Our corporate strategy to expand into mainland China progresses with a number of projects currently underway. However, as a new market that operates under a different legal system, business ethics and cultural practices, investing in China has prompted an in-depth review of what and how we do business there.

Risk and challenges to sustainable practices
Mainland China offers potential as both a business client and a product supplier. Our scope of activities includes rail consultancy on the operation and management of urban transit systems, joint ventures in building and operating rail networks, development of property under a rail + property business model, technical and management training programmes and the sourcing of rail products for world-wide sales.  

Given this scope of activities, we face a broad spectrum of sustainability issues that are common to most foreign investors in the PRC. At the macro level is the framework of the legal system which, while improving rapidly and acknowledging and addressing such practices as bribery and corruption, remains largely opaque and weak in enforcement, particularly at the provincial and municipal levels. This weakness in the rule of law impacts all stages of our projects development and operations and therefore imposes a more stringent risk assessment process.

Within our own daily work activities, the management of supply chains, sub and sub-sub-contracting on our sites, quality control and partnering are overriding factors for the continued sustainability of our operations. These issues vary in magnitude and severity depending on where we work and our choice of contractors, partners and suppliers. We are also aware of the growing implications of the up and downstream impacts of our operations, in particular within the dense urban environments where we work. We acknowledge that we are only at the threshold of understanding the issues involved and seek to share experiences and benchmark the solutions with other long established international companies in China.

Sustainable beginnings
With the recent national focus on the environment, we are working within a new framework of compliance that is showing great promise and commitment from all levels of the PRC Government. Our sites are inspected regularly and monitored for any breaches amongst all contractors engaged on sites. To date, our performance has been highly rated. We credit this principally to our Partnering Programme for site contractors, the integrity of our business partners and our stakeholder engagement policy. This framework furthermore, will allow us to develop our social, economic as well as environmental capital in mainland China both within and outside of the Corporation.

Current activities to structure better internal sustainability practice and extending practices to our projects and partners have been again most effective on the environmental front. As part of our master brief, we allocate in the design and planning of stations and the rail lines environs numerous community-minded features such as noise barriers, green belts, and efficient public transport modal links. We have also made changes in project deliverables as a result of stakeholder engagement as seen in our current Shanghai Line 4 project , where floating track slabs are installed along the rail lines to mitigate the vibrations that would potentially affect the hi-tech manufacturing plants bordering the rail lines. Most notably, where we have the opportunity for a majority interest and control in a project we are able to influence the planning of the communities clustered around our rail systems. The proposed holistic development plan for Shenzhen Railway demonstrates this influence with our vision for greener communities in mainland China.

Further reading:
Report: 'Made in China?' Sustainable label?