Fairgrove celebrates first year of sustainability drive

27 March 2023 Consultancy.uk

At the start of 2022, Fairgrove Partners announced a new partnership with environmental organisation Ecologi. Since then, the partnership has funded over 20 sustainability initiatives, and planted more than 1,000 trees.

Founded in 2013, Fairgrove Partners is a strategic advisory firm, serving corporations, private equity funds and their portfolio companies, and the family offices of high-net-worth individuals. The firm is based in London, and serves clients in the UK, US, China and Japan.

In early 2022, Fairgrove announced that it had “a climate positive workforce.” A release from the firm elaborated that this meant Fairgrove was now offsetting emissions from its employees’ personal and professional lives – including emissions from their homes, personal travel, holidays, food, and hobbies. Fairgrove began achieving this through partnering with Ecologi.

Fairgrove celebrates first year of sustainability drive

Founded in 2019, Ecologi is a Bristol-based environmental services organisation, providing SMEs with platform for collective climate action and carbon offsetting. Offsetting is the process of compensating for carbon dioxide emissions arising from industrial or other human activity, by participating in schemes designed to make equivalent reductions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Ecologi uses money from its partners to support a broad range of projects that are able to evidence that they are reducing or avoiding greenhouse gas emissions.

In the last year, Ecologi has helped Fairgrove push for carbon neutrality, by planting trees worldwide, and funding carbon reduction projects to accelerate the firm’s transition to a more sustainable mode of operating. In the first month alone, the collaboration resulting in the planting of 250 trees, and the offsetting of 17.7 tonnes of CO2 – equivalent of 14 long-haul flights, according to Fairgrove.

A release from Fairgrove added, “Despite this being a small part of what we plan to do in terms of becoming a more sustainable business in the future, this step is hugely important to us. As our company grows, we will continue to keep planting more trees.”

The following year has indeed seen the impact of Fairgrove and Ecologi’s collaboration grow. In the past year, Fairgrove contributions have helped to fund 22 sustainability projects, resulted in over 1,800 trees being planted, and helped reduce carbon emissions by more than 120 tonnes. Further progress is being tracked via Fairgrove’s ‘forest’ on Ecologi’s website.

A LinkedIn post from the company noted, “Fairgrove is celebrating one year of making a positive impact on our planet! Twelve months ago, we committed to a climate-friendly future through our partnership with Ecologi. Ecologi is an environmental organisation that facilitates the funding of carbon offset projects and tree planting around the world. We look forward to continuing this partnership throughout 2023 and beyond!”

With environmental, social and governance risks having swiftly risen to the top of the investment community’s priorities, consulting firms have placed increasing importance on ambitions to reduce their carbon footprint. This has seen a range of consulting firms looking to carbon offsetting as a means to reduce their carbon footprint, including Capgemini, WTW, and Simon-Kucher & Partners.