Pay dirt: Stantec digs for opportunity in the race against climate change

Stantec’s Environmental Services teams provide essential expertise to today’s infrastructure developers. Before every new project, there are permit requirements, site investigations, and sometimes mitigation to clean up past contamination. A project may require a team of archaeologists to preserve a historic find or ecologists to ensure at-risk species are protected. There is also the need to fortify today’s infrastructure in the face of climate change and the threat of wildfires, rising sea levels, and floods.

These are business opportunities for Stantec’s Environmental Services group, which contributes 20 percent of the income to the company’s overall business. Sustainability-related related projects will help the company achieve its goal of growing by 50 percent in the next three years.

Part of that growth will be fueled by acquisitions. But climate change, and the race to get ahead of it, is also a critical driver. The work of forestalling disaster is basically an engineering job—or rather, a series of engineering jobs, all interlinked.