Dulwich Celebrates World Earth Day with Launch of ESG Report

Today marks World Earth Day 2022, a day where individuals, groups and organisations from across the globe come together to reaffirm their commitment to creating a better future.

At Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi, we are deeply committed to pursuing the realisation of the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development. These goals provide the backbone of many of our conversations, help us to form our thinking around the problems we face as a global society, and act as a cornerstone of one of our College values; Make a Difference. World Earth Day provides as another opportunity to discuss these goals, and take action towards achieving them.

World Earth Day 2022 is a special one for the Dulwich College International family of schools, and indeed all schools across the Education in Motion (EiM) family. Today we launch our first ESG (Environment, Social & Governance) Report. This report is the culmination of many months of work across all stakeholder groups in our community. It is informed through interviews, conversations, research and analysis. The resulting report allows us to understand where we are on our journey to creating a better world, providing benchmarks from which we can set new targets and new goals. 

Below are some excerpts from the report, including a message from our founders;

“Our purpose has always been to prepare the next generation for the future, and we believe defining and achieving our ESG goals are essential to this.

This report expresses our commitment to be a global leader in pioneering education for a sustainable future. It outlines a framework to establish targets and indicators by which we will measure progress towards our Live Worldwise vision – to have a positive impact on society and the planet through education. We want this report to hold us accountable to our commitments.

We see this report as an opportunity to see where we are, what we are doing well, what more we could be doing and where we want to go – and consider it a significant progression from CSR approaches and our Sustainability Pledges.

We have defined four ESG pillars for our Group: Learning, Planet, People, and Policy. These provide the lens through which we focus our goals, progress indicators, and outcomes.”

LEARNING
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Meaningful and relevant learning that nurtures students as global citizens.

‘Students Come First’ is a core pillar of our vision and mission that guides our approach to virtually everything we do. We expect everyone in our organisation to deepen their awareness of sustainability, global citizenship, and the importance of diversity and inclusion as we work together to provide our students with an increasingly comprehensive Worldwise education. As a family of schools, we encourage shared and peer learning so that schools, students, and teachers share ideas and best practices with one another.

PLANET
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Helping more and harming less, with sustainable and regenerative ideas and practices for the planet.

If our mission to provide a pioneering education for a sustainable future is to be meaningful, environmental sustainability must be not only something we practice but a central part of who we are. We recognise that we have both the privilege and the responsibility to play a key role in a sustainable future through educating current and future generations. However, we must not lay the entire burden of planetary challenges on the shoulders of our students; we must work together as an entire organisation – individuals, schools, and head offices – to respond to climate change, reduce our energy and resource consumption, and increase environmentally friendly food consumption. There has never been a more critical time for our organisation and the world to be active and effective global citizens in the creation of restorative and regenerative ideas and practices. 

A critical goal of this ESG report is to keep ourselves accountable to our stated intentions, ambitions, and indicators for sustainability and the planet. We want to acknowledge our progress and achievements while recognising that this is a long-term, if not permanent, process, and there is much more to do.

PEOPLE
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Working together as a rich and diverse community for the benefit of all.

As a global family with thirteen schools in five countries, over 10,000 students, and over 3,000 teachers and staff from all over the world, we must treat each member of our community with respect, and develop the role that our schools play in building and  upporting community relationships, intercultural understanding, and a keen sense of connectedness with the world.

POLICY
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Building the systems and strong organisational structure to support our collective ambition.

Governance is about how well an organisation is overseen and managed. Robust governance is critical to any organisation’s ability to make social and environmental change, especially with the challenges and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our family of schools aims to maintain a governance structure that assures well-informed decision-making, risk management, transparency, and accountability. It should also protect the interests of our key stakeholders, especially our students, in the face of challenges like new and evolving regulations, and COVID-19.

We hope you share our enthusiasm for making a positive difference, and look forward to sharing more about the outcomes from our ESG report in due course.

Happy World Earth Day!