This article was originally published by edie(Opens a new window) and is republished here with permission.
By Alastair Child, Chief Sustainability Officer, Mars, Incorporated
The science hasn’t changed. But the world has. And the way businesses look at the role of sustainability is also changing.
We are living through a period of continuous global shocks. With supply chains disruption, rising input costs, and geopolitical tensions impacting global and local economies, the pressure is on businesses to focus on the here and now. The question is now whether transitioning to a more sustainable model can deliver improved competitiveness, more affordable inputs, and ultimately enable growth. That is the conundrum business leaders face.
For too long, the case for action has often appeared to rest on it simply being "the right thing to do" accompanied by a raft of commitments, lofty promises, and pledges. That argument established ambition. But it will not, on its own, deliver transformation and real progress.
Business needs to show something different: that acting on climate can be a source of long-term economic value and growth - and that businesses that care about their impact on people and the planet will be the most resilient and the ones that will gain a competitive edge in the near future.
At Mars, we are seeing the power of moving climate action into the core of how we operate. Every business plan must deliver against greenhouse gas and other non-financial targets. That’s why incentives for approximately 1,900 of our senior leaders are partly tied to sustainability goals. And it is about ensuring that our approximately 170,000 Mars Associates feel they have access to the tools, data, and incentives needed to make sustainability part of everyday operational decision-making.
This framework flows throughout our business, and you can see the powerful benefits of this integration most clearly within our own operations. In the U.S., for example, all of our operations are now covered 100 percent by renewable energy – a major milestone to scale clean energy and accelerate grid decarbonization. More broadly across the business, renewable energy now makes up 39.8 percent of our energy needs globally, and it is being sourced more competitively than fossil fuels.
Through our Renewables Acceleration program, we are now starting to extend that logic beyond our own operations across our full value chain — from farms and transport to the energy our consumers use at home. By 2030, this effort could reduce emissions by around 3 Mt CO2e, roughly 10 percent of our current footprint. Where the business case is clear, we partner and collaborate on what works with others. Because when it comes to the planet, there is no value in solutions that only one company can implement. We need scale. We need progress. We need systemic change.
Where the business case is still emerging, we take a longer-term view. We invest in innovation, partner across value chains, and help create the conditions that will make the solutions of tomorrow more viable and more scalable.
Celebrating and sharing our successes, however, is not enough. Building trust and credibility requires levels of transparency and humility that will feel uncomfortable at times.
Take our emissions trajectory. I’m incredibly proud that last year we delivered our biggest year of reductions with 6.4 percent. We have grown our business by approximately 75 percent since 2015 while cutting our absolute emissions by 16.9 percent. That decoupling is real and it matters. But progress won’t always be in a straight line, and we must be open about that. For us, part of this complexity is a process we undertake each year called restatement in which we review and adjust our baseline as methodologies evolve to ensure our footprint is properly reflected; be it because we have acquired new businesses that bring with them a footprint or because the GHG data available evolves and changes. This will sometimes result in a more challenging path ahead. So be it. We report it that way because being honest about the size of the problem ahead is the only way of making real progress. That is the kind of GHG accounting approach the industry needs to normalize and reward.
And that honesty must also extend to the challenge of transforming our extended supply chain, where a majority of our GHG footprint sits. For much of this, we do not yet have all the answers. When we talk with farmers and smallholders, facilitated through our suppliers — from the mint fields of Uttar Pradesh to the cocoa farms of Ghana — it is a constant reminder of how much complexity still lies ahead.
That is why we are working closely with farmers and suppliers to develop new ways of making climate-smart agriculture economically viable, while investing in science and innovation, developing technology solutions to solve the problems we need to go after and help protect the cocoa, dairy and peanuts at the heart of our most loved brands. These are supply chain security issues that translate into economic challenges, not just climate challenges. They matter to the resilience and long-term future of the farmers and consequently, our business which depends on them.
We must be clear that working out how to transform systems entrenched for decades — across agriculture, infrastructure, energy and packaging — IS the job. We know that to scale solutions that truly stick, the economics must work at every level, and we also must recognize that even determined businesses can only move as fast as the systems around them allow. Many of the challenges we face cannot be solved through a single intervention, however well-funded or well-intentioned. It requires a critical mass of industry to help build large-scale market demand.
The race to zero is not a race we want to win alone – there is no point in being a 1.5°C-aligned company if we are operating in a 4°C warmer world. That would be a waste of ambition and investment. We only win if everyone gets there together. That’s also the only way of avoiding some of the worst climate impacts. For solutions to be scaled they must be competitive, the economic argument needs to speak louder and we must collaborate across supply chains, industries, markets, to build a coalition of the willing capable of delivering the change this challenge demands.
