Assisting our clients to be sustainable

We create opportunities for our clients to enjoy prosperity and achieve sustainability goals with innovative ideas that embrace our sustainability principles.

GHD believes that its most significant contribution to sustainability is through the projects we work on with our clients.

The range of work we do and the clients we assist are broad, and we aim for outcomes that provide a balance of environmental benefits, community advantages and economic prudence.

The two key elements of GHD’s strategy revolve around leveraging our connected global network to put the best people we have on a project – and a client-service led culture – where we focus on partnering with our clients in the long term.

With the additional economic challenges encountered on many projects, we are finding clients are increasingly interested in innovative concepts, which helps to increase their overall sustainability.

Also, we have a strong interest in having sustainability concepts integrated into real projects. We believe this is the key next step in sustainability worldwide: to make changes in what we build and do.


  • Listens and communicates regularly


  • Delivers projects on-budget


  • Is accessible and responsive


  • Likely to recommend


  • Client satisfaction

Source: eSurveys, FY19/20 from 945 global responses

cyber

Organic Growth

GHD is accelerating organic growth by encouraging our people around the world to think big; developing new services, products and partnerships that benefit our clients, while creating new revenue streams for the business.

Our approach recognises that, in order to become successful, new opportunities often require initial funding and a risk appetite to try new things.

An example is the launch of the global GHD Digital business, spanning cybersecurity and risk, digital strategy and transformation, smart technology services, digital innovation, and data analytics.

Other initiatives launched in FY 19/20 include:

  • Commercial partnership with a geospatial company to automate land contamination reporting for the property sector
  • Development of industry-specific economic benchmarking tools to inform clients’ capital investment decisions
  • Strategic recruitment of specialists to expand client service offerings in flood modelling and civil infrastructure, coastal and maritime engineering, power, and operational process redesign
  • Pioneering approaches to contain and remediate/remove PFAS contamination in partnership with research organisations and equipment suppliers.
  • These growth initiatives are contributing to the future success of GHD and, even more importantly, unlocking the creative and entrepreneurial thinking of our people.

Smart Seeds

Powered by GHD with partners, Smart Seeds is a design-led global innovation program focused on complex challenges. What began as an idea to engage GHD’s vacation interns in 2012 has blossomed into a multi-national, cross-discipline program bringing together diverse groups of people to co-create integrated solutions.

In Australia, our programs in Melbourne, Tasmania and Riverina were postponed due to COVID. Melbourne and Riverina programs were redeveloped for virtual delivery, and we were able to complete all three programs this year, with 52 of the 58 participants presenting at the Showcase events.

After completing three programs in New Zealand in early 2019, we took Smart Seeds to our first region, Tauranga in August! We had a total 25 participants from a range of local client organisations working on four regional challenges.

2020 launched with Christchurch but unfortunately due to COVID, we suspended all programs for the rest of the year. New Zealand is excited to be launching again in 2021 in its four locations; Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington and Tauranga.

Our Smart Seeds team across New Zealand and Australia have developed an alternative program approach which will enable them to switch between both in-person and virtual events should they need to. This innovation by necessity has led to fresh and flexible ways we can deliver to more regions in 2021 and beyond.

Smart Seeds in Wellington

Future Energy

The global energy sector is transforming. GHD is positioned to be an industry leader in assisting our clients navigate this transition to a cleaner energy future.

Future Energy is a global strategic growth initiative - part of our enterprise strategy. We will build on our strengths, projects and the capabilities of our people to signal to the market that we're in the business of helping people with the transition occuring in energy systems.

GHD already works on hundreds of projects in the future energy space. Future Energy is a purposefully open concept and includes: