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Our leading climate change engagement

Warehouse inspection
5 April 2023
STORIES AND FEATURES

Our leading climate change engagement

05 April 2023

When it comes to collaborating with suppliers to tackle climate change, we’re among the world’s best businesses.

That’s according to CDP, a not-for-profit charity and leading, independent global organisation for measuring a company’s environmental impact.

CDP awarded BAT an ‘A grade’ for our environmental sustainability management and performance last year, putting us in the top two per cent of more than 18,700 companies assessed. This involved showing environmental leadership and disclosure in the areas of climate change, forests, and water security.

CDP has now named us among the top 8% of companies for how we engage suppliers on tackling climate change, after analysing the information companies supplied to them.


How we engage with suppliers

 

  •  Putting ESG front and centre in our Procurement standards: our tender process, contracts, and how we manage supplier relationships
  •  Assessing suppliers’ capability to manage the environmental impact of their business
  •  Defining a framework for achieving decarbonisation and setting metrics to monitor impact in key areas
  •  Testing how effective the framework will be by working with our priority suppliers
  •  Embedding the decarbonisation framework into our daily operations using digital supplier management solutions, and to produce accurate emissions data.

CDP said its Supplier Engagement Rating Leaderboard celebrates the companies playing a crucial role in the transition to a Net Zero sustainable economy by engaging their suppliers.

We are making good progress in advancing our sustainability strategy as we build A Better Tomorrow™. We are reducing the health impact of our business and in 2022 increased the number of consumers using our non-combustible products to 22.5m. We also reduced Scope 1 & 2 GHG emissions by 15% vs 2021 and have set new targets including:

  •  Achieving our 30% renewable energy target by 2025 three years early, in 2022, resulting in a revised target of 50% renewable energy by 2030;
  •  Increasing the initial target of a 15% reduction in waste from BAT’s operations by 2025, to 25%; having achieved a 21% reduction in 2022;
  •  Expanding the scope of BAT’s 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable packaging commitment, beyond just plastic, by 2025; and
  •  Setting a new target of zero conversion of natural ecosystems in its Tobacco Supply Chain by 20251

“Collaboration is critical to lowering carbon emissions, which are the key cause of climate change,” said John O’Reilly, BAT’s Group Head of Procurement Strategy & Sustainability.

“It’s so important we engage with our supply chain. We can’t lower emissions on our own.

“It’s great to be celebrated and recognised for all our hard work in this area. But, of course, there is much more to be done. All of us have a role to play, not just those of us collaborating with suppliers, to continuously improve our ESG performance.”

To find out more about our ESG progress and targets, download our BAT Combined Annual and ESG Report 2022 (8.7 mb).

1 To further reduce the risk of forests, wetlands, peatlands, grasslands, woodlands and wet/dry savannah being cleared to create farmland for tobacco within its supply chain. ‘Tobacco Supply Chain’ refers to the tobacco supplied by our directly contracted farmers and those of our strategic third-party suppliers who participate in our annual Thrive assessment, representing over 80% of the tobacco purchased by volume in 2022.