As we celebrate Earth Day 2025, Mead & Hunt reaffirms our commitment to environmental stewardship and sustainable practices that benefit our planet, our communities, and our company’s future. This year, we’re celebrating our 125th anniversary while implementing our 10-year strategic plan, featuring sustainability and resilience as core components across all our service areas. Our journey toward measuring, understanding, and reducing our environmental impact continues to evolve through frameworks like our Responsibility and Resilience Report, Strategic Plan, Embodied Carbon Action Plan (SE 2050), and Sustainability Action Plan (AIA 2030). These initiatives help us track our progress so we can make intentional, informed decisions that align with our values and responsibility to future generations.
This blog explores how we manage our impacts, understand and track our carbon footprint, integrate sustainability and resilience into our strategic planning, and hold ourselves accountable to our commitments.
Managing Our Impacts
Understanding our impacts allows us to make intentional and informed decisions for the benefit of our people and communities, our planet, and our company. Mead & Hunt’s Responsibility and Resilience Report, Strategic Plan, Embodied Carbon Action Plan (SE 2050), and Sustainability Action Plan (AIA 2030) give us frameworks to do exactly that. Making information available and setting goals is how we hold ourselves accountable, communicate our progress with stakeholders, work to consistently improve, and—most importantly—celebrate our accomplishments along the way.
Understanding Our Carbon Footprint
The first years of our carbon footprint reporting journey have been focused on calculating as many of our emissions as reasonably possible. We work each year to improve our data quality and quantity, using our best available assumptions where exact data is unavailable. This is evidenced by the increase in Scope 3 emissions each year as we added categories such as hotel stays, employee commute, and remote employee office spaces. Our process for calculation is aligned with the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, and we use the EPA Simplified Emissions Calculator to estimate our emissions inventory.
Knowledge is power, so the more data we have, the better decisions we can make. We take a practical approach to our emissions and any reduction efforts we pursue. For example, we could eliminate most of our Scope 1 emissions if we switched all of our fleet to electric vehicles (EVs), but this is not practical. The majority of our fleet vehicles make long trips to remote destinations where charging infrastructure does not exist yet. We do, however, have a program to identify upcoming fleet vehicle replacements that could be a good candidate for an EV. As the situation makes sense, we plan to grow the EV portion of our fleet organically.
Our offices are another area where we have the potential for impact. We lease 100% of our office space, and in most of those spaces we have no direct control over the utilities. However, there are some exceptions, including our largest office in Middleton, WI. We report the emissions from the few offices with direct utility control separately so that we can evaluate adjustments, set reduction targets, and realize energy efficiency gains where possible and practical. We procure energy from renewable sources where programs are offered for the offices with utility control.
Integrating Sustainability & Resilience Through Strategic Planning
This marks the first year of our 10-year strategic plan in action. When Mead & Hunt initially started the planning process in late 2023, each of our core groups was tasked with completing in-depth research to understand relevant trends that would significantly impact their clients’ future. There were only a few common threads present in each group—the need to help clients address climate-related challenges through sustainability and resilience was one of them.
Our Core Sustainability and Resilience Team (CSRT) includes representatives from each of our core groups across the company with the goal of better integrating sustainability and resilience elements into our project work. They accomplish this by establishing companywide alignment, facilitating cross-group collaboration, and soliciting a variety of perspectives.
In response to the strategic planning early findings, the CSRT was tasked with creating its own strategic plan with one overarching goal in mind—to integrate sustainability and resilience elements so fundamentally into our solutions that the CSRT itself would become obsolete. They aim to accomplish this in three ways:
- Developing an integrated structure that advances sustainability and resilience services and expertise throughout the entire organization.
- Integrating sustainability and resilience elements foundationally into every solution that we develop for our clients and their communities based on the best available climate science.
- Driving innovation to enhance existing sustainability and resilience services and develop new services for our clients and the industry.
Green Design: Meeting the AIA 2030 Challenge & SE 2050 Commitment
Mead & Hunt made two public commitments to championing change in our built world by signing on to the AIA 2030 Challenge in 2021 and the SE 2050 Commitment in 2024. As a Top 100 Green Design Firm (ranked by Engineering News-Record), we are aware of the effect that the built environment has on climate change. We aspire to be a leader in positive, transformative change as we address challenges related to climate change. The AIA 2030 and SE 2050 represent measurable commitments for our buildings group to actively reduce total GHG emissions from the built environment.
The AIA 2030 commitment focuses on reducing operational carbon emissions to achieve net zero emissions by 2030. Mead & Hunt has increased the average reduction of emissions for its 2030 portfolio from 41% to 57% over the past four years and reports our achievement annually to the AIA DDX 2030 framework.
As part of our commitment to the SE 2050, we publish an annual Embodied Carbon Action Plan (ECAP). This document allows us to share our efforts each year related to education, reporting, reduction, advocacy, and lessons learned.
- Education – We will continue to enhance our structural team’s resources and expertise through 1) case study presentations focused on processes and lessons learned, 2) tools to engage in detailed discussions about embodied carbon during early design and programming with our clients.
- Reporting – This year, we submitted four projects, including all structural material quantities, to the SE 2050 database. Our goal is to increase the number of reported projects by 25% each year.
- Reduction – While we currently do not yet have enough data to effectively establish an internal embodied carbon intensity baseline, once established, our short-term goal is to achieve a firm-wide reduction of 5% from baseline annually. We will continue to work to define our long-term reduction target for our 2026 ECAP.
- Advocacy – We will continue advocating for GHG reduction through collaboration with design teams on embodied carbon reduction strategies, external presentations to our clients and peers, and policy engagement.
- Lessons Learned – Important reflection on where we can improve relates to concrete reductions in remote locations, material quantities and quality control, and compliance with local regulations.
Moving Forward in Our Commitment to Environmental Stewardship
Looking ahead, Mead & Hunt remains dedicated to integrating sustainability and resilience so fundamentally into our solutions that they become inseparable from our core work. Our progress in reducing operational carbon emissions demonstrates our capability for meaningful change, but we recognize this is just the beginning. Through education, reporting, reduction strategies, and advocacy, we’re building a culture where environmental consciousness informs every project decision.
As we continue this journey, we invite our clients, partners, and communities to join us in shaping a more sustainable future. Continuing to measure our impact leads to innovation, accountability, and collective progress toward climate resilience. Earth Day reminds us that our daily decisions matter, and at Mead & Hunt, we’re committed to making choices that will benefit our planet for generations to come.
