Thinking beyond silos: meet Laurent Céard, Environmental engineer & climate expert
After nearly 20 years at Soitec, Laurent Céard has seen the company from multiple angles. Today, he helps shape its environmental strategy by coordinating climate reporting and developing its approach to biodiversity.
An Operational Journey Across the Company
Laurent’s path at Soitec began in the Facilities department, where he spent four years managing the maintenance and operation of chemical distribution systems at the Bernin site. Seeking a direct connection to our core business, he moved into manufacturing and served as a production supervisor for another four years. He then returned to Facilities as a manager to oversee a wide scope of responsibilities, including fluids, air and discharge treatment, electricity, and tertiary activities. Together with his team, he notably led energy efficiency management for the site and managed its ISO 50001 certification.
In 2021, Laurent decided to step away from people management to focus on environmental topics by joining the HSE team to lead the group's decarbonization plan. Today, Laurent focuses more on climate action and biodiversity, while energy performance management has been handed over to his newly recruited colleague, Florian Dufour.
Turning environmental data into meaningful action
As the expert responsible for the ESRS* E1 (climate change), Laurent coordinates the annual calculation of the Group's carbon footprint* and tracks its overarching climate strategy. This task involves consolidating hundreds of data points across multiple sites and functions.
Working alongside his colleague Coralie Zen, who manages the broader collection of environmental metrics, Laurent ensures the quality and consistency of the information published in Soitec's Sustainability Report.
"The CSRD* hasn't changed why we measure our environmental performance. It has changed how rigorously we collect, verify and document our data. That's a real step forward. This framework also led Soitec to implement Sphera, a reporting platform tool that now allows us to easily verify and justify our calculations to external auditors."
This reporting reflects a wider ambition: to reduce our environmental footprint. Thanks to our efforts in energy efficiency and the increasing use of electricity from renewable sources – now 100 per cent at Bernin and around 60 per cent at Pasir Ris – Soitec is on track to halve its greenhouse gas emissions from energy consumption (Scopes 1 and 2) by 2030 compared with our 2023 baseline.
Soitec is equally committed to reducing its indirect emissions arising from the upstream and downstream activities it relies on (Scope 3). Reducing the environmental impact of the transport and the procurement of goods and services are the two main pillars of the strategy implemented for Scope 3. The aim is to reduce this impact by 25% by 2030 compared with 2023.
Breaking silos: connecting climate and biodiversity
For Laurent, climate cannot be considered independently from water, energy or biodiversity.
"For example, Soitec has shifted a larger portion of its raw material transport from air to sea, which successfully cuts carbon emissions,” Laurent explains. “However, we must also consider the potential impact of maritime traffic on marine ecosystems. How could we even measure that? True sustainability means looking beyond separate silos to understand how a benefit in one environmental area might affect another, even if methods of measurement vary per subject."
This broader perspective is helping shape Soitec's biodiversity approach. While local initiatives, such as the partnership with the LPO launched in 2020, already contribute to protecting ecosystems around our sites, the next step is to better understand the company's impact across its entire value chain.
A shared, collective vision
One of the things Laurent enjoys most is the diversity of his role. On any given day, he might handle data modeling alongside IT, collaborate on technical decarbonization actions with manufacturing teams, or discuss long-term environmental strategy with executive directors.
"It is highly rewarding to contribute to the deep transformation of the company, prompting us to evaluate how we operate over the next 5 to 10 years," he shares.
Ultimately, Laurent stresses that environmental progress is never an individual achievement.
“Decarbonization is still an opaque subject for many. Everyone is aware of climate change, and most want to contribute to fighting it in one way or another. But knowing how to take action is far less obvious. My role is multifaceted: I need to simplify this topic for a broad audience, shape and distill the necessary long-term transformation of the company, and coordinate its implementation across every department. It is a long-term endeavor. Without daily collaboration and the genuine commitment of teams across all areas of Soitec, we could not achieve these goals. Above all, it is a collective success,” he concludes.
For Laurent, this is what sustainability is ultimately about: combining expertise from across the company to make better decisions together.
