VIVESCIA’s Climate Commitment !
Aligned with the Science-Based Targets Initiative*1 (SBTI), its roadmap sets long-term commitments to help achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, with a first step involving a 29% decrease in its carbon footprint across its whole value chain by 2030 (scope, 1, 2 and 3* – Baseline year: 2021)
Climate challenge is a key priority for the Group and an integral part of its sustainable development policy, LINK, and its 20 commitments.
Following a full year of work to quantify, evaluate, and model avenues for improvement and set ambitious, realistic and robust targets, the Board of Administrators and Executive Committee approved the climate strategy in the autumn of 2022.
"The carbon revolution is underway, and VIVESCIA Group is taking it seriously with an ambitious strategy. Reducing our emissions, adapting our agricultural systems, and finding carbon sinks… Climate change is a systemic challenge that requires us to change how we think, to innovate, and to design new forms of cooperation within our agri-food chain"
President of VIVESCIA Group, Christoph Büren
VIVESCIA Group – its cooperative and its food processing businesses (VIVESCIA Industries) – has therefore:
- set greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets for its entire scope of responsibility,
- with significant targets for 2030: namely a 29% reduction on total emissions (scope 1, 2 and 3) and a 42% reduction on emissions within its direct scope of responsibility (scope 1 and 2).
- VIVESCIA Group submitted its application to SBTi on 1 February 2023, and aims to certify its objectives in 2024. Each business – the Cooperative and VIVESCIA Industries’ six companies – is now working to consolidate their respective roadmaps.
VIVESCIA’s ambition to reduce its carbon footprint is not new.
“We initiated projects on energy efficiency and green energy several years ago, with a first objective set for our food processing businesses as early as 2018. These initiatives helped us reduce our GHG emissions by 26% between 2015 and 2020. In the face of the climate emergency, and as a major player in the grain and plant-based food industries, in 2021 we made the decision to review our entire policy and take it further, setting a new 10-year trajectory. Our choice to sign up for a robust, world-renowned standard based on the Paris Climate Agreement – the SBTI – defines our ambition for 2030: to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions we are directly responsible for, as well as to encourage the reduction of those we are only indirectly responsible for (scope 3 emissions), in particular those from upstream agricultural activities,”
VIVESCIA Group's CSR director, Valérie Frapier
In parallel with the reduction of GHG emissions, VIVESCIA is working on the fundamental challenge of adapting to the existing impact of climate change.
“We very quickly afforded this issue the same level of importance. Our climate strategy must be based on two interdependent pillars: mitigation and adaptation,” explains Valérie Frapier. “To ensure the continued viability of our agricultural and food processing businesses, we need to adapt to climate change, which is already a reality and whose consequences we – in particular VIVESCIA cooperative’s members – are already feeling,” she adds.
In the last six or seven years, VIVESCIA’s member-farmers have had to face increasingly severe climate incidents. Beyond strategies aimed at ‘sidestepping climate change’, it is now essential to evaluate and quantify the risks. This is why, in the autumn of 2022, VIVESCIA and its agronomy teams decided to develop its knowledge of the subject, by conducting a huge study in the cooperative’s region (North-East France) with a partner that has expertise in estimating the impact of climate change on crop yields by 2030, based on the IPCC’s scenarios. The study aims to understand and measure the impact of changes to three crucial factors (temperatures, rainfall, and sunlight) on 15 different crops. In order to take into account local disparities in soil and climate within the Cooperative region, 18 different zones were mapped. The first results of these this study will be known in the summer of 2023.
Farming, which is the first link in our food chain, is at once a contributor to, a victim of and a solution for climate change.
Thanks to its unique, vertically integrated grain value chain, VIVESCIA Group, is able to work alongside cooperative farmers in its region – to help them transition towards more resilient, low-carbon farming that preserves biodiversity – and help its customers develop more sustainable food that has a positive impact.
*Created following the Paris Agreement and a product of a collaboration between several institutions around the world, including the UN, the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) is now the benchmark in terms of companies’ carbon trajectories
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