Sustainability
- Reporting
  - Sustainability Report 2008
    - Sustainability and Barclays

Sustainability and Barclays

The corporate sustainability agenda has expanded rapidly over the past decade, reflecting companies increasing focus on the wider context of their business, and stakeholders growing interest in companies social, environmental and economic impacts.

There is now a greater awareness of long-term global challenges such as climate change, poverty, scarce resources and demographic shifts. Such challenges affect Barclays clients and customers and shape our competitive landscape. They require effective responses, from governments, from businesses, and from the not for profit sector.

In 2007, Barclays broadened its focus from corporate responsibility towards a wider sustainability programme, which we continued through 2008.

What sustainability means for Barclays is accurately identifying and managing our economic, social and environmental issues across the Group, and contributing to the wellbeing of society. In the current challenging economic climate, we believe we can play an important role in stablising the economies in which we operate.

Engaging our stakeholders

Sustainability covers a wide range of subject and issues. Our approach is to manage and report progress on the topics of most significance to our business and our stakeholders.

Barclays has engaged on this subject with stakeholders in a number of ways including:

research initiatives and partnerships
dialogue with governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), customers, consumer groups, investors and journalists across our markets globally
an internal sustainability strategy focus group attended by a cross section of colleagues representing our businesses
an external prioritisation media review conducted by Deloitte LLP to map the significant sustainability issues of our stakeholders in 2008.

Our stakeholders’ insight and feedback on our sustainability programme is useful to us and encourages us to be open and transparent about the issues they are concerned about.