Better for the planet

Our commitment and case for action

At COP26 in November 2021, we committed to ensuring our own-brand product would have deforestation and conversion free (DCF) supply chains by 2025, with a 2020 cut-off date. This means that, by 2025, we aim to ensure that all our products can be traced back to land which has not been deforested or converted since 2020.

We are signatories to the WWF Retailers' Commitment for Nature, which aims to halve the environmental impact of UK shopping baskets by 2030, including a commitment to DCF supply chains for key agricultural commodities by 2025. 

Forests are vitally important ecosystems that we depend upon for our livelihoods, food, and water. They are some of the world’s most biodiverse habitats, as well as the world’s second largest carbon sink after oceans. Ending their destruction was recognised in the 2015 Paris Agreement as key to meeting global climate goals, which was reiterated at COP26. It is also necessary to stop a global decline in biodiversity that is severely damaging our planet’s ecology.

As well as helping to combat climate change and biodiversity decline, keeping our forests and ecosystems intact is important for:

• Reducing extreme weather conditions e.g. flood and drought
• Reducing soil erosion and desertification
• Regulating the water cycle
• Improving soil health and underground ecosystems
• Protection of land for indigenous communities
• Growing nutrient dense food

Beyond that, forests globally support the livelihoods of communities living in and around them. Our approach to the elimination of deforestation and land conversion in our supply chain recognises that deforestation has far reaching human rights impacts. 

Supply chain engagement and approach to raw material sourcing

We know that eliminating deforestation and land conversion from our supply chains is critical to achieving the objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement, but we cannot do this alone. As a business, we have adopted a Forest Positive approach that incorporates sustainable supply principles and supports landscape initiatives that aim to tackle the root causes of deforestation. We are working with our supply chain, external partners, and collaborating in multi-stakeholder initiatives to deliver on this commitment. For more details on some of our key partnerships, please see below.

We have also undertaken an analysis of the key raw materials in our supply chains to understand which are exposed to the greatest deforestation risk. This enables us to prioritise our work to end deforestation and conversion. Guided by this assessment, we know that palm oil, soy, beef and timber are commodities of particular concern, and we have set out commitments and strategies for these key raw materials to meet our 2025 target.

Read more on Sustainable Soy

Read more on Sustainable Beef

Read more on Sustainable Palm Oil

Read more on our Forest Products Policy

Due diligence legislation

We know we need to work with our suppliers and others to tackle deforestation and conversion as a sector and address the key challenges together. For this reason, we support the introduction of EU and UK Due Diligence legislation for forest-risk commodities that would ban the sale of products linked to illegal deforestation, including soy-driven deforestation, and help set clear expectations on traceability throughout the supply chain. 

Acknowledging the interdependence between human rights, deforestation and conversion 

In addition to the environmental impacts, deforestation, and land conversion caused by agriculture expansion, there are also links to widespread human rights abuses in the form of illegal land grabbing and displacement of Indigenous peoples who depend on forest and other key ecosystems for food, medicine and cultural needs. The need to protect the rights of these communities makes the need to address deforestation ever more urgent.

We also recognise that human rights violations can also be a driver of deforestation in supply chains. For example, in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, around 80 per cent of the forested areas have been lost in the last few decades due to expansion of smallholder cocoa farmers who reportedly live on less than US$1 a day. Therefore, we are tackling one of the root causes of deforestation and working towards our aim which is for smallholder farmers in our priority supply chains to achieve a living income, which in turn means they can invest in the productivity of existing lands and reducing the pressure to convert more land towards agricultural activity.  

Collaboration for change

The scale of the deforestation challenge is huge, and systemic change will not happen if we act alone. Collaboration is therefore key to eliminating deforestation and land conversion globally. Signing up to the WWF Retailers' Commitment for Nature supports alignment in the UK retail sector on tackling the key environmental challenges that face us.

We have also engaged with partners to drive positive change in supply chains on deforestation and land conversion through multi-stakeholder initiatives.

Consumer Goods Forum Forest Positive Coalition

We’re members of the CGF Forest Positive Coalition of Action, made up of 18 member companies committed to moving efficiently and quickly toward a forest-positive future. With a collective market value of USD 1.8 trillion (GBP 1.3 trillion), these member companies are in a leading position to leverage collective action and accelerate systemic efforts to remove deforestation, forest degradation and conversion from key commodity supply chains.

In 2021, the focus for the Coalition was on developing and publishing the individual commodity roadmaps, which translate our vision for Forest Positive production into tangible actions and KPIs that members commit to. Our aim in participating in the implementation of these roadmaps is to drive collaborative efforts to accelerate the removal of commodity-driven deforestation and human rights abuses from individual supply chains and drive transformational change in key commodity landscapes. 

ForestMind
We are one of the first companies to collaborate with NGOs, geospatial service providers, data providers and academics on the UK government-funded Satellite Applications Catapult ForestMind initiative, which launched in 2020. This is a £4 million project part-funded by the European Space Agency, which we have worked with on trials for soy satellite mapping. The programme aims to use satellite technology to monitor and track the impacts of sourcing from forest areas, so that immediate action can be taken when a deforestation issue is identified.

UK Soy Manifesto
To tackle deforestation and conversion driven by soy production at scale, we believe that collective industry effort is the only way to ensure DCF supply chains for soy. We are signatories to the UK Soy Manifesto, which aims to ensure that all physical shipments of soy to the UK are DCF. From September 2022 our supplier requirements for soy require all our suppliers also become signatories to the UK Soy Manifesto and specifically commit to requiring their own suppliers to match and cascade these commitments. Annual progress reporting on our new soy policy will begin in January 2023, and we also require that our suppliers and their supply chains also report on their progress.

Landscape Initiative Projects
At Sainsbury’s, we support landscape initiative projects both in the UK, and across the world, to address the root causes of deforestation and conversion. We are supporting farmers in Brazil and Indonesia on specific key commodities and supporting projects that are working to regenerate entire ecosystems in South Africa and Peru.

Reporting

We recognise that putting in place sourcing standards to ensure a deforestation and conversion free supply chain is, on its own, not enough. To be accountable, we need to be transparent about our own, and our suppliers’ progress in eliminating deforestation and land conversion.

We therefore report annually on our commitment to ensure that all own-brand products are deforestation and conversion free by 2025.

In addition, we are founding members of the Palm Oil Transparency Coalition and the Soy Transparency Coalition, which allows buyers and investors to evaluate the progress of the major importers and traders of palm and soy. As part of this work, we also report the traders in our key raw material supply chains.