A View on the Future of Environmental Health and Safety Operational Excellence: A Q&A with Kim Watkins

A changing regulatory and sustainability landscape calls for greater adaptability. 

As the regulatory landscape continually shifts and changes directions, our clients and their decision-makers face intense challenges to their organization’s daily operations and long-term plans. As they look to the future, they’re also navigating the growing impact of climate response and what that means for the communities they serve. 

Around the world, Jacobs helps our clients face these opportunities head-on. As a leader in sustainability and environmental health and safety (EHS) compliance, we use our deep knowledge of our clients’ industries and processes to help them maintain compliance, manage risk, and reach their sustainability goals.  

Our practitioners, such as Kim Watkins, our global solutions director of EHS operational excellence, use their insights to address a diverse range of challenges and needs, provide innovative technical and regulatory strategies, and deliver resilient solutions. In this Q&A, we connect with Kim to discuss the trends in EHS and how we’re creating environmental stewardship for the future.  

Tell us a bit about what a day in the life is like as Jacobs Global Solutions Director of EHS Operational Excellence, and what we offer to our clients in this area. 

In my role, I help steward our expertise, engagement, and market growth in several environmental health and safety areas around air quality and acoustics, auditing and compliance, information management, integrated waste solutions and other various services. It’s a role that allows for significant connectivity across our global regions to identify, understand, and shape market trends and growth opportunities. This solution area is primarily about helping our clients acquire and maintain their license to operate in a changing regulatory environment and fit within broader environmental, social and governance standards. By thinking about a wholistic environmental strategy, our clients can continue working while managing risks to their people and the environment. We’re also helping our clients become more digital and maintain a strong focus on advising clients around sustainability, resilience and climate action.  

How do we help clients think differently to respond to future challenges? 

As engineers, we’re in the business of building things, solving problems and designing solutions, but with compliance we’re often in the business of avoiding problems being created in the first place. There’s often no tangible output, like a bridge or a road, but success is often in what didn’t happen – what injury didn’t happen, or which equipment didn’t fail, because compliance was maintained.  

As environmental stewards, we provide the best technical solutions, but they’re also compliant and sustainable, considering the whole picture of a client’s organization. We look at their challenges and create an approach that makes sense organizationally, economically, societally and environmentally. Our clients have a varied and wide-reaching set of challenges and needs, allowing us to provide equally diverse solutions to those needs. Being able to respond to that and help them is an exciting and fulfilling challenge to meet. 

Digital and data-driven solutions have revolutionized nearly every industry. How do you see data solutions coming into play for EHS? 

Nearly all our EHS projects entail measuring, analyzing or reporting some type of data, and our goal is to use data solutions that best fit the client’s business processes. In some cases, this could mean our teams use a solution to produce a specific output for the client, but in many cases, we’re working with solutions that we helped design and put in place for the client to use directly.  

In the current landscape of EHS technology, most of our large clients have systems in place and what they need from us is guidance on maximizing the value they get from those systems. This may include adding functionality through configuration, custom solutions to fill gaps in off-the-shelf software capabilities and automating the flow of data between systems to eliminate manual activities. Our information management team does a great job in realizing value for our clients and using it to go beyond our standard or compliance obligations to help reach our clients' sustainability goals. These efforts create exciting end-to-end solution opportunities that we hope to do more of for our clients. 

Is there a project you’re particularly proud of?  

Recently, we’ve worked with the city of New York to help with their circular design guidelines for construction. We've set the strategy and guidelines to help them implement an embodied carbon reduction of 50% by 2033. By embracing circular construction, we’ve helped our client benefit the environment through a reduction in air emissions, carbon footprint, and waste generation. Circular construction also supports health benefits through improved indoor air quality and increased comfort and well-being of occupants. I’m proud of our team helping our clients drive future goals and lead the charge for conscientious building practices. This project is a great example of bringing our best and brightest to create innovative solutions and strategies, creating sustainable and long-term results. 

What are the biggest opportunities ahead in operational excellence? 

One of the great aspects of this solution area is that all clients are going to need operational excellence in some form or fashion, and Jacobs can help meet that need. We’re seeing more opportunities around waste solutions and data management opportunities to help our clients achieve their net-zero, resilient waste stream and circular economy goals. It’s exciting to show our clients either how to modernize existing facilities to make them more sustainable or help with new facilities, creating them to be sustainable and resilient.