GRI 102-47, 103-1
Sustainability is at the core of MPIC’s business purpose given the essential and life-critical nature of the services that we provide. As the country’s leading corporation in infrastructure investment and management, we have a clear responsibility to foster a culture of sustainability that creates lasting value for our stakeholders.
We have been reporting yearly about the impact of our sustainability activities since 2016 based on all applicable Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards. Our goals are aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), with SDG 9: Replace with Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities as our main anchors. Enhanced MPIC Sustainability Framework Last year, coupled with the appointment of MPIC’s first Chief Sustainability Officer, we have redesigned our Sustainability Framework to give more focus on how our core businesses contribute directly to solving the country’s biggest challenges. From four sustainability pillars focused on efficiency, service delivery, workplace and human capital development, and community-based actions, we added two more on environmental stewardship and governance in 2020. This new set of pillars connected our new action framework directly on the strengths of our services. It allowed us to emphasize the ethical dimension of doing business especially in relation to the planet’s health. It also made our sustainability actions fully in sync with the current global Economic, Environmental, Social, and Governance (EESG) framework.
We took a step further in enhancing our Sustainability Framework in 2021: After reviewing past actions, present commitments, and future imperatives, and after consulting with the newly formed sustainability council, we have again adjusted our framework in response to the emerging post-pandemic context. Our new focus areas consolidate the key sustainability issues that each of our companies addresses based specifically on their business models. These issues have been identified as strategic to their respective businesses. They are expected to create significant impact at scale while directly yielding each company significant business gains.
The pool of sustainability issues was derived from multiple global sustainability issues frameworks. Each of the consolidated issues was rated by our different operating companies from the lenses of impact, risks, opportunities, and capability of the company to effect change on these issues. Then, the identified priority key issues were categorized according to themes, thereby formulating sustainability focus areas that target to
address these key issues, whereby current initiatives of our operating companies will be grouped accordingly, and wherein future sustainability initiatives and targets will be set strategically. Lastly, both the priority issues and focus areas from the operating companies were rolled-up at MPIC level to craft MPIC’s material sustainability issues and sustainability focus areas.
The updated framework is also expected to help our companies to better integrate sustainability into their current business models, driving them to optimize and be more responsible with limited capitals in order to deliver meaningful business outcomes. At the same time, it also encourages them to set ambitious targets as their sustainability actions increasingly become indistinguishable from their normal business actions.
Our updated framework now allows us to take a closer look at our overall resilience as a business and the strength of our business continuity processes, a focus area that has grown in importance in relation to climate change and the wide-ranging interruption caused by the recent COVID-19 crisis. Decarbonization has become a critical focus area as well as the entire world races to achieve net zero by 2050.