Why do we need to act?
Climate change will have a growing impact on our business.
Our suppliers of agricultural raw materials will be affected by changing weather patterns, water scarcity and alterations to growing conditions.
Global weather events will cause disruption to our consumers too, by displacing people and also posing risks for security and business continuity. Developing and emerging economies generate around half our sales and are expected to feel the effects most severely.
We believe that the cost of addressing climate change now will be far less than allowing the problem to get worse.
Our strategy
Our Compass strategy sets out our ambition as a company, which is to double the size of our business while reducing our environmental footprint, including greenhouse gas emissions. Over 2008-2010, we conducted extensive work to understand the total greenhouse gas footprint of our product portfolio.
Based on this analysis we set ourselves an ambitious target to halve the ‘per consumer use’ greenhouse gas impact of our products. This target will be achieved through:
reducing greenhouse gas emissions associated with our raw materials
reducing the greenhouse gas impacts from our manufacturing and increasing our use of renewable energy
reducing the emissions related to transport and refrigeration, and
reducing the greenhouse gas impacts associated with the use of our products, in particular our skin, hair and laundry products.
Future challenges
Most of our greenhouse gas emissions come from the hot water needed to use our soaps, shower gels and shampoos. To achieve our goal we will have to provide consumers with products and tools that will enable them to use less water. We do not yet know how we will do this. We have started to explore new partnerships and technologies.
However, achieving our Sustainable Living Plan greenhouse gas targets is the biggest contribution we can make towards limiting any future temperature rise to 2 degrees celcius and towards supporting the call for a more ambitious 50%-85% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050*.
* Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Fourth Assessment Report, 2007
Influencing public policy
To support this wider goal we will continue to work with others to achieve changes in public policy.
Following the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico in December 2010, we are keen to see binding targets emerge from the negotiations that will continue during 2011. Moving closer to clear and binding global reduction targets helps to provide a level playing field for business and the certainty required to encourage investment in long-term solutions to the climate challenge.
We continue to participate in business coalitions to stress the need for urgent action on climate change. In October 2011 we signed the 2°C Challenge Communiqué, drafted by the Prince of Wales's Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, which calls on governments to break the deadlock in international climate negotiations and take the necessary action to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. We also continue to contribute to a number of business initiatives such as those from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the Consumer Goods Forum and the World Economic Forum.