts in turn.
This is how, by moving FasterForward, we can multiply our positive impact.
Our commitments
Embed sustainability inside 100% of our brands by 2025
Help and promote the achievement of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals through
Become carbon neutral as a business and across our products by 2025 1. 4. 6.
our brands
Halve the waste generated through our products and events by 2025 Become zero waste and net zero carbon by 2030 or earlier 2. 3.
7.
5.
8 INFORMA PLC SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2019 WWW.INFORMA.COM/SUSTAINABILITY 9
Our primary contribution to the SDGs are in goals 4 and 17 but the way we choose to run our business also contributes to goals 8, 12 and 13 as secondary impacts.
However, by helping customers connect with the networks and knowledge they need to solve challenges in their markets, we believe we also support progress towards the other SDGs and we've measured the relative contribution in the graphic below.
For each of our products or brands, we determined whether they contribute to the SDGs and, if so, which goal they have the most impact on. We then calculated the amount of revenues per SDG as an indicator of the value we create, and therefore our activity in the relevant SDG area, as a standard measure across our diverse business.
Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development
Knowledge can be acquired in many ways, and that includes from each other. We help create efficient ways to enable tens of millions of connections between specialists every year. This helps them create and sustain the partnerships needed to foster sustainable development in their markets.
Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all
At the heart of our purpose is a role in connecting people with knowledge to help them learn more, know more and do more. The better we do this, the more value we create for others and ourselves. This links perfectly with SDG4 and it is strongly supported by our FasterForward commitment to connect one million disconnected people with the knowledge they need to succeed by 2025.
The 2020s are set to be the decade of decisive action on the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the framework through which governments, businesses and society can combine actions to address the biggest issues the world is facing. With the publication of The Informa Constitution in 2019, we defined Informa's purpose as a business: To Champion the Specialist. Through this, we have also identified a key part of our role to support the global sustainability effort too.
Informa gives people access to the specialist knowledge, information and products they need to be successful in their goals. That might be something we create or publish ourselves but, more often, it's created by others. In that case, our role is to provide the platforms and curation for customers to access that knowledge.
We work to find new ways of connecting trustworthy, innovative solutions with the people who need them, whether that's in person or online. By enabling better access to content, we help others be more successful in their aims and we believe this, more often than not, creates lasting, positive change in our markets and beyond.
At the heart of all of this is our focus on content and connections that will make a difference. Of course, the knowledge we provide must be relevant and unbiased, but we also know that many of our customers and colleagues want it to help inspire progress in their markets. We work with our customers and partners to understand the challenges they're trying to solve. Increasingly, we are seeing that these challenges are intrinsically connected to creating a more sustainable future for our planet.
That is how we make our biggest contribution to the world and to the SDGs, particularly supporting SDGs 4 (on Quality Education) and 17 (on Partnerships).
In the following stories, you'll hear from colleagues who have been supporting specialists whose goals are to address some of the biggest challenges in society, the environment or their own markets. As a leader in the Knowledge and Information Economy, we have the opportunity to curate and create knowledge people can trust as a viable solution to those challenges.
From there, we defined new content streams rooted in sustainability with help from key organisations such as the Arab Authority for Agricultural Investment and Development (AAAID), Innovation Norway, Agritecture, Al Rawabi and the World Organization for Animal Health, among others. We also had a speaker from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Dr. Markos Tibbo Dambi, who addressed attendees on 'Sustainable Livestock Sector Development for Food Security and Nutrition in the Gulf Cooperation Council', based on FAO's flagship report, 'World Livestock: Transforming the Livestock Sector through the SDGs'.
We believed in the importance of these topics, but was our audience ready for this focus on sustainability? We ran an A/B marketing test on our website to find out. During the test, half of website visitors saw our typical homepage and the others saw a version focused on the SDGs. We saw a remarkable 52% increase in the proportion of attendees registering for the show in the second version – a sign that this isn't just a great way of inspiring our own people, it's a great way of attracting our audience too.
2019's event was a great success and we've already developing plans on how we make our event, and our content, even more sustainable in 2020.
The livestock sector contributes to the achievement of each of the 17 SDGs either directly or indirectly. It is important to examine the sector's interaction in the Gulf Cooperation Council with each of the Goals and the potential synergies, trade-offs and complex interlinkages to better support the transformation needed in the livestock sector and enhance its contribution to the SDGs.
Dr. Markos Tibbo Dambi Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
In July, through an amazing interdepartmental collaboration, we launched Sustainable Development Goals Online (SDGO). It's a huge specialist online collection of content related to the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
I remember first learning about the SDGs in 2016. I was meeting with Jonas Haertle, Head of the UN's secretariat for PRME, Principles for Responsible Management Education – we co-publish a book series with them. Their mission is 'to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development'. One of the big challenges for higher education institutions became clear: today's students expect their university courses to equip them with knowledge on sustainability. Which means tutors, researchers and students need the right tools and educational content to do that. And they need it fast!
That's when I realised that, as one of the only publishers with content spanning all 17 SDGs, we could curate high quality, peer-reviewed knowledge and package it for institutions. We'd be helping to support researchers and equip people who'll lead careers tackling the 'world's biggest change programme'. And we'd be creating revenue – after all, there's an estimated 12 trillion dollars to be made from businesses engaging with SDGs, according to the UN.
AgraME is the Middle East's longest-running exhibition for agriculture, hosted in March at the Dubai World Trade Centre. Attendees from around the region come to keep up to date with industry advancements and trends related to investment, livestock health, aquaculture and controlled-environment agriculture. In 2019, we really wanted to bring sustainability into the spotlight to help raise the importance of this issue amongst our specialist audience – and to meet their need for more solutions to growing food in the region.
Inspired by other Informa events, we realised our opportunity to help connect the agriculture community to the latest knowledge and best practice on sustainability when they gather together at AgraME.
The UN's SDGs were our starting point. We reviewed each of the 17 SDGs and identified seven most relevant for our focus: Zero Hunger (SDG2), Quality Education (SDG4), Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG12), Climate Action (SDG13), Life Below Water (SDG14), Life on Land (SDG15) and Partnerships for the Goals (SDG17).
SDGO launched with over 12,000 chapters and journal articles from across T&F's content, from authors around the globe. Together with brand new core essays, videos and lesson plans, all mapped to the 17 Goals, we believe it provides the largest resource of SDG-aligned content in the world. Teaching and learning materials will be continuously updated, and the content library will be updated twice each year.
There's no other resource like it. With the content, live newsfeed and links to related Informa Events, we believe it can become the place for specialist content on the SDGs. SDGO has been already showcased at several important international events, and it's not only being bought by universities – the European Parliament became a customer last year.
And while we're doing good business, the whole team feels great to be enabling others to learn about and make progress on such important issues. We've committed to making at least 10% of the material available for free, on a rotating basis, so that everyone can benefit from this resource. We're also approaching academics and other thought leaders, inviting them to contribute lesson plans, notes and other materials. One author wrote back to say they were "honoured to participate".
It's easy to assume that for our specialist authors, publishing research in our academic journals adds value to their work. Through the peer review process, their research is validated by other researchers in the same field. We make it easy for others to discover and cite their research. And we make sure their research is available in perpetuity.
But beyond data on citations and downloads, there's much more to the impact of publishing research with T&F. We are now extending the work we do to consider the impact on authors and if it helps them achieve their aims. This can include areas such as progressing their careers, gaining funding, building relationships or starting collaborations. Most importantly, we want to increasingly understand if authors feel their research is reaching the people who need it.
We partnered with the International Association of Impact (IAIA) to investigate this. They're the leading global network in using impact assessment for informed decision making. We publish their journal, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal (IAPA), which has a broad readership including people in universities, government and public agencies, consultancies and community groups. Together we devised a survey and sent it to every author who'd been published in IAPA since 2012.
Clinical trials are a crucial part of developing new cures. They frequently fail, but the most common cause of a failed trial may surprise you – pharmaceutical companies simply struggle to enrol and retain the patients they need.
I witnessed this difficulty first-hand in my previous role, which made the opportunity to make a difference at Citeline particularly appealing. I joined the Sitetrove team in 2018, where we help our clients – often pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses – streamline clinical trials by providing them with an invaluable database of information.
The results revealed some interesting insights (see chart below).
A third of respondents said that being published in IAPA led to greater impact than other journals. We believe this really does show the value of having the specialist focus and the right audiences.
We also heard that publishing in IAPA helps authors connect across their community and outside academia. For example, 46% of respondents made connections with researchers in their own country (and 40% had done so in other countries), while 40% had been approached for research collaborations as a result of being published.
Overall, the project has given us and IAIA a deeper understanding of the network, and where we can amplify and promote authors' research to give it the most impact. Our ambition for 2020 and beyond is to do similar studies in other areas, starting with those that support the UN's SDGs and the urgent issue of climate change. By knowing more about the life of research beyond publication, beyond citations and downloads, we can ensure that specialist authors in our fields really make an impact.
in IAPA
IAPA authors see their articles go on to make an impact, both in terms of future academic research and in the real world:
| Linked to goal: | |||||
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With over 300,000 clinical trials, 400,000 investigator profiles and 117,000 clinical trial sites, we bring together all the information customers need to identify qualified investigators, decide which organisations to partner with, and prioritize sites which are most likely to make their trial a success. This data is supplemented by our Ask the Analyst service, where a team of industry experts help clients make informed, strategic decisions by finding the most relevant information and designing effective search strategies.
Citeline helps customers identify investigators who have the trial experience they need, which allows them to easily pinpoint investigators who meet their criteria. Using Citeline, they can also gain insight into previous, similar trials in specific populations. This reduces costs, improves the chances of a successful trial, and accelerates the process of getting new drugs to market – and potentially saving lives.
The feedback we get from customers is overwhelmingly positive. One Strategic Feasibility Expert from a top-20 pharma business delivered this glowing testimonial: "speaking from a position of a person who is in Sitetrove on a weekly basis, I can undeniably state that Sitetrove has the most comprehensive collection of clinical trial investigator data that I have seen anywhere. By far, and without a doubt, the Trialtrove and Sitetrove platform provides a level of information which in not obtainable in a single platform offered by other organisations which I have come across."
Fast fashion faces sustainability challenges in some areas but less so in others, such as leather. APLF (Asia Pacific Leather Fair) was voted the industry's most important leather event and we've found an important role to play as champions of a material that is sustainable by nature. Produced by tanners who process hides that would otherwise be wasted as a by-product of the meat industry, leather is also long-lasting and bio-degradable.
Championing sustainability has been central to APLF for well over a decade. Most of our conferences, and most new products launched at the show each year, have sustainability built in. The Leather Working Group (LWG), who established the industry's gold, silver and bronze sustainability ratings for tanneries, host their Annual Meeting at our show. So does Leather Naturally, an industrial group we helped found to promote the beauty, durability, versatility and (most importantly) sustainability of leather. We developed the Sustainability in the Leather Supply Chain conference, and it's also the occasion for the Tannery of the Year Award and gala dinner.
Taylor and Francis content can help solve some of these problems. Working with Kortext and its partners (HP, one of the world's main manufacturers of laptops for schools, and OpenStax, the leading
The industry has come a long way since the LWG began offering sustainability audits and certification in 2005. Driven by consumers, brands needed to understand which suppliers met their requirements on sustainability in the broadest sense – on environmental, human rights and compliance issues. Today, the majority of tanneries in China and other countries in Asia-Pacific region have upgraded their production. Treatments are increasingly environmentally friendly, such as vegetable tannins and solvent-free dye, and in some of the most advanced tanneries water discharge from the tanning process is drinkable!
Reflecting the trends in the global leather industry, in 2018 we introduced the 'PPP process' for all exhibitors – a Profiling and Positioning Procedure that shows our commitment to transparency. We require every exhibitor to declare their sustainability credentials, and we include proofs of their certificates in the online showroom. And every year we continue to invite the technicians and experts from British Leather Centre to organise training programmes with us in Hong Kong, where fashion industry professionals can get clued up on the latest auditing, compliance and certifications.
Taylor & Francis and its partner Kortext, the global digital textbook and personal study platform, share a common belief – that access to high quality digital educational resources has the power to fundamentally change children's lives and support SDG4: Quality Education. UNESCO says over 600 million school-aged children are not achieving basic proficiency in reading and maths. The problem, they say, is mainly down to three common themes – lacking the right access to education, failing to keep children in school and low quality teaching in the classroom. Linked to goals: Children today are growing up around smart technology – by providing crucial educational resources with HP, OpenStax and Kortext, we hope many more will gain the core skills to participate in the digital, knowledge-based economy as adults. Indeed, the World Bank estimates that increasing knowledge through free access to world-class content could lead to increases in GDP of more than 30%, at the same time as enhancing vital skills.
We have made it our mission to become the region's leading sustainable sourcing platform for the fashion industry – including non-leather materials. To do that, we've set up a Sustainability Steering Committee to guide our development, comprised of our exhibitors, brands, research centres and organisations promoting sustainability.
Taylor & Francis partnership with HP and Kortext puts educational content at fingertips
Open Educational Resources supplier), we are bringing a rich body of learning content to children the world over – enabling them to interact, collaborate and learn.
Kortext and HP announced in April 2019 that all HP Windows Education Edition devices will be pre-installed with the Kortext reading app, meaning any child using one will have access to a library of selected digital textbooks – for free. To date, the Kortext app is now on some 2.5 million HP laptops.
The content library includes textbooks covering a range of subjects including STEM, as well as some key introductory level texts from Taylor and Francis that will help English learners find their reading level. In addition, teachers can access analytical insights to see how their students are using the content, helping them refine and support the children's learning experiences.
Katie Stern General Manager, Game Group Informa Tech, San Francisco
The game industry is driven by a global community of specialists with few opportunities to come together IRL (internet slang for "in real life"); that's where we come in.
We facilitate the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the video game industry's premier professional event, championing specialist game developers and the advancement of their craft.
Most developers know the community can feel imposing to outsiders, especially women and minorities – 75% of the audience identify as male, and around 25% as female or another gender identity. We feel a duty to the industry, and everyone connected to it, to ensure all attendees feel welcome and have a seat around the table.
That starts with our code of conduct, which invites all attendees to help realise a safe and positive experience for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity or religion. And during five days of education, inspiration and networking, we put that approach into action in the way we curate the space, the content and the speakers.
We fund a Low Income Pass Lottery, giving people who would otherwise not be able to attend the chance to win a complimentary pass. We provide Mamava Lactation Pods and childcare with our partner KiddieCorp, to make sure parents are included. And attendees can pick up stickers with preferred pronouns (he, they, she, etc) when they arrive.
We're very thankful for our voluntary and diverse advisory board that guides content selection to ensure it meets the needs of many groups from the industry. Last year we featured sessions on accessibility in game design and representation in character design. And we run hands-on training with industry partners to boost new voices that will change the face of games, VR & AR.
Our Speaker Diversity Initiative helps to remove financial barriers by prioritizing honorariums for diverse speakers. We also have 33 not-for-profit partner organisations who all go through a rigorous selection to ensure a broad reach and purpose that grows our community.
Our customers are part of many specialist networks and industries around the globe, and we help them to learn more, know more, and do more. They come to us because of what the knowledge and networks we connect them with can lead to. Our brands bring people together – experts, buyers, sellers, authors, partners, associations, communities – around a common topic, challenge or even passion.
Our session evaluations of this segment of content are proof of success, with the diversity and accessibility sessions almost always in our top-scoring content. It gives us confidence that this is something our community wants to level up on, and there's a key role for us to play until it becomes the norm. 18 INFORMA PLC SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2019 WWW.INFORMA.COM/SUSTAINABILITY 19
Whether it's in person at an event or through our physical and digital products, we help people working in the same community collaborate with each other. We believe that the value customers gain from connecting with each other more effectively, as a result of the platforms we provide, helps us keep them coming back. Building on that, at our best we hope that our commitment to improving the products year on year turns them into ambassadors for our brands. Done well, it also puts us at the heart of each specialist community as a valued partner.
As well as being integral to how we thrive as a business, this is a powerful contribution to the global sustainable development agenda – and particularly to the UN's SDG17 (on partnerships for sustainable development).
Here, we've brought together some of the ways Informa colleagues are helping customers connect by doing what we do best: creating opportunities for others to make new connections and strengthen existing ones.
Our success, now and in the future, depends on how efficiently we create the places and ways for learning, knowledge and collaboration to spark and flourish.
Explori's platform was a game changer because it enabled us to start creating a consistent, joined-up data set across hundreds of our conferences. Surveys go out immediately after the event and data is available at all times, for all users, and updated live as the response builds. This immediacy means we can make product decisions much faster and compare KPI's across the business.
Today it feels like Explori are an extended part of the team. And they've played a really important part in building Informa's customer-centric culture and given us a common language for understanding events.
It's great to be part of the team. And because we work with lots of other organisers and major associations, we're able to benchmark Informa's performance against others. That's how we see and share market trends. For instance, the recent data from 2019 suggests that the desire of business people around the world to seek out face-to-face interactions is growing. So, the better the networking and connections made at events, the higher attendees' satisfaction. It's the thing people return for. They want the human interaction to reignite and sustain the digital relationships and recognise events as the most effective platform to do this.
The even better news is, it's true for exhibitors too – we asked exhibitors how events compare to other channels for building brand trust with their communities, customers and markets. They rank events at #1.
That really is great news. And for Informa Connect, we believe the quality of our events keeps our customers returning. This includes their ability to meet the growing interest and expectation for responsibly run, sustainable events.
Yes – there's no question that the landscape is changing. We're all becoming more and more aware of the positive and less desirable impacts of events. Whilst we know events create a lot of good, attendees and exhibitors are putting pressure on events organisers to be more transparent about their environmental impact and how they're managing it. And they'll start voting with their feet. Our industry insights study tells us that around a third of exhibitors say they would consider not exhibiting at an unsustainable show, perhaps because they are concerned about the impact on their brand. And attendees too are now telling us they prefer sustainable shows, with 78% saying they expect events to have a "responsible approach to sustainability".
It's great to hear that the progress we're making on sustainable events is in line with market expectations. We're all motivated to lead the way by listening to the market and responding to provide a really good product and Explori's insights are definitely helping keep us on track.
We listened in when Mark Brewster caught up with Stuart, to discuss Informa Connect's work with Explori, a research business specialising in customer experience and benchmarking for the events industry. We've worked with them since 2016.
events are run in a responsible and sustainable way.
In the summer of 2018, we did a lot of soul-searching about our show's reason for being – we reached the conclusion that our community is what makes us special. We're continually inspired by the passion and courage that drives each person to make their craft into a living, and by the conscious consumers who search for 'storied' gifts or items that are made in a way that aligns with their personal values.
We also identified that diversity is absolutely key to the variety of beautiful work that our community creates and appreciates. That's why we're so focused on supporting people in their journey to the show – whether as visitors or exhibitors.
Since 1975, One Of A Kind (OOAK) has been connecting makers and artisans to people in search of meaningful gifts. We have a very loyal community of attendees and exhibitors, many of whom have been coming to the show for decades. People come from all sorts of different backgrounds, but it's the appreciation of creativity and craft that brings them together. Creative diversity in craft Craft champions
To help invite new people into our community, this year we introduced a new option for visitors to purchase a "pay it forward" ticket for an additional \$10. This ticket provided an opportunity for an immigrant new to Toronto to attend the show for free. At the 2019 Winter Show, we gifted over 100 tickets to the show. We believe this helps keep our community vibrant and brings together people from across the city with a shared love of craft.
These individuals are all on limited income and would not otherwise be able to afford the luxury of a ticket to the One Of A Kind Show. For our English Language Program students, we are excited to expose them to Canadian artisans and learn more about the abundant, creative talent from across our country. Again, you have our gratitude.
Newcomer Women's Services Toronto
Championing makers starts with our event team, who are just so invested in helping people exhibit at the show. We really enjoy investing the time to coach and mentor our exhibitors, advising on how to perfect their booth, engage customers or refine their sales pitch. We know that doing the show is an important fixture in our exhibitors' calendar, which can make or break their business, and it's reflected in our team's compassion to help them get the most from it.
We also know that the scale of that investment required, in time, spend and stock, is significant for some small businesses. To help improve accessibility, and bring new ideas to the event, we have developed scholarship options for new exhibitors as well as options for booth sharing and marketplace areas, offering a foot in the door for first timers who otherwise might not be able to attend. It's a testament to our community's shared values that every year we bring around 20% first-time exhibitors to each One Of A Kind Show.
For the first time in 2019, we also ran a section for small business ideas from a local elementary school. This saw savvy 13-year-olds selling and marketing their work and getting feedback on their products. It's really satisfying to give young entrepreneurs a learning opportunity like that.
Accelerating African-led Tech for Good
New Hope has been a valuable partner, helping us craft and tell our sustainability story to the U.S. naturals product industry through an effective content marketing program.
Alison Castillo, Unilever Industry Relations & Sustainable Living
Since joining Informa 11 years ago, I've watched how we have increasingly provided the platform for others to inspire change – not least when it comes to sustainability. Today at Informa Health & Nutrition, I help companies in the natural products industry tell their stories, to grow businesses and bring more health to more people.
It's not surprising to me that a recent study found that 78% of consumers believe it is no longer acceptable for companies to just make money. There's an expectation that companies should positively impact society as well.
As well as price, quality of product and convenience, consumers increasingly care about sustainability and the mission of a brand. And it's a massive opportunity for those brands that do it well.
Unilever understood this when I first met with them in 2016. Some of their brands had exhibited at New Hope Network's 85,000+ person event Natural Products Expo West in the past and they saw us as an important partner. We act as an amplifier to their rallying call by creating content marketing that builds trust in their products, with stories that promote sustainable best practices to other companies, retailers and industry influencers that engage with our market networks in various ways.
The message is that there are companies making products that are not only good for you, but also good for the planet and society. For example, Unilever brands like Pukka Herbs donate at least 1% of all sales to environmental projects through 1% for the Planet, and Growing Roots donates a staggering 50% of profits to urban agriculture organisations. Culture Republick is supporting local arts with 10% of profits, while Schmidt's and Love Beauty and Planet products are proudly vegan and cruelty free, a crucial factor for their customers.
And at Natural Products Expo West, we've teamed up with Unilever to offer education sessions on sustainability for other businesses in the natural products industry. Independent and large retailers get involved, which shows how big and small companies can work together. We further build out this story through a range of digital content tools. Ultimately, we're showing how sustainable, mission-driven business models are cultivating health for people and the planet, growing their businesses and defining a new collaboration economy.
Over the last 20 years, AfricaCom has been the place where tens of thousands of people come together to design and build Africa's digital future, spurring on economic empowerment and social mobility through digital tech. Summed up in our motto 'Tech for Good', this gives the whole team a real sense of purpose.
In 2019, we brought together more people, with more specialist knowledge, to help our largest African event have even more impact.
We want to promote more inclusivity in Africa's digital economy, so we started a number of programmes to attract and support more women entering the tech industry. We invited our large corporate and investor partners to get involved too.
Our new programme of free content and networking under the banner of 'Women in Tech' gives a voice to African gender diversity champions to inspire others, in person and online. This included a dedicated space to attract investment for women-led startups, and a series of keynote panels from women leaders from Google, Microsoft and others. The message wasn't only that gender diversity is positive and important, but that it's also a proven way to enable organisations to be more innovative, support growth and gain competitive advantage. The sessions were hugely inspirational, and even got a rare cheer alongside the usual applause.
Many sessions were created in partnership with local organisations who are already doing great work and we're really pleased to raise their profile. For example, we've grown our partnership with Code4CapeTown, which helps young women equip themselves with the skills to be successful leaders in tech. Together we held an innovation competition involving more than 40 local students who developed solutions for Africa's digital skills gap. Each received mentoring from senior speakers at AfricaCom before pitching their ideas back to a packed audience on our innovation stage.
This year we also developed the idea of 'Innovation Challenges' – a way of identifying the most disruptive and game-changing technologies that have the potential to rapidly accelerate progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For our first foray into these Challenges, we helped form a coalition between Informa Tech, innovation platform Dysruptus and the Africa50 Development Bank. Our collective aim was to find combinations of solutions which can significantly increase access to affordable and reliable high speed internet in Africa, helping reach the 60% of Africans who don't have access to all the benefits the internet can bring. We know that higher internet penetration can support growth in GDP, living standards and many other SDGs and we look forward to the results of the work in 2020.
The Africa50 Innovation Challenge has the potential to connect tens of millions of people with the internet in Rwanda and beyond. The partnership with Informa's specialists and their networks helped us make this platform possible and reach a broader audience of the leading tech businesses in Africa and beyond. The project opens up the potential for more investments being made and many millions more Africans joining the digital economy over the next few years.
Terry Waghorn, CEO and Founder, Dysruptus
24 INFORMA PLC SUSTAINABILITY REPORT 2019 WWW.INFORMA.COM/SUSTAINABILITY 25
The launch of Informa's new sustainable event management system breaks new ground in the events industry.
We want to make running sustainable events good for our business and good for all our stakeholders. Attendees, investors and colleagues are telling us that sustainability – in economic, social and environmental terms – is something that's not just a nice-to-have, but a necessary part of our success.
In 2019 we launched our new Sustainable Events Management System, a framework to inspire and enable all event to enhance their sustainability.
Within Informa, the response so far has far exceeded expectations – over 300 events have already committed to the Fundamentals for 2020 and around 50 events are working with the sustainability team on their Sustainable Improvement Plan. Externally, the response has been exciting too, with the Fundamentals helping a shift in the wider events industry. The Association of Event Organisers (AEO) is adapting our 12 Fundamentals for their members as well as those in the Association of Event Venues (AEV) and Event Supplier and Services Association (ESSA).
We're taking the lead on this because we know it's what our audience wants, with more than 80% of attendees saying sustainability is important to them. It's also evident that events which focus on becoming more sustainable benefit from increased innovation, cost savings, enriched content, higher customer satisfaction and enhanced reputation. The reception so far suggests we've created something that really helps the industry move forward.
Vitafoods Europe is one of Informa's largest and newest events to be awarded the ISO 20121 Event Sustainability Management System certificate – external recognition of the way we manage and improve the sustainability of our events.
It's our mission to shape the food industry for optimal health through our content and communities, contributing to the SDG3: Healthy Lives and Wellbeing. But we also want to run our event in a way that's healthy for our attendees, the community and environment.
Case study: Vitafoods Europe 2019 gains ISO sustainability recognition
We encourage people to discuss and debate during our educational talks and networking events, such as the new Diversity & Inclusion Roundtable, or the 5km run and Yoga Wellness session. We also work with partners who share our commitment to environmental sustainability by powering the event with renewable energy and introducing new regulations for building stands to encourage exhibitors to move away from using disposable materials.
The Fundamentals A 12-point checklist of key sustainability aspects that we believe all of our events should be implementing. See following page for details.
Sustainable Toolkit and Self Assessment Our library of resources, toolkits and self-assessment score cards guide events as they go further and identify key areas for improvement.
Sustainable Improvement Plan 50 events every year will work with the Group Sustainability team to create a Sustainable Improvement Plan (SIP).
Sustainable Leaders
Events that graduate from their SIP and deliver something truly unique will be our Sustainability Leaders.
Running an Environmentally Responsible Event
For sustainability to be included in the content of the event.
02 For the event to have a purposeful partnership with a not-for-profit.
03 For there to be six significant sustainability communications.
For the event team to be engaged with sustainability, and it to be a part of event decisions.
08
For all lighting specified by Informa to be LEDs, and for the venue's lights and air conditioning to be used efficiently.
06
For the event to have minimal to no waste generation from areas of the show built by Informa, and for the carpet to be reused or recycled.
07 For at least three items procured for the event to have enhanced sustainability credentials.
For there to be at least three ways in which the sustainability of the food and beverage (F&B) of the event has been enhanced.
12
For the event to have at least two initiatives which support the local community around the event venue.
10
For the event to have at least three initiatives which enhance wellbeing, equality, accessibility and respect for all.
11 For the events to be compliant with Informa's Health and Safety Guidelines.
For event sustainability data to be submitted within six weeks of the event.
300 events
already committed to the Fundamentals in 2020
already submitted scores in the first four months
Developing our own management system helps events progress in a structured and focused way towards being more sustainable, concentrating on what matters to them. Our events are ranked in internal league tables to encourage a competitive spirit.
But we also value external benchmarks. Working with a steering group from the Events Industry Council's (EIC) sustainability working group, we contributed to the development of the EIC's Sustainable Event Standard.
Whereas ISO20121 certifies that the event's management system is effective in driving improvements in sustainability, the EIC Standards score how sustainable the event is against their criteria. I'm really pleased to say that three of Informa's events are among the
world's first events to be externally certified to this new standard. Natural Products Expo East and Greenbuild both gained a Platinum rating, the highest possible standard. ABX, an event that only became part of Informa in 2017, gained the Silver standard, which is a great achievement after just one year of work. It's a testament to the hard work and commitment of these teams that they've been recognised with these awards.
The Fundamentals are a 12-point checklist that gives all events a way to measure themselves against our stakeholders' minimum expectations around sustainability. It enables them to track progress, share stories of best practice and see how they compare to other events.
The framework was designed to give specific direction at the same time as providing freedom for events to adapt for their markets and their local community. As a business, it provides us with a lever and guide to help hundreds of our events, big and small, improve their sustainability over time.
Teams use the Fundamentals to assess their event against each of the 12 criteria, giving themselves a score and highlighting what they can improve on. They also have a library of resources, templates and guidance to call upon to help their implementation and progress for the next event.
Around 60 events, ranging from Amsterdam to Cairo, Shanghai to Vancouver, submitted their Fundamentals score for 2019. And over 300 of our events are already using the Fundamentals in preparation for 2020.
Our ambition is for all Informa's events to adopt the Fundamentals within a year, and within the next two event cycles we think they can achieve full points. Over time, particularly as we progress towards our 2025 targets, we'll increase the level of ambition within the Fundamentals to move all of our events towards greater sustainability. We believe there are so many opportunities to engage with customers, develop new revenue streams, save money and create engaging content – by leading on sustainability in our industry, and theirs.
We know that mutually beneficial partnerships are absolutely integral to our long-term success as a business. Working in partnership is also clearly an important part of how the global community will build a more sustainable future, highlighted clearly by this being one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDG17).
There are many ways to make a positive difference in the world, and at Informa we are always mindful of our impacts on the places where we operate and the communities around them. Many of our brands have worked closely with stakeholders such as cities and local charities for years, but we've seen increasing returns when relationships become partnerships with clear, shared goals that use the unique skills of everyone involved.
No one is better placed than our colleagues to identify and create fruitful partnerships, and in 2019 we saw some great examples of local or market-specific partnerships that are enabling us and others to flourish. That's why local offices, events and brands are all encouraged to develop their own relationships and collaborations.
But there are also some challenges that require businesses like ours to leverage our reach and scale – in fact, there are challenges so big that they require everyone – businesses, governments, NGOs, customers, suppliers – to work together to solve them. As part of our FasterForward priorities of being an Impact Multiplier and building Sustainability Inside, we aim to establish more of these kinds of multi-lateral partnerships and we share early progress in some of these stories.
Whether it's through partnerships large or small, we know that our knowledge and networks are the most valuable thing we can offer.
Many organisations in the events industry have made good progress on sustainability goals by acting individually. But there are many areas of sustainability that would see the biggest improvement through cooperation – a joint approach to changing our industry's embedded practices. An agreed vision of a sustainable future would also give clear signals to the supply chain and help us all maximise the return on investment in sustainability.
We were thrilled at Freeman when Informa reached out to talk about an industry consortium to specifically tackle the big challenges in sustainability that we can only tackle together. As industry leaders, with different but complementary roles, we knew we could effectively inspire the industry to work together to create change. We also both recognised the opportunity to be leaders addressing emerging opportunities to improve our industry's impacts, helping us stay ahead of key trends and identify new ways of doing things.
In August 2018, we convened more than 20 sustainability leaders from global events organisations to imagine what the future of sustainable events could look like. Of the 25 ideas that we generated, four were clearly opportunities that could only be achieved together. These became the focus of the newly formed Sustainable Events: Big Initiatives Group (SEBIG):
In 2019, 10 members of SEBIG crowdfunded the largest ever materiality study into the environmental and social impacts of the events industry. This will help us understand where to focus further projects by giving us a more complete view of the impacts of our industry and the \$1.5 trillion of economic value it creates each year.
All of these aims require collaboration between the different parts of the events industry to be successful. It has been incredibly encouraging to see our industry partners and peers from so many different organisations, representing facilities, event organisers and suppliers, see the value of this group and commit to work together to enhance the sustainability of our industry.
Success is a partnership
Food Ingredients (FI) Asia is the number one meeting place for Southeast Asia's food industry, gathering leading ingredient suppliers, distributors and manufacturers. We look at everything from how the region can be more self-sufficient on food to how the industry innovates around locally grown ingredients.
For large numbers of small businesses in our industry, one of the most challenging things is working out the process of getting their product approved for sale or export. The regulators, Thailand's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and few of government agencies such as Thailand Institution of Science Technology and Research (TISTR), were also finding it difficult to connect with all the new entrants to the market and ensure food is safe.
As the industry's convenor, we saw an opportunity to partner with these groups and invited the FDA and TISTR to take space at our show where they could engage with businesses to help them understand the process. The result has been hugely successful. By creating space to connect, we help them work better together and help make the whole industry more efficient.
As a result of this growing trust, the FDA invited us to join a community project with them to support deprived schools in rural Thailand. We brought together colleagues, suppliers and other partners to visit the schools and run education sessions. The children there are the future of our country and subjects like English, computing and self-sufficiency helps share opportunities with those who are at risk of being left behind. It's been a great source of happiness to make a difference to the students there and give them aspiration.
This growing relationship with the FDA now means they bring us into consultative conversations about food waste and small business support in Thailand, which is an exciting new role for us as advisors in the industry. They are also backing our invitation to the FDAs from other countries in Asia to join our future shows, which will only bring further benefits to our industry in the region.
Rose Chitanuwat Group Brand Director – ASEAN Informa Markets, Bangkok
1 Includes all known donations in kind
Vitamin Angels is a charity working to solve the #1 cause of preventable child deaths. They provide lifesaving vitamins to over 70 million mothers and children at risk of malnutrition. In 2019 alone, we donated funds to help them reach over 200,000 children. But we aim to do more than that – by giving them booths which enabled Vitamin Angels to reach over 100,000 attendees, and by hosting an event that brought together 120 influential CEOs from the natural products industry, we are seeking to raise their profile and, with a united voice, assert that health is a human right.
Jon Benninger VP Health & Nutrition Informa Markets, Phoenix
According to the UN, 1.3 billion tons of food are discarded around the world every year, while 820 million people starve. Comida Invisível is a UN-certified social startup and app in Brazil that enables businesses to easily donate food waste. We teamed up with them for Fispal Food Service 2019 to raise awareness about unnecessary waste at work, at home and in our lives. All the food and organic waste produced at the show was collected by Comida Invisível, composted and transformed into fertiliser to produce food that was donated to needy families. They also had a booth where they offered free consultancy, and we distributed organic fertiliser samples to our attendees in exchange for their badges at the end.
Clelia Iwaki Show Director Informa Markets, São Paulo
Our teams and brands choose to support charitable groups and not-for-profits all around the world. Our offices choose their local charities aligned with what colleagues care about, and support these through programmes such as Walk the World (pages 40-41) and our enhanced volunteering and donations (page 38) benefits.
However, much of the value we donate to charities every year comes from the partnerships between our brands and charities relevant to their industry. Across hundreds of different brands, we provide partnerships, profile and opportunities for charities to benefit from the knowledge and networks we have. In return, we benefit from their own knowledge and networks, as well as the chance to show our commitment to issues that are important within each of our specialist markets.
Here are just a few examples.
At Licensing Expo, which connects the world's most influential entertainment, character, art and corporate brand owners and agents, we partnered with a group called Magic Wheelchair, a non-profit that transforms children's wheelchairs into epic costumes. At this year's show they created a My Little Pony chariot wheelchair for a six-year-old girl. The big reveal took place at the expo, which included a 10-minute talk from the show director and the girl's family. It was an emotional occasion for everyone in attendance. Magic Wheelchair also had their own booth and they reported a high level of engagement throughout the day. A lot of the children's and movie brands there were eager to get involved.
Event & Content Director Informa Markets, Santa Monica
Every year we end up with a quantity of books the business no longer needs. This includes advance, gratis or reference copies, books from acquisitions after we have archived the content digitally, and books from storage that need to be cleared out. For over eight years now, we've partnered with Amnesty International, providing our excess books for their annual book sale in London, and to their warehouse for distribution through their second-hand bookshops and Amazon marketplace. We have also donated more than 65,000 books in the last two years to BookAid, who distribute those books to restock libraries after natural disasters or conflict in vulnerable areas of the world.
Taylor & Francis, Oxford
In China, tens of thousands of children are injured each year because they do not sit in a safety seat while in the car. The team at Children- Baby-Maternity Expo partnered with Safe Kids Worldwide (a non-profit organisation working to prevent these injuries), China Children and Teenagers' Fund, and Capital Institute of Pediatrics, to create a campaign urging parents to make sure that babies sit in appropriate seats. The campaign included videos, posters, social media and news reports. It produced a total of 2,100 original videos and illustrations as well as news coverage across 100 media platforms, reaching almost 50 million people.
Shuang Liang
Social Media Executive
Informa Markets, Hangzhou
Building ethical AI needs developers from all backgrounds, yet only 12% of AI developers are women. We partner with DevelopHer, the UK's largest non-profit dedicated to elevating women in tech, to run 'How to get into AI?' workshops for 100 DevelopHer members aged mostly 16-25.
Sally Freeman, Co-Founder, DevelopHer said "It has been such a privilege to work with Informa for the past two years. High on the agenda was the need for the female voice to be built into algorithms to make diverse and inclusive platforms. Informa also generously gifted over 100 tickets to make the incredible knowledge and resource that the AI Summit delivers accessible to a broad community."
Through this partnership, Informa can engage the industry on a topic that's key to its future development. It also helps us engage wider audiences. We'll be expanding our work to four events in 2020, as well as hosting DevelopHer meet-ups in Spring at Informa offices.
VIP Delegate Recruitment Exec
Informa Tech, London
Informa Connect provides over 800 training programmes, to 8000 delegates, every year. But we know that our training can also help younger people who might not traditionally have access to the right skills to thrive in their workplaces and become the leaders of tomorrow.
We've created a new partnership with the Dubai Youth Council to offer free training courses for Emirati youth on soft skills development.
The first workshop was fully booked within four hours of advertising on Instagram, attracting over 70 young people to promote cross-cultural understanding, boost their communication skills and train their brains for high performance output.
We trialled new interactive exercises on a live digital platform where participants used their smartphones to answer polls and share their experiences. Feedback was really positive and it's also helped us develop new content that can engage a younger audience at our wider events.
Vitafoods Europe brings 25,000 industry experts together every year to help shape the food industry to create optimal health and nutrition through science and innovation. We foster relationships and support knowledge sharing for specialists all across the industry who are looking to connect and learn about the future of the nutraceutical industry.
Sustainability has become increasingly important to our industry. We've spent the last three years building a portfolio of activities and commitments to help our customers understand what the collective priorities are on sustainability and find new sources of solutions and innovation to address them.
But we've also been partners with the city of Geneva for more than two decades, bringing hundreds of thousands of new visitors to the city over the life of the event. This has a huge positive impact on the local economy.
Reading last year's sustainability report, I learned that Informa's ongoing development of a set of tools and common methodologies
Quantifying these impacts in financial terms also allows us to understand the net benefit arising from an event, taking into account many of the different impacts of the event.
The results show a high level of value created for our host city including local economic benefits from visitor spend and our spend on local suppliers as well. It also shows a lot of value created in the vital nutraceutical industry. To make sure we didn't just focus on the positives, we also sought to value the environmental impacts from carbon emissions using estimated costs of carbon required to achieve the Paris Agreement.
It's important for us to consider as many aspects of the impacts as possible, particularly the largest ones, and we've shown the relative sizes of them in the diagram. This gives us a really good indication of where we create even more value for attendees and our host city whilst improving our contribution to climate change. We're also using what we learned about the tool to help the Group Sustainability team improve the model and method, including adding in estimates of other impacts such as waste and spend on stand contractors by exhibitors.
Over 600 colleagues trained in safety operating model
£375m Total tax contribution
in 2019
22.8% Statutory effective tax rate in 2019
For more, see informa.com/tax
Nearly 1,000
people have completed our Modern Slavery training
Policies that matter This year, we've focused on engaging with our significantly expanded global community. Our 12 Global Policies that sit at the heart of our compliance programme were revised, including our Sanctions, Anti Bribery & Corruption, and Diversity & Inclusion policies. We also created a new 'Speak Up' policy, setting out our commitment to support colleagues who report concerns about any behaviours they observe.
Our Code of Conduct was completely rewritten in 2019 to align with the Informa Constitution. The new Code sets out our focus on doing business in the way that is best and most sustainable for us and for our partners, customers and communities. In 2020, we will publish the Code and roll out new training for all colleagues. The Group and Divisional Compliance teams also engaged with selected teams in higher risk locations, providing face to face training on anti-corruption, sanctions and data privacy.
We also completed a Group-level Human Rights risk review and developed a new Human Rights policy to reflect our organisation's ongoing commitment to respecting internationally recognised human rights standards, including the UN Declaration of Human Rights: the new policy is scheduled to be launched in 2020.
Senior Compliance Manager
Informa Group, London
2019 has seen much progress in HSS, including the centralisation of incident report at a Group level to give us a clearer view of our performance and where further work is needed.
We've also updated our policies including the Health and Safety Policy to reflect recent changes in our business and expectations. More than 600 colleagues were trained in the Informa safety operating model and we're developing a new HSS e-learning course for all colleagues.
We established a new Business Resilience Council responsible for helping us adequately plan and respond to any emergency and crisis situations that we might face as a global business – whether it be regional tensions, civil unrest, pandemics, extreme weather events or cyber security threats. In early 2020, this group has been helping us respond and manage the situation from COVID-19 as it develops.
Informa Group, London
Paying tax is an important part of our contribution to the societies in which we operate. Our taxes help governments provide vital services and insfrastructure, which we in turn rely on to run our business successfully.
The Group's total tax contribution was £375m which includes £165m of taxes borne by the Group and £210m of taxes collected on behalf of governments.
Informa Group, London
Currently estimated negative value of carbon emissions from the top 5 aspects of the show's carbon emissions
*As with any impact modelling, there is a degree of assumption and extrapolation. These numbers should be taken as an indication of relative impact rather than absolutely precise measurements.
Summary of the relative scale of selected impacts for Vitafoods*
It's the shared culture and attitudes that turn individual colleagues into Informa's combined successes. Together we make Informa what it is. Colleagues are the engine that drives growth, create innovation, grow our relationships and guide our impacts on the world. We are at our best when we each have the freedom to realise our individual personal and professional ambitions.
Our culture is one whole made up of many different businesses, divisions and offices, but together we have the scale to help our customers create positive changes in their markets. While scale is powerful. We also strongly believe in the value of diversity and think it's important that colleagues around the world can equally contribute, be heard, and hopefully be inspired.
To do this, we promote a supportive, diverse and inclusive environment in which colleagues can use their energy and ambition to make a meaningful difference at work and within the community.
We want to work in a culture where colleagues feel free to do things better, with fewer barriers – to bring their whole selves into the office and know how everything we do fits into the bigger Informa picture. Around the business in 2019, we can see some great examples of local office and team cultures that are uniquely themselves, but are clearly part of the Informa team, working together for the same purpose.
This year as a Group we took more steps towards making it a reality for everyone – so that wherever they are, people feel a part of their teams and the wider Informa. We believe this is good for our business too because people who are empowered and fulfilled contribute far more to making Informa a successful, sustainable business.
colleague engagement score across a range of questions (2018: 77%)
of colleagues believe strongly in the goals and objectives of the business (2018: 82%)
work gives them a personal sense of accomplishment (2018: 79%)
Fiona Gibson Community Programme Manager Informa Group, London
I'm a strong believer in the empowerment of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) community, which is one of the reasons why I was so keen to launch the AllInforma Rainbow network in 2019. Colleagues around the world will often tell you that Informa is very much a people business, and one of the missions of AllInforma Rainbow is to increase awareness and visibility of the LGBTQIA+ community to help build inclusive workplaces and enable colleagues to bring their full selves to work.
In turn, this increased confidence and comfort with being one's full self at work and knowing that there is adequate support available, will allow colleagues to perform at their best and maximise performance and consequently success.
AllInforma Rainbow launched in June 2019, an historically significant time for the LGBTQIA+ community demarcating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. June is also Pride month, a time when LGBTQIA+ communities are celebrated in many places around the world. Run by local champions, AllInforma Rainbow is a network for colleagues who identify as LGBTQIA+, as well as anyone who supports or wants to learn more learn more about the community.
The response since we launched it has been fantastic. We have champions spanning all divisions and have active networks in eight locations on four continents. As each network is governed locally, colleagues can develop each network in a way that works best for them.
Activity has been varied across the networks. Our Milton Park and Dallas offices held diversity training, while our Singapore office held a panel discussion on the value of diversity in the workplace. Colleagues in New York held a red ribbon sale for World AIDS Day, while our Melbourne office made the T&F repository of HIV and AIDS content free to access for two months. In London, AllInforma Rainbow has run a series of diversity and inclusion-themed lunch and learn sessions in the different offices and held a charity bake sale, raising money for a local LGBTQIA+ homeless charity.
Looking ahead, I'm excited about AllInforma Rainbow's future. Not only will we continue to support current networks and facilitate the launch of new ones, but we will also continue to raise awareness of diversity and inclusion and the benefits it can bring to both our £500 business and customers.
matching for
fundraising
additional day of annual leave for colleagues' birthdays
to volunteer
Every company talks about valuing its colleagues – but the proof of that is in whether they really offer support and benefits that help our colleagues with their life goals and to make a meaningful contribution every day at work. Our new Constitution and the FasterForward strategy help ensure this is a great place to work, with shared values, but we also used 2019 to evaluate the benefits we offer and see how we can enhance them.
We thought really hard about what would make a difference to people and what's more personal than your birthday? So from January 2020 onwards, every colleague gets an extra day off for their birthday and they're encouraged to share with others what they do with it.
Another important aspect is volunteering – we believe that donating your skills, energy and passion to a cause you believe in is good for you, as well as for those you're helping. It makes you feel positive in yourself, and it can be a source of learning and personal growth outside the office which supports your career path. So, we've doubled the number of annual volunteering days all colleagues are encouraged to take, from two to four. We've also announced that we'll match up to £500 of fundraising by colleagues when it's for a registered charity.
I believe these – and other benefits we're looking at for the future – will make a genuine difference to our people's personal and professional lives.
We also continue to measure the engagement levels of our colleagues within our regular Informa Pulse survey, and the most recent results show that colleagues highly value their work and want to actively contribute to the purpose of the business.
UK gap in male/female median pay (2018: 22.7%; 2017: 23.3%)
Leadership group 2019 21832% 2017:
30% of women on our Board (3/10)
For more information on our gender pay gap reporting, go to informa.com/gpg
2018 £2.9m
£2.7m
2017 £2.5m
Average sickness absence per colleague (days)
Walk the World (WTW) is a big part of our culture here at Informa, and growing more so. My role was created this year to help deliver it for as many colleagues as possible. It's an event that perfectly embodies our guiding principle – Think Big, Act Small – the idea of people coming together within a common idea but making it their own at a local and personal level.
In a company as large and geographically diverse as ours, we want to find ways to feel connected with our colleagues. As our annual team-building and fundraising event, now in its fourth year, WTW is an amazing example of this. Colleagues across the world are invited on a walk to raise money for local causes that they care about.
Each walk has always had its own unique personality. In the care of a network of hundreds of local Sustainability Champions, the walks have become more ambitious and creative each year, with colleagues organising extras ranging from sports days to drumming workshops, litter picks to city farm visits.
2019's WTW was our biggest and best yet – more than 7,000 colleagues from 130 offices took part. To put that in context, that's more participants than Informa had colleagues in the previous year! Since its inception in 2016, we've also tripled the amount of fundraising, and opened the invitation to business suppliers and partners, family and friends, and even pets. This year, between us we walked more than 1.5 times the length of the equator, with colleagues in all corners of the globe, from Shanghai to New Delhi and from Bahrain to Boston.
We're now seeing more than 20 offices achieve participation rates of over 90%. Some even have more external guests joining than they have internal colleagues in the office, making it a real outreach event as well.
It's truly amazing to see colleagues all joined together around a common goal, while also celebrating local cultures, traditions and interests. It's a great job to have and I hope to see it grow more and more in coming years.
Auckland
Our colleagues' shared culture
As a business and as people, we care deeply about climate change and we're determined to reduce our impacts on the environment. We are taking action across the Group to reduce the impact of our offices, our events and our wider products. You can read about some our initiatives here. But there's more to do and our 2025 FasterForward programme sets out that ambitious path in more detail on pages 8-9.
Here in Florida, we run several boat shows including the world's largest: the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show.
Our progress on generators is probably the thing I'm most proud of. The city infrastructure wasn't able to deliver the power we needed so we were bringing in a lot of additional petrol generators. By working with city officials and local power companies, we've supported overhaul and upgrade of the local electricity grids.
In 2019, for the first year, shows in Miami and Palm Beach ran entirely off city grid power and we eliminated half the generators at Fort Lauderdale. We're over the hump and well on the way to being 100% generator-free. This not only saves us money and reduces our carbon emissions but it reduces local air and noise pollution as well as enhancing the local infrastructure that others can then make use of.
We've also been upgrading our vehicle fleet. Given our fuel usage accounted for around 10% of Informa's carbon emissions, this makes a material improvement to the overall emissions of the Group and we're proud to make that difference.
To deliver the event, we own over seven miles of floating docks that we set up for each show. Even though they were built to regulations, we discovered the docks were at risk of shedding polystyrene pellets from the interior and we didn't want to put the Florida ecosystems at risk. In 2019, we completed a project to update the docks with a polyethylene resin sheath that prevents this happening. Even better, we found the docks' buoyancy increased by 10% meaning we can continue to grow our show and improve safety. Other boat shows are now calling us to ask how we did it.
We were also using a lot of treated hardwood flooring. The lumber had to be stored outside between shows and, with the wear and weathering, it only lasted two years before needing to be replaced. We've now designed and adopted recycled plastic decking for nearly 90% of all flooring at the show. It lasts much longer, creates a use for plastic waste, perhaps meaning less plastic enters the ocean, and hugely reduces our use of chemically treated hardwoods.
VP US Boating Informa Markets, Fort Lauderdale
The real heroes of this story are Brenda Foo and her Marketing Team in Singapore. The original idea came from our shared aspiration to create more sustainable products, defined in 2018 as 'harnessing innovation to build new products and services that improve the quality of life'.
We wanted a programme that increased the readership of books aligned with environmental management and the UN SDGs, increasing our sales and with a positive social outcome too.
The Marketing team took charge of curating appropriate books that we would promote to customers and helped us partner with One Tree Planted, a non-profit that works with reforestation organisations around the world that need financial support. Our idea was to run a marketing campaign that planted a tree for every book sold.
The Marketing team then engaged the Sales teams and won their enthusiasm to identify key customers, book dealers and people in the supply chain who were more likely to be engaged with an environmentally minded product. We also ran social media campaigns to reach a lot more people.
A total of 71 libraries, schools and universities across the Asia Pacific region participated, buying just over 1,800 books, which generated an estimated net £100,000 of new business. Inspired by this success, we doubled our customers' donations, then Informa Group matched it again, giving the campaign a grand total of 5,400 trees planted within the reforestation of Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesia.
The programme was so successful that the UK Marketing team also picked up the baton to run the programme there, earning an extra £160,000 gross revenue and planting even more trees.
This idea won the Marketing team an award for Sustainability at the Informa Awards. To have seen the Singapore team originate an idea, grow it and gain recognition, was one of the best days of my career so far.
Barry Clarke Managing Director – Asia Pacific
Taylor & Francis, Singapore
We want to be one of the leading businesses in reducing our own contributions to climate change.
In 2019, we were one of the first organisations to have our targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative to show that our goals to halve emissions from our buildings, generators and vehicles (scope 1 and 2), and to reduce our other controllable (scope 3) emissions by 20%, are sufficient to do our part to keep global temperature rises below 1.5°C.
But we want to go further and our new FasterForward programme commits Informa to be a carbon neutral organisation by 2021 and develop carbon neutral products across most of our portfolio by 2025. This is with a long term goal of being zero waste and net zero carbon by 2030 or earlier.
We're working with senior leadership and the Risk Committee to understand how Informa will be affected by emerging impacts related to climate change. This includes working to meet the recommendations of the international Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).
We consider two types of impacts:
We believe the actions we are taking are helping us manage and control these impacts in a suitable manner and will be publishing more information in future reports.
We have a number of ambitious programmes in place to reduce our impacts:
By 2021, our aim is to become a certified CarbonNeutral® Company, in line with the CarbonNeutral Protocol. We have already committed as a group to offset all of the unavoidable carbon emissions from the operation of our estate and all of our business travel. We're also developing increasing numbers of offsetting programmes at our events. We'll then focus on making our products carbon neutral as well.
Our offsetting programme helps others reduce their emissions by helping impoverished communities access clean, green energy and protecting and enhancing natural ecosystems. These are all within established, certified programmes.
In 2019, we were recognised by leading measures of responsible and sustainable business:
• For the second year running, Informa was included in the DJSI World Index and the DJSI Europe Index
• We were re-awarded a ranking in the FTSE4Good and Ethibel Indices
• We also participated in the CDP for the first time and we will release our results publicly from 2020.
As discussed in other stories, our impact on the world through our Content and Customers, our 'brainprint', is far greater than anything we do through our direct or even our indirect operations.
By proving platforms in specialist markets, we can help our customers discover and develop solutions to some of the world's biggest environmental challenges whilst creating a platform for growth for Informa and more satisfied customers.
From our Greenbuild or Middle East Electricity events, which have environmental issues at their heart, to our Aviation Week or New Hope brands which build significant content around reducing the sector's impact on climate change into their work, the sustainability agenda is woven into many of our products. Our books and journals contain over 1,300 chapters, articles and teaching and learning resources related to climate action, and our Finance vertical in Informa Intelligence helps with the assessment and confidence building in Green Bonds.
The urgency of climate change has rapidly risen up the agenda during 2019 but it's long been something that Informa has taken seriously. It's nearly 15 years since our first corporate carbon footprint and our first carbon neutral event. Much has changed over that time but our commitment to address our impact on climate change and support others do the same has only grown.
The last two years have seen a particular increase in our work in this area. We've summarised the key initiatives and data on these pages. Alongside the issue of waste, we believe this is the most important area of our environmental impact that we must manage.
Nicolas Desolino Group Sustainability & Reporting Manager Informa Group, London
For more, see informa.com/carbonoffsetting
For more, see informa.com/eventcarbonfootprint
of our electricity use in our estate is now from renewable sources
Sanjay Sarvankar Chief HR Officer Informa Markets, Mumbai
Ben Wielgus
Head of Sustainability Informa Group, London
Over the last year, the level of focus and concern over the climate crisis has understandably increased as the general public has become more aware of the scale of the challenge. It presents a significant agenda for change for most businesses, and a need to deepen conversations and actions to address the issue.
One of the most common questions we receive from stakeholders is whether a possible change in attitudes to flying might affect the level of attendance at some of our events.
At the heart of classic sustainability debate is the 'triple bottom line': the idea of considering a whole range of impacts in balance across a range of areas. This is key when we think about flights as they aren't inherently bad. The carbon emissions from flying have a negative impact on the environment but the net result of flights when we consider all the social, economic and environmental impacts can be very positive.
For me, it's helpful to remember that flights can enable face to face connections, which in turn foster knowledge sharing and innovation, things that are highly necessary to address sustainability issues in a range of industries and markets. Flights foster human connection and understanding, and they help create jobs and investment.
We believe that the modern business world needs both digital technologies to help sustain relationships and in-person meetings which can really cement them. Choosing the right time, method and purpose of connection can help us to do this most efficiently across the year.
A well designed and run event, especially where that event is a brand leader in the specialist market it serves, can be a highly efficient use of travel and time, particularly if that event is festivalised with many different components such as a trade show, conference, meetings etc.
Our industry has long stated that a great event provides a platform for thousands of meetings (both pre-organised and serendipitous), as well as training, networking, association gatherings, entertainment and trade. Done well, such events are highly efficient for all stakeholders, whether they are attendees, exhibitors, organisers, contractors, venues and even the cities in which they take place.
To help us understand this more, we've begun to survey attendees across a range of events to gather evidence on the extent to which our events help save flights that would otherwise be taken to achieve the same outcome. We've had results from more than a dozen events so far and 90% of surveyed audiences told us that by attending, they saved more flights than they took: at least two flights, on average. Extrapolating this would mean that those events created a net saving of 190,000 flights. While this is just a sample the story is clear, in a world that is starting to think more carefully about travel, a single trip to an event can save time, money, emissions and nights away from families whilst providing all the benefits and advantages of bringing people together in person.
We've had results from more than a dozen events so far. This is a small, but growing sample that hints strongly at a clear story – in a world that is starting to think more carefully about travel, a single trip to an event can save time, money, emissions and nights away from families whilst providing all the benefits and advantages of bringing people together in person.
One of our goals is to keep finding ways to increase the efficiency of our events further by enabling and facilitating more things to be done in a single trip.
We are also working to offset the impact of the carbon emissions associated with that travel. From 1 Jan 2020, Informa will be offsetting all our own travel with high quality, certified carbon offsets. We also want to make sure that all our attendees have the same opportunity and are in the process of expanding offset options when booking into our events. Offsetting is not a perfect solution, but it compensates for the carbon emissions from travel in the near-term, providing the aviation industry with time to innovate further and develop ever more sustainable solutions.
Across our sampled audience groups, more than 90% of those audiences told us they said that they saved more flights than they took.
Across a small sample of 15 events, we estimate a net saving of 190,000 flights.
We have both been involved personally with social work, so it was very inspiring to learn about Informa's sustainability initiatives and Walk the World in particular when we joined the business as part of an acquisition in 2018. It sparked conversations here in the Mumbai office about how we could give back to our community. Informa's main contribution to the world is through education, and that idea really clicked for us. For many children in India, education is still not readily available – it's still something like a dream!
We teamed up with the children's charity Make A Difference (MAD) to evaluate how we could make the biggest impact together and where our unique skills and relationships could make the biggest difference.
MAD introduced us to a programme in the remote Palargh district where the schools had very minimal facilities. When our team visited there, it was clear that the kids were missing out on vital education because of two common challenges: the lack of facilities and the lack of electricity. Many of these areas only receive 1-2 hours of electricity per day.
We saw that building science laboratories that many schools could access would make a huge difference, but we had to also solve the power issue without relying on expensive, polluting generators. That's where our own unique networks could make a real difference: we run the Renewable Energy India event – 40,000 people and 800 exhibitors all dedicated to India's energy revolution.
From there it really clicked so beautifully. One of our exhibitors was happy to support us specify, buy and install the panels. We also funded the equipment for six labs covering topics from computing and robotics to e-learning and biology. MAD now runs these facilities and welcomes thousands of children from over 20 schools. We're also still involved, using our volunteer time to help develop the children's interest in education and their future aspirations.
Over the last three years in my role as Head of Sustainability at Informa, the business has grown from 6,500 people to nearly 12,000. This has meant significant changes to many aspects of our business but particularly in our approach to sustainability. I've found myself writing words like 'transformation' and 'step change' to describe it. Growth has certainly given us a strong foundation to take our next leap forward – the launch of our 2025 FasterForward programme (see pages 8-9).
I believe this will bring about change of an order of magnitude greater than we've seen before. As a set of commitments they represent a meaningful, long-term commercial differentiator for Informa. They will create value for many stakeholders inside and outside the business, and I truly think they have the potential to make a lasting impact in our industry, and the industries we touch. The change itself will not be delivered by our sustainability team alone, but by thousands of colleagues working together with common purpose and principles, just like our success to date has been delivered by those who are most enthusiastic about making a difference to the sustainability of our business and our markets.
Over the last decade, we focused Informa's sustainability programme on our most material issues. We worked with the Responsible Media Forum, and identified that we could make the most impact through our Content and Customers, which is where we have concentrated our efforts. There are also aspects of our Environmental, Community and Colleague agendas that matter significantly to one or more stakeholders, and to our future success.
As part of our FasterForward programme, we're updating our materiality assessment specifically for our business and expect to publish this later in 2020. It will help us steer towards our priorities for the next five years. As always, we will continue to be alert and responsive to emerging issues.
We will still consider our impacts across all five areas of Content, Customers, Communities, Colleagues and the Environment but FasterForward gives us focus on some of the most important issues that we've already identified from conversations with hundreds of colleagues.
We've also spoken with several external stakeholders including major suppliers and investors, and we're taking part in two industry initiatives to measure materiality, our SEBIG project (see page 30) and the Responsible Media Forum.
In 2020 we will be managing many moving pieces, but top of the list will be establishing the remaining baselines for measurement of our performance against our FasterForward commitments. We'll also be launching new systems to support colleague volunteering, donations and impact measurement on host cities.
The Fundamentals, part of ISEMS (see pages 26-29), will help hundreds of our events identify opportunities to create value from sustainability. We'll also continue to work on embedding Informa's Constitution with our FasterForward programme. That will involve helping colleagues to build sustainability into our products in a way that Champions the Specialist and supports each market's transition to a more sustainable way of doing business.
With the climate crisis at the forefront of many people's minds, closely followed by concerns around waste and social justice, we'll ensure these are priority areas for our work, and look forward to reporting our progress next year.
At the time of writing this report, we've yet to understand the full impact of COVID-19, but we'll work hard to ensure we can continue with our commitments to sustainability but with consideration to any changes brought about by the pandemic.
Our new FasterForward approach is ambitious and broad-reaching across the business, but our investment over the past three years has given us a strong foundation to deliver on our commitments.
As sustainability becomes a business imperative, we're seeing more teams make sustainability objectives part of performance appraisals. Our central Group sustainability team is becoming a centre of excellence, providing strategic direction and enabling others in the business to be successful in their own sustainability ambitions.
We're also delighted to see that our Sustainability Champions programme grows from strength to strength with around 250 colleagues giving their time to support local initiatives, up from fewer than 25 champions four years ago.
The divisional CEOs and Group Executive Leadership Team have an active role in monitoring performance against our targets, reporting to the Informa Board at least every six months.
Our approach to sustainability is underpinned by a set of sustainability policies, linked to our wider Group policies such as Informa's Code of Conduct. All are available on our website (informa.com).
The diagram above shows how we structure sustainability governance at a high level, and the links with teams such as compliance, HR, strategy and health, safety & security.
This year we sought assurance of selected sustainability data from both our internal auditors and external assurance specialists, Bureau Veritas. We are pleased to announce that we have successfully gained assurance over the data marked * in the table on page 53.
Bureau Veritas UK Limited has been engaged by Informa plc to provide limited assurance over selected sustainability performance indicators for inclusion in its sustainability report. This Assurance Statement applies to the related information included within the scope of work described below, for the period 1 January to 31 December 2019: Fundraising, Company contributions, Volunteering, Headcount, Training, Colleague turnover, Absenteeism, Global gender diversity, Employee Engagement Indicator, Waste, Resource Use, Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Scope 1, 2 & partial Scope 3) and Water.
On the basis of the methodology and activities described above, Bureau Veritas concludes that there is no evidence to suggest that the data presented here is not materially correct and a fair representation of Informa's sustainability performance. A full verification statement including methodology, limitations and exclusions and the reporting criteria can be found on the Group's website: https://www. informa.com/sustainability/sustainability-reports
| Content & Customers | Units | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenues | £m | £2,890 m | £2,369 m | £1,758 m | £1,346 m |
| Profit before tax (adjusted) | £m | £933 m | £732 m | £546 m | £377 m |
| New books published | Number of books | 7,300 | 7,100 | 7,100 | 6,100 |
| Countries sold into | Number of countries | 170+ | 170+ | 165 | 165 |
| Open access journals | Number of journals | 276 | 268 | 173 | 108 |
| Open access articles | No. of OA articles published | 16,700 | 13,500 | 11,073 | 7,602 |
| Ebooks | % of all book titles | 78% | 77% | 74% | 73% |
| Accepted articles from developing countries | % of all accepted articles | 38% | 35% | 35% | 36% |
| Subscriptions to our intelligence products | No. of subscribers | 30,000 | 27,000 | 38,000 | 25,000 |
| Space across all our exhibitors | m sqm | 4.6 m | 4.2 m | 1.8 m | 1.4 m |
| People attending our events | No. of people | 5.8 m | 5.5 m | 2.0 m | 1.3 m |
| Communities | Units | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 |
| Volunteering | % of colleagues volunteering | 14% | 15% | 9% | 6% |
| Number of colleagues | 1,577 | 1,729 | 689 | 372 | |
| Total company donations | £k | £ 1,630 k | £ 1,409 k | £ 685 k | £ 476 k |
| Company donations (cash) | £k | £ 644 k (*) | £ 354 k | £ 411 k | £ 338 k |
| Volunteer programme costs | £k recorded | £ 424 k (*) | £ 376 k | £ 235 k | £ 95 k |
| Donations in kind | £k recorded | £ 678 k | £ 39 k | £ 44 k | |
| £ 562 k (*) | |||||
| Colleague fundraising | £k | £ 305 k (*) | £ 191 k | £ 82 k | £ 71 k |
| Statutory effective tax rate | % | 22.8% | 21.4% | 21% | 18% |
| Colleagues | Units | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 |
| Headcount | Number of colleagues | 11,296 (*) | 11,197 | 7,525 | 6,934 |
| Spend on training | £m | £ 2.7 m (*) | £ 2.9 m | £ 2.5 m | £ 2.3 m |
| Colleague turnover – Voluntary | % turnover | 10% (*) | 16% | 16% | 16% |
| Colleague turnover – Total | % turnover | 26% (*) | 26% | 24% | 24% |
| Absenteeism | Sick days/year per colleague | 3.3 (*) | 3.0 | 2.2 | 2.3 |
| All Colleague gender split | % female | 59% (*) | 59% | 56% | 56% |
| All management gender split | % female | 53% (*) | 54% | 51% | 49% |
| Leadership group gender split | % female | 30% (*) | 32% | 27% | 33% |
| Director gender split | % female | 30% (*) | 25% | 22% | 20% |
| Promotions gender split | % female | 62% (*) | 60% | 60% | 63% |
| Gender pay gap (UK) | % difference | 22.3% | 22.7% | 23.3% | NA |
| Colleague engagement score | % saying they are engaged | 80% (*) | 77% | 74% | 71% |
| Environment | Units | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 |
| Energy & greenhouse gas emissions | |||||
| Energy consumption | MWh | 30,600 | 34,929 | 29,951 | 28,895 |
| Renewable electricity generated/purchased | MWh | 15,498 | 2,213 | 648 | 19 |
| Scope 1 emissions – Total | tonnes CO2 e |
3,990 (*) | 4,776 | 3,205 | 2,997 |
| Emissions from natural gas | tonnes CO2 e |
1,989 | 2,504 | 1,197 | 967 |
| Emissions from refrigerants | tonnes CO2 e |
918 | 843 | 567 | 567 |
| Emissions from company vehicles & generator fuel | tonnes CO2 e |
1,083 | 1,429 | 1,441 | 1,463 |
| Scope 2 emissions (location-based) | tonnes CO2 e |
6,697 (*) | 7,010 | 6,477 | 7,164 |
| Total scope 1 & 2 location-based emissions | tonnes CO2 e |
10,687 | 11,786 | 9,682 | 10,162 |
| Intensity ratio total location-based scope 1&2 emissions | tonnes CO2 e/Colleague |
0.96 (*) | 1.18 | 1.29 | 1.59 |
| Scope 2 emissions (market-based) | tonnes CO2 e |
397 (*) | 6,385 | 6,477 | 7,164 |
| Total Scope 1 & 2 market-based emissions | tonnes CO2 e |
4,388 | 11,161 | 9,682 | 10,162 |
| Carbon offsets used to compensate for remaining emissions | tonnes CO2 e |
4,388 | NA | NA | NA |
| Residual scope 1&2 emissions post green energy and offsets | tonnes CO2 e |
0 | 11,161 | 9,682 | 10,162 |
| Resource use | |||||
| Paper consumption | tonnes | 9,347 (*) | 10,240 | 10,823 | 7,149 |
| Paper from sustainable sources | % certified paper | 94% (*) | 94% | 63% | 88% |
| Books & journals sent for pulping | tonnes | 271 (*) | 470 | 587 | 523 |
| Office waste generated | tonnes | 7,387 (*) | 6,309 | 5,073 | 5,089 |
| Office water consumption | m3 | 435 k (*) | 417 k | 261 k | 250 k |
Notes:
Data marked with a (*) indicates that Bureau Veritas has independently assured the 2019 total data. Our reporting methodology is available at: www.informa.com/sustainability-methodology
Where accuracy improvements have been made, some earlier data has been restated. 2018 totals include UBM data from date of acquisition with the exception of the intensity metric.
In 2017, we set some mid-term targets to help us focus on improvements while we developed 2025 FasterForward strategy.
| Issue | Goal | Status Progress in 2019 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Governance | Sustainability framework |
By 2019, we'll have an expanded framework for sustainability across the business and will have launched it to all our colleagues. This will be integrated with our purpose and business strategy. More than two-thirds of colleagues will be familiar with it. |
Our 2025 FasterForward programme was developed in 2019 and was launched at our 2019 results day. Our overall business strategy now includes a sustainability pillar. |
| Dow Jones Sustainability Indices ("DJSI") performance |
Enhance our absolute score by focusing on opportunities to progress in constituent parts of the index, and work towards DJSI World inclusion by 2020. |
Informa has been included in the DJSI World Index and the DJSI Europe Index for the last two years. Our score puts us in the top 10% of companies. 2019 score: 65 (2018:68, 2017:61). Informa also continues to be listed in the FTSE4Good Index and in 2019 we reentered the CDP. |
|
| Content | Sector collaboration |
By 2020, we'll participate in at least two sector collaborations on understanding and improving the impact of our sector. |
As discussed on page 30, we helped found SEBIG (Sustainable Events Big Initiative Group) working together on a series of events industry initiatives. We have also partnered with AEO/AEV to help adapt our Fundamentals for the UK events sector and worked on the EIC's sustainability steering group to launch this new standards. We're also part of the media industry's DIMPACTS group to create a tool to measure our digital carbon footprints. |
| Sustainable Development Goals ("SDG") engagement |
By 2020, we'll identify five new projects that engage our customers within a specific vertical around the SDGs and create value in helping address the goals. |
Pages 10-11 outline our progress on embedding the SDGs and developing products that contribute to the SDGs or support our customers make their own contributions to the SDGs. Themes around the SDGs feature in events from fashion to agriculture, tech to publishing. |
|
| Key Performance Indicators ("KPI") development |
By 2020, we'll have a set of KPIs that help us to better understand the role of our content and communities in creating broader stakeholder value. |
Our 2025 FasterForward programme also includes a number of targets and we are continuning to develop more. See pages 8-9. |
|
| Community | City impact | By 2020, we'll have partnered with five cities to improve the local impact of our events. |
We have developed a consistent methodology to measure our economic, social and environmental impact on host cities and have piloted this with 4 cities. But across many events we continue to partner with visitor bureaus and local government to help ensure our events have a positive impact on our host cities. |
| Measuring impact on people |
By 2020, we'll have introduced a programme of common measurement of the impact we create through content/ community for all attendees at our events. |
We are using our Sustainable Event Management System and the Fundamentals to track how embedded content around sustainability is across our events and we are expanding this into other divisions. See pages 26-29. |
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| Meaningful charity partnerships |
By 2020, we'll have a way of measuring our contribution to charities across the Group and our 10 biggest shows will have a charity partner. |
We have centralised the collection of financial data and the Fundamentals gather data on the in-kind giving from each event but we have not yet embedded systems to gather value in kind giving from our non-event products. Nine of our ten largest events have a charity partner. |
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| Colleagues | Gender balance |
Each year, we'll make continuous progress on female representation in our Senior Leadership Group |
Our Leadership team is 30% female (2018: 32% and 2017: 27%). Our Directors are also now 30% female (208: 25% and 2017: 22%). We also continue to report on our UK Gender Pay Gap at www.informa.com/gpg |
| Colleague wellbeing |
By the end of 2019, we'll have launched a Companywide colleague campaign to support physical and mental wellbeing. |
We offer colleagues an Employee Assistance Programme in several countries that gives access to external, professional counselling support. Individual divisions such as T&F, Informa Connect and Informa Markets are also implementing broader wellbeing programmes as reelvant for their markets. |
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| Colleague participation |
Participation in Walk the World will be more than 60% a year, every year, and more than 20% of our colleagues will develop their skills through volunteering by 2020. |
60% of colleagues participated in Walk The World in 2019 (2018: 55% and 2017: 46%). Volunteering rates were at 14% in 2019 (2018: 15%, 2017: 9%). We will seek to increase that in 2020. |
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| Environment Our | contribution to climate change |
By 2020, we'll have cut our carbon footprint by another 10% per head and at least five of our top 10 offices will have invested in energy efficiency measures. |
Thanks to a series of energy efficiency initiatives, estates rationalisation and a shift of almost all of our offices to green energy, our carbon footprint went down by 31% from 2017 and our energy intensity per colleague is 0.96tCO2e/colleague (2017: 1.43) |
| Responsible sourcing |
By 2020, more than 95% of our paper usage will be from sustainably certified sources, with the rest responsibly sourced. |
94% of paper used across Informa was sustainably sourced in 2019 (2018: 94%. 2017: 63%) and we are working to increase this further. |
Sustainability is a collective responsibility – so join the debate by sending your thoughts to [email protected]
Our registered office address is: 5 Howick Place London, SW1P 1WG t: +44 (0)20 7017 5000 www.informa.com/sustainability
For more information on our sustainability programme, or if you'd like to get involved, contact [email protected]
This report is printed on 100% recycled, FSC certified paper in an ISO14001 and FSC accredited, Carbon Neutral factory.
We use biodegradable vegetable based inks. All waste paper, chemicals and other materials generated in the manufacturing process are recycled.
The printed version of this document is a certified CarbonNeutral® publication, meaning the emissions from production and shipping have been offset, reducing them to zero.
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