British American Tobacco recognised as global leader for engaging its supply chain on climate change

British American Tobacco (BAT) has been identified as a global leader for engaging with its suppliers on climate change, being awarded a position on the Supplier Engagement Leaderboard compiled by global environmental impact non-profit organisation CDP.

BAT has been recognised for its actions and strategies to reduce emissions and manage climate risks in its supply chain in the past reporting year. Over 4,800 companies were assessed by CDP. They were given a Supplier Engagement Rating based on answers to questions about governance, targets, scope 3 emissions, value chain engagement of their response to the CDP 2019 climate change questionnaire and their overall CDP climate change score. BAT is among the top 3% of organisations assessed by CDP and one of almost 160 companies on this year’s Leaderboard. 

Inclusion on the Leaderboard follows BAT achieving a place on CDP's prestigious ‘A List’ for climate change, last month.

Simon Cleverly, Group Head of Corporate Affairs at BAT, said: “Climate change is a global issue and multi-stakeholder collaboration to address its impacts and find innovative new solutions for a low carbon economy is essential. Partnering with suppliers and other stakeholders across our value chain is a key element of our mission to reach our science-based targets and I’m delighted that our work in this area has been recognised by inclusion on the CDP Supplier Engagement Leaderboard.”

In March 2019, BAT published its Scope 3 emissions, shortly followed by its first Science-Based Targets. The targets include reducing emissions of purchased goods and services by 16% by 2030 (vs 2017) and engaging with its ‘top 70% suppliers by spend’ on their commitment to carbon footprint reduction. Since then, BAT has presented its Climate Change Strategy to all tobacco suppliers and held internal workshops with Category Managers. The top 70% suppliers by spend have received BAT’s 2030 targets and taken part in supplier-BAT engagement sessions.  BAT’s customised approach will speed up data sharing by suppliers and give BAT greater accuracy and fairness when reporting Scope 3 emissions and materials’ footprint evolution.

Dexter Galvin, Director of Corporates and Supply Chains at CDP said: “Congratulations to all the companies on the CDP Supplier Engagement Leaderboard for this year. They are showing leadership on engaging their suppliers to manage climate risk and cut emissions. Given that supply chain emissions are on average 5.5 times as high as a company’s operational emissions, this couldn’t be more crucial. If we are to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and decarbonise the economy, then other companies learning from these leaders and engaging their suppliers is going to be vital.” 

The Supplier Engagement Leaderboard is released today and available on CDP’s website . It follows CDP’s most recent supply chain report, Changing the Chain , which showed the vast potential for driving climate action at scale in the supply chain. The report found that major companies working with CDP could potentially cut a gigaton of emissions by driving their suppliers to increase their average proportion of renewable power by 20%.

CDP is a global non-profit that runs the world’s leading environmental disclosure platform. In 2019, over 8,400 companies disclosed environmental data through CDP. The data was requested by 125 major purchasing organisations with US$3.6 trillion in purchasing spend, and 525 investors with US$96 trillion in assets, making CDP the gold standard in corporate environmental reporting.