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At Diageo, we know how important it is that action on the environment is collaborative across water, carbon, biodiversity and agriculture. While collaboration has been in short supply on the geopolitical stage, it lies at the heart of how we’re going to adapt the world to a changing climate and mitigate our impact on the environment.
Business has a significant role to play in reducing our climate and nature impact. By doing this, we will deliver for the environment, communities and the customers and consumers of the future who want more sustainable brands and partners.
We believe the corporate incentive to invest in sustainability has never been stronger. Beyond the positive impact on the environment, it’s a triple win benefitting communities, customers, and performance.
We expect to invest £1 billion in sustainability projects for Diageo by 2030. We’re expanding our collective action in priority water basins from 12 to 20 in our most water-stressed areas, and investing in water efficiency at our own sites by nurturing innovation through Diageo Sustainable Solutions, and installing biomass boilers across east Africa to reduce carbon.
Ultimately, no company or sector can restore the environment alone. That’s why Diageo is working as part of multi-stakeholder collaborations across the world, such as the Upper Tana-Nairobi Water Fund in Kenya. As part of this initiative, we’re working with companies, NGO’s, local government, and farming communities to improve the Upper Tana watershed’s water quality and quantity. And given the recent flooding in the basin, the need for collaboration to reduce the impacts of the climate disaster and adapt for the future has never been more prevalent.
Together in the Upper Tana basin, we’re undertaking actions including strategically sited tree planting and land terracing, introducing natural water holding features and on-farm soil and water management practices. These actions will support the long-term conservation, protection and maintenance of the watershed to improve Nairobi’s water security and optimise the functioning of hydropower facilities along the Tana River. It’ll also improve the water quality and quantity of water into our Tusker and White Cap brewery in Nairobi.
But collaboration on the local level on climate adaptation will only get us so far. Now we need the infrastructure to deliver more and build climate mitigation.
Put simply, we need to work across our industries, sectors, and countries to put in place and support the delivery of essential infrastructure to tackle the climate crisis and improve our own operations. We need quicker progress in renewable energy infrastructure, cleaner transportation, and improved water infrastructure, all of which will help to decarbonise economies, adapt to climate change and protect our environment.
Take agricultural emissions. Regenerative agriculture has the potential to significantly reduce farming’s impact on the environment, with our pilot programme in Ireland showing that the implementation of low-carbon fertilisers could potentially reduce emissions from our Guinness farms by 30%. We have also worked with Agricarbon to measure soil carbon stock changes and the carbon impact of our efforts across our regenerative agriculture programmes.
But to better restore landscapes and improve the resilience of farming techniques, we need to see collaboration across the value chain to share learnings and accelerate innovation in this space.
Where companies have a responsibility to improve their operations, we all need to work together to ensure there’s the public infrastructure we need, and to set up the collaborative environment that companies, communities and governments need to make that transition.
We are transitioning across our own operations and making strong progress against our well-developed roadmaps to net zero carbon and delivery of our water goals. Beyond our operations is a different scale of transformation. Whilst we’re excited by the momentum we have, and across industry we know that it needs to accelerate, scale and collaborate further with stronger policies, bigger financial incentives and critically, the stacking of investment capital rather than the vast array of singular action initiatives.
If you’d like to join us in scaling up and collaborating, highlight your water and carbon transition barriers on our LinkedIn post. We’ll review them and share back the key themes and opportunities for working better together to drive triple wins across environment, communities, and company performance.
Ewan Andrew is President, Global Supply Chain & Procurement and Chief Sustainability Officer at Diageo
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