Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Corporate Sustainability Report 2022 Webinar Live Webcast. I am Alice, the Chorus Call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen only mode and the event is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing via the relative field. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to André Frei, Chairman of Sustainability. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and welcome to Partners Group's Annual Corporate Sustainability Update. Thank you for joining us today. As was just announced, my name is André Frei. I'm hosting this call as Partners Group's Chairman of Sustainability, and we're truly excited to share some of the main points from our corporate sustainability report with you today. The report was published this morning. It provides relevant insights into our environmental, social and governance performance and progress, and it covers both investment portfolio and corporate levels. If you look at it, you see that we have upgraded the format of the CSR to further improve clarity for you as the readers of that report, and we hope you like both the format and the substance. If I turn to slide two, just a table of contents, basically.
I will start this call by providing a general sustainability overview. My colleague, Carmela Mondino, she's the Head of ESG and Sustainability, will present ESG insights from our portfolio in 2022. She will be joined by Torborg Chetkovich, a Managing Director in our private infrastructure team, who will present an interesting ESG case study. Finally, Kirsta Anderson, our Chief People Officer, will talk about ESG at corporate level. Like we did last year, we will end today's call with a Q&A session. Let's move to and start with slide three. Partners Group really has been committed to sustainability for more than 15 years now. You know, in 2006, we first established our ESG and sustainability directive. We signed the Principles for Responsible Investment back in 2008.
In 2014, we established our PG Charter, which states that creating lasting positive impact is one of our three core purposes, and that is as true today as it was back then. If I look back, you know, about 20 years ago, ESG may have started off as a common sense topic, also in private markets. We have seen ESG evolve a lot since then. Today, ESG is much more clearly defined, it's more standardized, it's more formalized. While that takes a lot of time and resources, it's actually a good thing. This slide shows some additional milestones that Partners Group has achieved on our journey to date, like the launch of our PG LIFE dual impact investment strategy in 2018, or our climate change strategy in 2020.
Let me say that Partners Group will of course, continue to dedicate significant resources to sustainability and to be and remain a committed leader in responsible investing also going forward. I'd like to turn to slide four. I would like to share some of our sustainability activities and achievements last year. First, we've invested over $2 billion in decarbonization-related portfolio assets on behalf of our clients, including Budderfly, a U.S. energy-as-a-service provider, Sunsure, an Indian renewable energy platform, as well as atNorth, an Icelandic data center operator. Investing in the low carbon economy, as illustrated by these three examples, is and remains an important and attractive investment theme for Partners Group. In private debt, we structured and invested in 20 sustainability-linked loans, which provide an incentive for borrowers to improve on their ESG profile by setting and achieving sustainability performance targets.
I think that's a very effective way to engage. We allocated significant resources to keep up with the tightening of ESG regulations globally. You know, one of the special projects, I would almost say, was to ramp up our ESG data collection for our portfolio of controlled assets in private equity and infrastructure to meet regulatory requirements and increase transparency to investors. Data collection, of course, went way beyond just this core set of controlled assets and actually covered the entire portfolio. Now, while ESG reporting is not a proxy for progress, data is a prerequisite, I think, to measure and manage ESG improvements.
I'm glad that on average, our controlled portfolio companies completed more than 80% of the questions we asked in our annual ESG data collection exercise, and I think that's quite an achievement in terms of data maturity and a good basis for our engagement in 2023 and beyond. I'm excited that Partners Group entered into an agreement with Climeworks, a leading designer, developer and operator of direct air capture plants, to help contribute to the firm's goal of net zero by 2030. Partners Group now is not only an investor in Climeworks, but we're also a client, and that is great. You will hear more about Climeworks later from Torborg. In 2022, finally, we also published our first TCFD report.
We were included in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the second year running and in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook 2023. We move on to slide five. 2022 has been a crucial year with the launch of our sustainability strategy. We actually presented it to this group almost precisely one year ago. We then spend significant time to also communicate this to our portfolio companies with an initial focus on the controlled assets in our portfolio in private active infrastructure. The strategy is now being adapted to real estate. I believe that the ambitions that you see on this slide, combined with the more detailed targets we defined represent a systematic and thoughtful approach to building sustainability at scale across our platform.
In the dialogue with our portfolio companies, we always strive to find the right balance between guiding them top-down on ESG matters through these focus areas and targets set out in our sustainability strategy, but then also, and at the same time, letting boards and executives decide what is going to be most impactful or simply required due to current or upcoming regulation. Our aim in 2022 at portfolio level has been to align expectations, to build on existing initiatives, and to ensure that our portfolio companies develop meaningful multi-year ESG journeys that address the needs of the various stakeholders, be that clients, be it PHS and investors, customers of these assets, and of course, regulation. I'd like to move to slide 60. You know, as Partners Group, we drive ESG impact through a clear and dedicated governance structure.
Actually, we always say that ESG starts with a T, because strategy and tone from the top matter. For that reason, oversight for sustainability topics lies with the most senior levels of our organization. Our board of directors, together with the executive team, is responsible for our sustainability strategy. Lindsay Lewis, Carmela Mondino, and I, we closely work with Wolf Scheider, who is Co-Head Investments, and Hans Ploos van Amstel, our CFO, to implement our sustainability strategy both at portfolio and corporate level. The three quotes on this slide actually summarize our approach quite well. Let me just read them. As active owners, we have the opportunity and responsibility to build better and more sustainable businesses. We do not treat sustainability as a separate and isolated topic, but as an integral part of our transformational investing approach. We organize ourselves to realize sustainability at scale.
In slide seven, finally, I've tried to link our approach to sustainability, which is shown at the bottom of the slide, to how we explain our transformational investing approach in the context of direct private equity investing, which is shown at top of the slide. You know, sustainability can happen both through thematic sourcing of investment and opportunities, as we acquire assets and companies in specific sectors. Sustainability is also a vital topic pre-investment in terms of sourcing and due diligence. I've already mentioned, for example, the $2 billion invested in decarbonization related investments. Sustainability, second, can also happen through active ESG engagement with existing investments in our portfolio during the ownership period. You recall how I said that ESG starts with a G on the previous slide? Actually the same holds true for our assets.
We want to have clear governance and ownership for ESG at the board, executive and operational level for our controlled investments. We are of opinion that our portfolio companies, their boards and executives, are best suited to design and oversee an ESG journey that is most fitting and impactful for their business and stakeholders. The ESG team is, of course, here to advise, support, and challenge. Depending on the business and value proposition, an ESG journey can be highly strategic and transformational, or it can be geared towards operational excellence. An ESG journey, however, always means to intentionally strive for higher ESG standards to benefit the business, the stakeholders of the company, and ultimately, investment success. To future-proof companies in terms of sustainability and to win, we believe ESG journeys must be aligned with regulatory standards, expectations from customers, investors, and society.
I would like to hand over to Carmela, who will talk about these topics in the next section. Carmela, over to you.
Thanks, André. Now, I would like to give a brief overview of how we embed ESG in our investment framework and this transformational investment strategy that André has referred to. Today, 100% of our AUM is covered by our ESG and sustainability directive. In practice, this means that we integrate material ESG factors just as we would integrate commercial, financial, legal considerations across all asset classes and investment strategies throughout the investment life cycle. Since we have different governance rights, our approach and ambition levels vary between controlled and non-controlled investments. For non-controlled investments, and this is what you see on the left of the slide, our investment philosophy is that, you know, it is very similar to what would be considered a traditional ESG approach to stewardship, similar to the approach adopted in public markets.
For controlled assets now going towards the right, our approach goes beyond this. We follow a strategic ESG approach based on our active ownership and our transformational investment approach. As an active owner, we have the unique opportunity to go beyond just excluding or engaging and driving change within our investments. This is the part that I personally, but also my entire team likes the most about our jobs. I think I say it in every webinar every year because it's true. Again, it all starts with governance, right? We adopt this strategic approach and we can really enhance and in some cases even transform our companies into ESG leaders. As active owners, we do not only just mitigate risk, we really leverage value creation opportunities and build more sustainable businesses.
Now I'm going to go through how we made progress over the past year on the three dimensions E, S, and G. If we go to the next slide, please, I'll start with the environmental part. I'm happy to say that 2023 was a very active year for Partners Group and for our control portfolio on the environmental side. After introducing our sustainability strategy, we received consistent feedback from our portfolio that carbon accounting is not really straightforward. For that reason, we formalized our approach around how we expected the companies to apply the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. For that reason, we partnered with EY to support our portfolio companies in this effort and achieve its scalability across our platform.
A significant share of our assets use this service, and this enabled them to have a better quality of their calculations and also for us to be able to better report to our clients and our different stakeholders. This is really important because as we have made current commitments as part of our sustainability strategy, we need a good baseline. On the figures side of things, 92% of our portfolio companies disclosed their Scope 1 and 2 footprint, and 80% obtained assurance on the figures. This assurance was very, you know, based on the need for this improved quality for this baselining.
Now we will discuss how, you know, we work with data in a couple of slides, but this is really important for us at the moment because as you know, we want to align our portfolio with the Paris Agreement. We have asked all our portfolio companies to develop a greenhouse gas reduction strategy within three years of holding, being part of our portfolio. Everyone needs to have a plan towards reducing their footprint by 20% during our ownership period and by 50% by 2035. If we move to the next slide on the social side of things, our goal is to build companies that employees want to work for and increase returns by having an effective workforce with better culture, cooperation, and retention.
We encourage our employees or our companies actually to engage with their employees and to pursue employee-centered efforts. It all starts with governance, right? At board levels, we have worked a lot to improve the diversity at the board level. Over the past year we have observed that 30% of board appointments were from minority candidates and more than 60% of new companies had at least one diverse board member. This is in line with our target from our sustainability strategy to hire 40% of all new board members from underrepresented groups. On the social side, looking into the next slide, we are also working on our stakeholder benefits program.
We invite portfolio companies and their board of directors and management teams to design a tailored approach specific to the business, including non-monetary rewards or financial participation, both looking into going above and beyond traditional benefits, and really increasing employee engagement. A lot of our companies are still working on it, but we also have a big group of them that have already started initiatives that illustrate its intentions and the goals that are in line with the stakeholder benefits. For instance, one of them was our company, Pharmathen. Pharmathen is a leading developer of advanced drug delivery technology. They have over 1,300 employees, and they have started implementing an equity program for large section leaders, and for all of its of their 800 factory workers.
You know, this is really important because not only we are creating a better business, by doing so, but for us it's important to increase talent retention as there's a very high competition for R&D talent in the science side of things. This program is what we think will make the difference for the people to stay within the company. Now, if we go to the next slide. On the governance side, it all starts with governance again. It's very clear for us that in order for our portfolio to be able to deliver on their ESG targets, and for this to stay beyond our ownership, we need to have clear ownership within each level of decision making.
We expect all our portfolio companies to establish ESG responsibles at board, executive and leadership level within their first 100 days of ownership. This is what we do as well as Partners Group. Through our ESG responsibles, our portfolio companies are expected to develop strategic and operational ESG initiatives to enhance their ESG performance and if applicable also transform them in what we call this ESG journey. The ESG journey is supposed to address material ESG topics and align the sustainability performance of the company with the expectations from customers, society, Partners Group as an investor, and these days a very important stakeholder, and that is the regulator, and we have a big project running at Partners Group to make sure that we are delivering to regulatory needs, and we expect our companies to do so as well.
From a governance perspective, it is crucial that companies are managing these risks on their own as well. We are asking every company to have a risk and audit committee, and also for them to work on the most material risks for their business. We believe cybersecurity is one of them for the entire portfolio. For that reason, last year, with the support from Aon, we introduced a cyber baseline project where we had a you know, a general assessment of where each company is in terms of cybersecurity and, 85% of our controlled assets in private equity went through this assessment last year. I've mentioned a lot of figures over the past minutes, in the next slide, I'm happy to introduce you to our new ESG dashboards.
You, you've seen them before, right? Collecting data is a very important part of our transformational investing in general, our ownership approach. This is how we believe we can really track performance and drive progress against our ESG ambitions and missions. As part of our strategy, we defined certain focus areas and targets that we expect all our companies to work on. As I mentioned before, the regulation and their expectations are also part of the things that we take into considerations as when we're driving our engagement. This year there was a big lift on our Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation work. We have been collecting ESG data for many years now, since 2014, and we have continuously worked on this topic and improved our ESG data governance to improve coverage and quality.
In 2022, our focus was to refine how we gather data and build a scalable reporting solution to fulfill all these reporting requirements that we see from different stakeholders. Also in 2022, we, as I mentioned before, the carbon side, we asked companies to start getting assurance on certain data points, and 80% were controlled before the companies had a number of ESG indicators assured. This is only the start of the journey, and we will continue refining our approach to improve quality, but also make a practical process to our portfolio company. Now, our ESG dashboards focus on the ESG data from our controlled assets and, you know, these are the assets that we can really actively influence. This is the...
You know, what you see on the dashboard, it's just a result of a lot of work from a lot of people at Partners Group that work with these companies making better businesses. My colleague, Torborg, is one of them, and she will walk you through an example of how we do this. Torborg, back to you.
Thank you, Carmela. As mentioned, a key part of our ESG work is engaging with portfolio companies to drive improvement projects on topics that are highly material to them and societies where present. One example is the work we have carried out with CWP Renewables across its environmental, social, and governance pillars. CWP is a large-scale Australian renewables energy platform combining wind, solar and storage. We invested in Sapphire Wind Farm, the first of the CWP Renewables assets to be constructed in 2016. Go to the next slide. Thank you. We have developed CWP Renewables from the ground up in line with our long-term thematic approach to investing in next generation infrastructure assets that benefit from decarbonization trends.
Having successfully managed projects towards commercial operation dates, installed best-in-class teams to handle daily operations, arranged long-term purchase agreements, and implemented a portfolio to replace individual asset-specific project finance facilities. CWP transformed into one of the largest renewable energy platforms in Australia. We exited the investment in 2022. On the environmental front, CWP's mission is to lead Australia's transition to renewable energy. The platform is a key contributor to helping corporates and governments to achieve their net zero emissions target through the supply of renewable energy by way of long-term power purchase agreements. CWP has explicitly disclosed its commitment to reduce its emissions intensity by 50% by 2030 and to reach net zero emissions intensity by 2040.
A key focus area as part of this is continued focus on building internal capacity to properly track Scope 3 emissions. With a view to define construction emissions intensity and to track performance against its committed targets. It has furthermore committed AUD 250,000 to ecological research and AUD 500,000 to scientific research for the conservation of vulnerable species in partnership with the Australian Government. Wind power has already got one of the lowest carbon footprints compared to other energy sources and produces zero emission energy. Even this industry can do more. For example, it can shift from a linear to circular economy. Rather than decommissioning turbines, it can seek to extend the product's life cycle and repower old part of the asset, offering environmental benefits by delaying or preventing disposal.
On the social front, it has defined target for zero Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate. Last year, CWP were awarded an ISO 45001 accreditation for its health and management system. Community impact is also super central to CWP's ESG strategy, and CWP has demonstrated its commitment to diversity and inclusion of indigenous groups with a reconciliation plan. Key actions include working towards improving supplier diversity by prioritizing procurement from businesses owned by indigenous people, execute anti-discrimination strategies, and offer scholarships for the professional development of indigenous people. On the governance side, CWP has published its first ESG report in 2022, highlighting its ESG commitments and progress across material topics. I truly would like to highlight that our ESG engagement work with CWP is just one example of the deep ESG work we are conducting across all our portfolio companies.
The sustainability revolution presents a big investment opportunity with an array of compelling investments. I'm truly excited to see how our thematic investing approach in decarbonization and sustainability guides our investment professionals in their investment sourcing efforts, and how we then, during our ownership period, integrate sustainability as a seamless part of our value creation efforts together with our boards and management teams in our portfolio companies. We will now delve into sustainability at corporate level in 2022. Another and to do that, I would like to share another great example of how Partners Group is using one of its investments through our use of Climeworks services. An investment we did in March of 2022. We invested in Climeworks as a leading Swiss designer, developer, and operator of direct air capture plants.
Climeworks generates revenues through selling carbon dioxide removal services to both businesses and individuals. Today, it has 15 plants, including the world's largest direct air capture and storage plant, which started operations in September. We are working closely with Climeworks management team, board, and other investors to help scale Climeworks and to support its commercialization strategy and international expansion. Our true belief in this investment is so strong that we have additionally signed a separate partnership with Climeworks to remove CO2 from the atmosphere on our behalf and permanently store it underground. This multi-year agreement will help to accelerate the scale-up of carbon dioxide removal technologies such as Climeworks and the market as a whole. Carbon dioxide removal technologies needs to be scaled to gigaton capacity by 2050 at the least to help the world achieve net zero by neutralizing residual emissions.
We are truly proud of being part of this journey. I now would like to hand over to Kirsta.
Thank you very much, Torborg. We are really excited about the opportunity to partner with one of our own investments and through doing so to help accelerate the scale-up of carbon dioxide removal technologies. If I zoom out for a moment, as a firm, we've committed to working towards net zero carbon emissions by 2030 for our corporate related Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. In 2022, we managed to reduce the sum of Scope 1 and 2. However, Scope 3 did increase largely due to increased travel volumes. There is more action that will be needed in 2023, and we are working on it. One example is we've established an internal carbon price of $50 per ton of CO2 in 2022, and that's to provide an incentive to reduce emissions and to fund carbon removals.
The adoption of Climeworks will complement our portfolio of nature-based solutions that I just went through as our first technology-based solution. We're very excited about all of those initiatives. If I move in the next slide to the social side. Our conviction is that our business's growth and our people's growth go hand in hand. That's why in recent years, we've invested heavily in figuring out how to scale our people's growth. When we were smaller, we could do it through day-to-day coaching and bringing people to our headquarters to absorb our culture through osmosis. Now we have to find more scalable ways as we grow, and that's what I'm going to talk about here. If I think about celebrating success, first of all, we started the year celebrating some of the great successes in our engagement survey.
Engagement increased to 71%. This has put us on track to achieve our goal of 75% by 2025. Going beyond and kind of underneath the surface of engagement, we were really pleased to see that some of the foundations of our culture and our people's growth were maintained through the COVID years in particular. People continued to report that they feel they are treated with respect and inclusion. They continue to feel incredibly proud of the quality of what we offer and of our client focus, and they continue to feel clear and confident about the direction of the firm. We take all of that feedback to mean that our people feel a strong sense of purpose and belonging at Partners Group.
Building on those results, we also took away from the survey three key areas to focus on to ensure that PG continues to be a place where people grow. One was resourcing, so making sure that we actually have enough people in the right places to maintain that level of quality and also give people the opportunity to grow. The second is decision authority, so getting decisions to the lowest level appropriate so that our people can be quick to take the right decisions and we can manage the growing complexity of our business. The last one is collaboration, which again, as we become more global, collaboration becomes all the more important for making sure that we're coming to the right conclusions. A little bit about what we did on each of those fronts.
On the resourcing side, in 2022, we hired over 650 people and expanded our global platform to 1,856 employees with a turnover rate of 14.6%. We turned to how do we onboard these new people that we've hired and brought into the platform. To get decision authority and collaboration working for so many new joiners, our focus was on giving them the context to make the right decisions for Partners Group and also the opportunity to build relationships across the firm to ground collaboration across those departments. To that end, one of the most fun and inspiring initiatives in 2022 was we relaunched our onboarding event, which we call Wildspitz. You can actually just barely see a picture of a group on a Wildspitz event in the background of the slide up there.
This is a 2-day onboarding event that we run in each region, which includes people who've joined Partners Group in the last 6 months or so. It's named after the mountain that our founders and senior leaders used to climb for strategic planning sessions. In Switzerland, it actually still takes place there on Wildspitz. Over those 2 days, we help people understand PG's history, our values, our culture, why we do things the way we do, but we also get their feedback on what to change and improve. We give those people at all levels the opportunity to engage with senior leaders. I had the honor of hosting our relaunch sessions in Singapore and in Zug, and in fact, in Zug, André was kind enough to co-host with me.
I have to say it was truly inspiring to see people developing a real sense of belonging in Partners Group through these programs. In addition to this cultural onboarding focus, we also expanded our learning opportunities. The key vehicle for learning and growth for our people, in our view, is actually on the job. This is why in our performance management process, everyone in the firm is evaluated on leadership and collaboration alongside productivity and quality. That is to ensure that everyone is invested in the development of their colleagues day in, day out, and that has been the case for a number of years. Then to complement on-the-job learning, we also continue to expand our PG Academy platform to match the scale of the firm.
We, this year, increased the variety and volume of our offerings and have launched a series of pilot programs aimed at providing support and practical advice to develop self-awareness and emotional intelligence, and that all sits under a new training category of well-being. We also introduced a new ESG training module to educate our employees on ESG concepts and our general approach to sustainability. As a measure of the success of the platform, we are really pleased to see that the average training hours per employee increased by 20% from 20 hours to 25 hours per person. We have a big and continued focus on growing our people and creating that sense of belonging I talked about earlier. That brings us to diversity and inclusion as a topic because we know that diversity and inclusion are critical foundations for our people's growth.
If we go to the next slide, thank you. Our conviction is that the importance of diversity and inclusion to our business has not changed because it really is embedded in our DNA. Since our founding, we have seen time and again that we make the best decisions on behalf of our clients when we collaborate, jointly explore, vigorously debate a range of viewpoints in order to achieve clarity of direction and come to the best decision. We're glad to see that we are generally heading in the right direction here. The focus on this slide is gender diversity, and I wanna be clear about it because that's what we can currently measure. We are currently in the process of gathering additional data on other underrepresented groups where we can, and we will soon start reporting on other elements of diversity.
What we're most proud of this year is the growth of our employee networks, actually, and the leadership role that they have taken in driving diversity and inclusion in Partners Group. We have five employee networks, all of which started grassroots by our employees on their own initiative. Those are the Women's Network, the Black Network, the Pride Network, the Parents' Network, and the Boots & Rucks Network, which represents veterans at Partners Group. Membership of these networks grew by 50% in 2022, and they were a huge part of bringing people back from COVID and re-engaging a sense of belonging in Partners Group. They hosted social events and education sessions for employees at all levels. They started book clubs. They hosted training sessions on well-being and engaged in a whole range of activities.
I'd actually like to take this opportunity to thank our networks for the great impact they've had on our culture this year. They've been truly inspiring in the passion they've shown and the impact that they've had. That summarizes our key activities on the diversity and inclusion front. With that, I'd like to hand back to André to wrap us up.
Well, I would just like to say thank you, Kirsta, Torborg, Carmela, and the entire team who worked on, the CSR report. I hope you enjoy the format and substance, as I said before, and I'm happy to open up, for questions.
The first question from the webcast goes to André Frei. Could you elaborate on how Partners Group are considering their Scope 3 Category 15 emissions footprint? Are there ambitions to set quantifiable Scope 3 Category 15 reduction targets following science-based targets, initiatives, private equity sector guidance in the future, given ongoing efforts to help assets decarbonize?
Thanks for the question, actually, we partially addressed it in the CSR report. You know, if you look at Partners Group, Scope 1 and 2 are much smaller than Scope 3, which is largely due to air travel, as Kirsta said. If we included Category 15, which is also like a Scope 3, if you wish, of course it would again be much higher than the Scope 3 without Category 15. The reason we do not include Category 15 right now is simply that I believe we lack the data as a foundation to publish figures with confidence, right? We have in 2022, we have spent a lot of time gathering data. We have built sound processes and tools and systems.
I believe it will take more time before we have comprehensive data. Also data of high quality, so we could report a Scope 3 Category 15, which is really meaningful, as opposed to just a figure that is not really trustworthy. Scope 3 and Category 15, by the way, is of course also a figure that clients frequently, you know, inquire about. The focus will initially be to report such figures to clients, and if we can report to clients, we can also report to shareholders in the CSR. In terms of SBTi, actually, we do look at SBTi. It's a... at this point, only a small number of our companies have or are about to commit to SBTi.
If you read about it's very interesting. A lot of relevant methodologies that could make sense for Partners Group's overall portfolio or for individual asset classes. The approach we have chosen is not to publish a target right now, but to learn about the market, to learn from SBTi and we'll take it from here.
Thank you, André. The second question from the webcast goes to André Frei as well. You have just published the sustainability strategy in 2022. Did you not have one before?
The answer is yes and no. No, you know, when... Partners Group has been committed to ESG for, like, 15, 20 years, as I said. Over these years or decades, of course, like, the conviction, Our approach to ESG has found its way into processes and policies, into tools, into experience, into frameworks. The sustainability strategy is an attempt to consolidate, to pause and reflect, say, what have we done in the past, and what do we have to do going forward? I believe it's just a natural next milestone. It's not a revolution, but it's a logical consequence of, let's say, 2 decades of ESG experience and provide a frame that should be relevant for the years to come.
The sustainability strategy at one point will not be obsolete, but will have to be refreshed. So it's not a strategy once and forever. As I said in my presentation, it's really vital to always reflect, does Partners Group need to impose sustainability top-down or how do we enter into dialogue with our portfolio companies and have them really, you know, commit and strive towards ESG? That is the balance that we strive for at this point and in the future.
Thank you. The third question from the webcast goes to Kirsta. Your corporate D&I target of aiming your teams to reflect the societies in which you operate is quite vague. How will you track this?
Yes, it's a great question. We actually will have a more concrete coming out soon. We are looking at in each of the regions in which we operate, what is, for example, the female representation in the workforce at different seniority levels. We're looking at the same for ethnic minorities, in particular in the U.S. and the U.K., where that is a concern. We will be releasing those, and that will enable us to, A, track our progress, and then, B, know when we're at where we want to be in terms of what it means to actually reflect the societies we operate in.
What we're also doing simultaneously so that we actually know where we stand is where we can collecting the data, I think I alluded to this before, on representation of gender, of LGBT plus status, and of ethnic minorities, again, so that we know how we're doing.
Thank you very much. The next question from the webcast goes to Torborg. Introducing ESG measures in companies might be a long-term process. In terms of influencing a company's targets, how much time, in years, for instance, would you believe it takes until a firm actually starts introducing the ESG measures you suggested from the first time of discussions?
Yeah. Thank you. I would like to start with, you know, it's really it's about tone from the top that we were discussing before. And the same goes for how we are approaching when we take over a portfolio company. And we actually start with identifying in the board who is the person in the board who is responsible for the ESG questions. Then, you know, looking at the portfolio company together with them, we then decide who is in on the executive level and also on the operational level within the portfolio company, you know, responsible for together with us driving what we call our ESG journey. And of course, I mean, every company is different, and every company also needs to find their own ESG journey.
Of course, we have from our end, I mean, also coming from regulation, but also from our true beliefs in PG, there are some things that we really would like to see where our portfolio companies are developing, basically. You know, as a rule of thumb, I would say that we wouldn't like this ESG journey to take longer time than two years to develop. What we have seen over the years is also that by having this very tight cooperation, also having support from our ESG team here in Partners Group, we can also inspire and support and help our portfolio on their journey.
Thank you. The next question from the webcast goes to Carmela. Does Partners Group have a specific set of targets or objectives to affect biodiversity risk?
Thanks, Ivan. Not yet. At the moment, we have ad hoc initiatives if the topic is material for specific portfolio companies. For instance, for greenfield infrastructure assets, we address the impact of the construction on local biodiversity, right? This is something that, you know, is part of the environmental impact assessments that we do. We don't have anything at the moment throughout the portfolio. What I would say is that, you know, this year we gathered a number of data points on biodiversity through our survey. We're in the process of analyzing the data, establishing priorities, and then we will see, you know, what makes the most sense, what type of engagement we can have.
Thank you very much. The next question from the webcast goes to Kirsta. As an employer, are you engaging on how to, for example, anonymizing CV, cover letters to remove gender, ethnicity, et cetera, and avoid whatever biases which might affect people employing, although they might not be aware of it?
We did. Great question. We did actually explore that. We ran an experiment a couple of years ago when our CEO, David Layton, asked our recruitment team when recruiting for one of our graduate programs to run a blind recruitment process. What we did is insisted because we felt that this wouldn't lead to a better outcome, but thought it was worth running the experiment on actually running two recruitment processes at once. We ran one blind and one non-blind. What we found is that the blind process actually led to a less diverse candidate pool. We believe it's because there is still not equal opportunity in university education and internship opportunities and so on.
If you take everything else away and can only see that, you end up replicating that lack of equal opportunity at the levels below. We stopped that practice. What we do instead is we focus on diverse interview panels and crystal clarity and training on what competencies interviewers are looking for to enhance objectivity. Then finally, unconscious bias training for interviewers so that they can be aware of any of their own biases and control for them.
Thank you very much. The last question from the webcast goes to André. André, keen to hear how you spend your time internally versus with portfolio companies. Has it changed over the last years?
You know, it's a clear goal that we spend more time externally than internally. There's also a clear goal that we wanna spend more time at portfolio level than at corporate level. If you look at Partners Group, we have, like, 2,000 minus employees at corporate level, but we have 200,000 plus at portfolio level. Naturally, the time allocation and the focus of the ESG team should be on the portfolio side more than the corporate side. What was, I'm not sure surprising is the right term, but, in 2022, probably the focus has not been as much on the portfolio as we want it to be because regulation is the regulatory landscape is developing quickly.
Everyone wants the ESG to be quantitative. We have spent a significant time in 2022 to provide guidance to our portfolio companies to really gather the data to make sense of regulation. I really look forward to 2023, 2024 when we can turn this around and again increase dialogue with portfolio companies and spend time externally. I hope the investments see it the same way. I'm sure they do. There seems to be no more questions at this point. Let me say thank you again to everyone involved, and especially thank you, dear listeners, to attending this call. I wish everyone an amazing day. Thank you.