UN Sustainable Development Goals

We promote healthy living and well-being for our employees and the communities we serve through our work. Our employees receive excellent, affordable health insurance, annual fitness reimbursement, generous family leave for new parents, and free access to fitness, mindfulness and other wellness programs (Target 3.8). Our largest office, our New York headquarters, is certified through the WELL Health-Safety standard to ensure a safe work environment during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Our team of sustainability experts has worked on more than 450 green building certification projects and helped clients realize their project certification goals toward standards like WELL, WELL Health-Safety, LEED, BREEAM and the Living Building Challenge, as well as others that seek to improve the health and well-being of building occupants – in projects as diverse as schools and airports. Our recent work on PlaNYC: Getting Sustainability Done includes 32 citywide initiatives with implementable actions that promote a healthier, more climate-resilient New York City for all.

Thornton Tomasetti aspires to be an industry leader in fostering the professional advancement, success and visibility of women, not just at all levels of our firm, but also in the engineering field. A passion for gender equality and innovation through diversity drives our efforts to increase our number of female shareholders and employees, encourage women to become involved in company management, empower women through our Women@TT employee network group and encourage girls to enter STEM professions (Target 5.5). Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Women@TT initiatives promote education of all employees regarding challenges faced by women as a gender underrepresented in our industry. These initiatives create opportunities to improve inclusion for women, foster a supportive community for women in our firm at all stages of their professional development, and help create a culture in which women are treated equitably and inclusively (Target 5.1). We support shared responsibility within the family by offering generous parental leave for both mothers and fathers (Target 5.4).

Thornton Tomasetti's work in decarbonization supports the goal of achieving affordable and clean energy globally. We are helping decarbonize the power sector and heavy industry by minimizing the risks associated with carbon capture and storage technologies and onshore and offshore energy facilities. We are also advancing technologies for more efficient energy storage and electrifying transportation systems (Target 7.a). Our engineers apply their expertise to solving the structural and functional challenges of alternative energy systems. Our sustainability experts guide clients to pursue embodied-carbon reduction, energy efficiency and net-zero-energy buildings (Target 7.3). We fund renewable energy by purchasing renewable energy certificates to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by our offices’ electricity consumption, as well as by buying carbon offsets for our business travel (Target 7.2).

Thornton Tomasetti’s innovation engine, CORE studio, develops innovative and dynamic tools that improve efficiency and enable us to provide optimized client solutions. This positively impacts the quality of the infrastructure in the cities where we work. Every year, R&D funding is made available to employees in an open call for innovation developments. Our services contribute directly to the industry, innovation and infrastructure goal. Our resilience consulting helps clients prepare, endure, adapt and thrive in a disruptive and changing world. In addition, we’re working with hospitals and subways to develop resilient infrastructure designs, and we have numerous Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure-certified Envision Sustainability Professionals (Target 9.1). Our Applied Science practice engages in research, development and design to engineer practical solutions that manage risks across a range of military and civilian applications. One project is HyperloopTT, with the goal of creating the world's fastest, most efficient and most affordable end-to-end transportation solution (Target 9.4).

Thornton Tomasetti provides consulting services in resilience and sustainability, which positively impact the goal of sustainable cities and communities. Our work in all our practice areas requires that we honor our oath as engineers to protect public safety in the communities we serve. We’re committed to constructing a cleaner, healthier built environment by measuring, tracking and eliminating embodied and operational carbon in buildings and neighborhoods. We collaborate with other firms to create high-performance, low-energy facilities and communities that are efficient, comfortable and healthful at every stage of their life cycles. Our broad range of sustainability services – from water balancing, green building certification, circular economy guidance and healthy materials research to parametric energy analysis – contributes every day to creating sustainable cities and communities (Target 11.6). Our firm contributes widely to this goal through our work on affordable housing development (Target 11.1), transportation (Target 11.2), master planning and resilience (Target 11.3), building renewal (Target 11.4), community resilience and building forensics for natural disasters (Target 11.5).

With our new initiative, Climate Action at Thornton Tomasetti, we're structuring many of our practices around providing decarbonization and resilience solutions (Target 13.1). We’re combating climate change through our internal policies, projects and services, and advocacy and partnerships. We participate in committees focused on reducing emissions in our industry and sponsor organizations like the Carbon Leadership Forum. We promote and apply creative means to reduce carbon in our projects and are committed to achieving carbon-neutral business operations and influencing policies and practices for sustainability and resilience in our industry and communities. We’re a recognized leader in moving consideration of embodied carbon to the forefront of our industry. We co-initiated the Structural Engineers 2050 Challenge, urging all structural engineers to understand, reduce and eliminate embodied carbon in their projects by 2050, and are an inaugural member of the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment (Target 13.3). Our sustainable design, decarbonization and resilience services help clients combat climate change and its impacts (Targets 13.1, 13.3).