Our Spirit of Progress targets

Spirit of Progress is our ongoing ESG action plan to create a more inclusive and sustainable world and are aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Our targets

At Diageo, we manage our business for the long-term, and have always believed in doing business the right way.

Spirit of Progress targets

Our ESG priorities

When we launched Spirit of Progress in 2020, we set out a series of ambitious priority targets. Now we are a few years into our journey we have taken stock, reflected on our excellent progress to date, and refreshed our focus for the critical years ahead. Our 12 priority performance targets focus on where we believe we have the greatest control to drive positive change at scale across positive drinking, inclusion and diversity and grain-to-glass sustainability.

Promote positive drinking

Our ambition is to change the way people drink for the better, by engaging, educating and empowering consumers to make informed choices about drinking.

Our priority targets focus on areas where we believe we can have the biggest reach and impact:

Scale up our SMASHED partnership, and educate 10 million young people, parents, and teachers on the dangers of underage drinking
Through our programmes, deliver five million experiences that promote changes in attitude to drink driving.

We know our responsibility is to educate consumers of times when consumption of alcohol is not ever appropriate, and to provide clear and transparent health information about the impacts of consuming alcohol. Since starting our Spirit of Progress journey we have made excellent progress, championing healthy literacy and tackling harm through DrinkiQ and reaching 1 billion people with dedicated responsible drinking messages. We continue to embed these crucial programmes into the rhythm of daily business.

Water

Water accordian button

Water stewardship has been a longstanding priority for us and we are focused on preserving this critical resource, particularly in water stressed areas. Our priority targets across water are:

Reduce water use in our operations with a 40% improvement in water use efficiency in water-stressed areas
Replenish more water than we use for operations in water-stressed areas
Engage in collective action in all priority water basins to improve water accessibility, availability and quality and contribute to net positive water impact

We also set a target to provide access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) in water-stressed communities near our sites and in water-stressed areas that supply our raw materials. In fiscal 2023 we reached our 2030 target, meaning all nine of the markets included in our target, invested in WASH projects since 2020. We will now maintain this commitment, investing every year to 2030.

Carbon

Carbon accordian button

We are committed to a low-carbon future and following a science-based approach to drive the pace and scale of change required. In fiscal 2025, we continued to reflect on learnings from our first five years tracking against our ‘Spirit of Progress‘ greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets. Our priority targets are:

Reducing our scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by 2030, reaching net zero in direct operations by 2040.
Reducing our scope 3 emissions by 26% by 2030 and achieving net zero across scopes 1, 2 and 3 by 2050.
Increasing the percentage of recycled content in our packaging to 50% by 2030.
Implementing 10 regenerative agriculture programmes by 2030.

We'll continue to work on our other targets within Spirit of Progress and data on these targets are available in our ESG Reporting Index.

Grain-to-glass sustainability

2020 targets

We set ourselves ambitious targets to be reached by 2020 and committed to measuring and reporting on our progress in a transparent and meaningful way. Our targets were aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and support the World Health Organization's programmes on health.

Our goals reflected the holistic way we measure and evaluate our responsibility and sustainability efforts, focusing on impact, not only within our own business, but also within the communities in which we operate. We also understood the importance of working in partnership to create true scale for our many programmes and initiatives around the world.

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