ENVIRONMENT
Our environmental policy, for which the CEO is responsible to the Boards, sets out key principles and responsibilities for reducing the environmental impacts of our operations and activities. Its implementation is supported through a network of individuals at group and business unit level.

Our priorities remain managing energy, water and waste, where we have assessed we can maximise our contribution to reducing the environmental impact of our businesses. We are developing our current processes into an environmental management system and will be publishing our environmental objectives and targets against which we will report future progress.

One of our key group objectives for 2002 was to improve the quality and coverage of our environmental data, a crucial step in being able to monitor group wide environmental performance. This has broadly been achieved, although we are undertaking further work to improve the measurement of waste and transport.

We are also managing our supply chain impact more closely by requiring our key strategic suppliers to have environmental policies that meet standards in regard to human and labour rights.

In the business divisions, improvements in environmental performance include the continuing growth of online journals (reducing the environmental impact associated with paper use, printing and distribution) and an annual reduction in energy consumption of over 2 million kWh in LexisNexis through the introduction of more energy efficient data servers and lighting.