Contributor: Patrick Ko

With the deterioration of the environment, it is not only governments that began thinking about sustainable development. Enterprises have begun to think of sustainable ways to develop their own businesses. The New Taipei City Government was invited by the law firm Winkler Partners to visit their office on May 17, 2022. Among the attendees were partner lawyer Peter J. Dernbach, Green Office Commissioner Shen Ming-Yi, and New Taipei City Government Secretariat Director-General Chingyu Yao, together with nine other staff members. During the visit, both sides engaged in discussion and exchanged ideas about sustainable development. Just as New Taipei City is focused on achieving its SDGs, so is Winkler Partners dedicated to achieving its ESG goals.

Winkler Partners was established in 2002 and is the first law firm in Taiwan composed of a partnership between Taiwanese lawyers and foreign lawyers. The company provides a full range of legal services as well as legal translation and intellectual property filing services. Winkler Partners has been an outlier in the promotion of ESG. Winkler Partners voluntarily entrusted the British Standards Institution to verify and declare that it has achieved carbon neutrality in 2021, in accordance with the internationally accepted PAS 2060:2014 standard. The firm became the first Taiwanese law firm to be certified as carbon neutral.

The company has purchased the gold standard carbon rights of Taiwan’s Changbin onshore wind power generation for carbon offsetting, thus, declaring carbon neutrality. Winkler Partners continues to focus on sustainability issues and hopes to become the most environmentally friendly law firm in Taiwan. It has implemented many carbon footprint reduction measures for many years. Such as reducing the consumption of electricity by 58% from 2004 to 2014. It has also reduced water consumption by 61% in 2021 equipping its roof with rain showers to collect rainwater, saving an average of 40 metric tons of tap water every year.

ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance, which assesses whether an enterprise meets the goals of sustainable development by using three indicators of environmental, social, and governance as the criteria for evaluating business operations. In the past, investors could only rely on financial statements to judge the benefits and disadvantages of investing in a company. However, today, it is not only enough for a company to be profitable, but it must also fulfill its social responsibilities and maintain the ecosystem. During the 2008 financial crisis, among 83 listed banks in Europe, the banks with high ESG scores were less affected, indicating that investors and the public are more willing to deal with banks with continuous investment in sustainable development. New Taipei City encourages industries and companies to utilize the ESG Dialogue platform in order to encourage sustainable development at the workplace and improve the quality of life of employees.