Ashurst Aurecon Alliance
A long-term partnership helping you to navigate through uncertainty, unlock opportunities and invest in your future
The global landscape on sustainability issues has well and truly shifted. Sustainability is no longer an aspirational goal for organisations – it is core to the successful growth of a business.
We recognise that the world has changed and that our clients are on a journey of transition. The new challenges require a diverse set of skills to find the highest and best use opportunities that arise in a decarbonising world while meeting legal obligations and ethical expectations of people, communities and stakeholders, and upholding environmental responsibilities.
The Ashurst Aurecon Alliance brings together an integrated end to end solution that meets the challenges involved in pivoting to a sustainable future. Our strong collaboration across legal, risk consulting and technical advisory brings a new degree of excellence to our clients. We understand that the sustainability journey is complex and every organisation is on a different path. That is why, instead of applying a generalist template, we craft bespoke solutions depending on each client’s aspirations.
The Ashurst Aurecon Alliance provides capabilities on two initial key offerings:
- Climate Risk Transition; and
- Social License
Climate Risk Transition – Achieving net zero
The transition to a low carbon economy includes a range of processes and solutions. We understand there are many unknowns due to regulation and compliance, market behaviours, stakeholder expectations, technological advancements and global geopolitics. We work with market-leading organisations who define mitigating climate transition risk as achieving net zero as the first critical step, with a view to achieving more in time. We call this Net Negative and it involves transformation of every part of a business.
Our expertise team provides structure to address the complexities of decarbonising businesses and assets by utilising a “Strategise, Execute, Validate and Iterate” model.
- Strategise: reviewing the full value chain across technical, commercial and legal frameworks.
- Execute: helping clients to deliver throughout the entire lifecycle, including long-term operational optimisation, sustaining capital, longer term / cyclic measures (e.g. fleet procurement, electricity procurement, offset procurement), asset acquisition, divestment, transformation and decommissioning.
- Validate: attesting and monitoring performance to baseline and tracking alignment to vision and strategic objectives.
- Iterate: adjusting as needed within regulatory frameworks and improving practices as obligations evolve.
Social License
Our work with progressive organisations and clients is taking us on a journey. The social licence risk model we have developed goes beyond a focus on good PR and investor relations. We recognise that social license needs to be a category of risk in its own right, operationalised across an entire organisation. Effective social license means strong governance, and a Board level commitment to resourcing, measuring and leading.
Organisations that consistently maintain a strong social license achieve high levels of trust, across multiple stakeholder classes, including governments, investors, employees, and affected communities). Social license is realised when stakeholders believe that an organisation is willing to act beyond legal obligations to meet established and emerging social norms, often identified jointly. Often the only viable recovery option is for a Board to make significant leadership and strategic changes in order to restore community and investor confidence.
Social license deals with issues that are regulated (such as native title, environmental standards and approvals and privacy), with emerging regulations (such as heritage, climate change and modern slavery) and issues that may become regulated if organisations systemically fail to meet societal expectations (such as in regard to use of plastic, social procurement and inequality).
Our Ashurst Aurecon multi-disciplinary team can assist your organisation with:
- Social license audits
- Community sentiment analysis
- Issue monitoring and management
- Stakeholder engagement strategy and planning
- Social advisory and research
- Social value measurement and management
- Social license governance and risk framework
- Risk policies and Standard Operating Procedures
- Crisis response, legal support and advice
- Crisis planning and simulation; and
- Crisis management planning and simulations
Our purpose is to help our clients close the gap between strategic goals and pragmatic implementation
Ashurst contacts
Aurecon contact
Michael Tafe
Principal, Infrastructure Advisory, Aurecon
+61 7 31738403
+61 413 141901
michael.tafe@aurecongroup.com
