To tackle climate crisis, businesses need to be carbon neutral before 2050

To tackle climate crisis, businesses need to be carbon neutral before 2050

28 January 2020

Mike Coupe, Chief Executive and Martin Scicluna, Chairman of Sainsbury’s

As Sir David Attenborough has warned, the moment of crisis has come and we need to act now to tackle climate change. To keep global warming below 1.5°C, the upper limit deemed “safe” by scientists, greenhouse gases must halve in the next 10 years. We know that this issue is high up in our colleagues’ and customers’ minds and we hope that world leaders will act to address the issue at COP26 in Glasgow later this year.

Whether or not they can, one thing is certain: getting to this goal will be impossible without greater ambition from business. We believe we must become a carbon neutral economy sooner than 2050.
 
We know this is going to be tougher for some sectors than others. But over the past year we’ve seen businesses in some of the most difficult industries begin to decarbonise – from shipping to steel, agriculture to aviation, all setting their own targets to become carbon neutral by 2050. 

So what about consumer-facing businesses like Sainsbury’s? If we really set our minds to it, as we do to meet other commercial challenges, just how far and fast could we go? With UK households now more worried about the climate crisis than the economy and even crime, it’s clear we need to help our customers live well for less impact and make sustainable choices easier and more affordable for the 26 million people who shop with us each week.
 
That’s why today we are announcing that we will commit £1 billion over twenty years to becoming a Net Zero retailer across our own operations by 2040. We believe this commitment is central to our purpose of helping our customers and future generations to live well for less. 

We will work with the Carbon Trust to set science-based targets in line with the goal to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, the highest ambition of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. We’re pledging to do this a decade ahead of the UK’s own climate target because we believe Net Zero can’t come soon enough. 

This investment represents around 10% of our annual capital expenditure. In today’s fiercely competitive retail landscape, an investment this big is no small decision. But we see this as a crucial investment in our customers, our colleagues, our business and the future of our planet. What’s more, we believe achieving this ambition will put us at an advantage in the future by keeping pace with our customers and showing that we are attuned to the concerns of younger generations.
 
To reach this goal, Sainsbury’s is working with the Carbon Trust to implement radical changes across our operations. From using more renewable energy in our stores and operations and making our fridges more energy efficient to expanding our fleet of low emission delivery vehicles. We will cut plastic packaging by half by 2025 and then go further and explore how we recycle our water in stores, from fish counters to car washes as we drive towards becoming a water neutral business. 

This goal is hugely ambitious but, we believe, it’s also achievable. Over the last nine years we’ve invested £260 million on over 3,000 climate and sustainability-related initiatives and in the last fifteen we have reduced our emissions by 35% despite the business growing by 46%. We now need to push ourselves to make the biggest impact we possibly can, as quickly as we possibly can. 

Yet the largest and most challenging source of our emissions comes from the products we sell and our supply chain. So, we are asking all our suppliers to join us by setting their own Net Zero targets, in line with the Paris Agreement. And as part of our ambition we will ramp up efforts to help customers switch to healthier and more sustainable diets and lifestyles. 

We know that achieving this won’t be easy. Some initiatives will likely fail while others will take time to scale up. But it’s our hope that other business leaders join us in challenging themselves to take their organisations as far and as fast as they can on climate change. In doing so, world leaders will know that business is backing them to act ambitiously on climate change, so that we can all live well now and well into the future.