Corporate Social Responsibility

Sustainability is at the heart of our design approach. We audit projects against global standards as well as our own, more comprehensive, Responsibility Framework. To build sustainably requires us to design holistically, driven by our unique integrated approach. Every project starts with fresh thinking, leading to innovative solutions that are tailor-made to site, user and climate.

As an environmentally driven studio, we aim to practice what we preach. Over recent years we have developed an analytical framework for our own office, based on our bespoke Foster + Partners Responsibility Framework (FRF). This covers ten sustainability related themes - Wellbeing, Community Impact, Energy and Carbon, Mobility and Connectivity, Resources, Water, Land and Ecology, Social Equity, Planning for Change, and Feedback - and informs our CSER policy.

Our CSER policy is driven by a desire to deliver lasting benefits by applying our sustainable principles to our own operations. The focus is to drive down energy consumption by implementing carbon management plans for business travel and procurement, collectively targeting the practice’s whole-life carbon emissions, both operational and embodied. We take our commitment to education and community very seriously and we invest our time and skills, as well as financial support, in educational and charitable initiatives. 

We have well-established links with a number of schools and universities around the world, funding awards and prizes and supporting educational activities such as design crits, graduate shows and visits to the studio. Our internship and apprenticeship programmes give valuable experience and teaching opportunities to students from a wide range of backgrounds and we have strong links with the Stephen Lawrence Trust. 

Our charitable activities include Macmillan Cancer Support, Crisis and Open City. From our pro bono projects to construct a community boathouse in New York and reimagining children’s playgrounds in London, to refurbishing London Zoo’s Snowdon Aviary to create a new home for Colobus monkeys, our work aims to create new opportunities and a better future for all.

Foster + Partners’ sustainability manifesto demonstrates the practice’s ongoing commitment towards achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. Outlining a holistic sustainable approach, our methodology, developed in collaboration with others and drawing on the practice’s experience and expertise, enables the measurement of embodied and operational carbon in each project. This process gives greater insight into the different aspects that affect the environmental impact of a project and provides tools to mitigate and lower their carbon content.