Unilever’s impact
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity aims to preserve biodiversity and has been signed by more than 160 countries.
Human activity can reduce biodiversity through, for example, converting biodiversity-rich habitats such as forests or wetlands to agriculture, destructive fishing practices, pollution or over–exploitation of natural resources such as forests and water.
This is an issue for Unilever. Around half the raw materials we buy come from agriculture and forestry, measured by volume. We are among the world’s largest users of agricultural raw materials such as tea, vegetables and vegetable oils. Growing our business – while conserving biodiversity – is a substantial challenge. Our Sustainable Agriculture Code is designed to ensure that our agricultural sourcing activities do not encourage practices that have adverse effects on the number and variety of species found in a particular area or region, and that our suppliers and their farmers put practices into place that have positive impacts on biodiversity.
Sustainable agriculture
Protecting biodiversity is central to our Sustainable Agriculture Programme. Sustainable agriculture is about the sustainable use of biological resources. One of four principles in Unilever’s Sustainable Agriculture Programme is: “Ensuring any adverse effects on… biodiversity from agricultural activities are minimised and positive contributions are made where possible”. Biodiversity is one of our 11 core indicators that we use to measure sustainable farming practices.
Where we have owned or managed agricultural operations ourselves in the last ten years, we have developed Biodiversity Action Plans for the sites, including Unilever tea estates in Tanzania and Kenya, our farm research site at Colworth in the UK, palm oil plantations in Ghana (formerly managed by Unilever) and our suppliers’ tomato farms.
Biodiversity impact studies have also been carried out in Ghana and Tanzania, where we are working with local smallholder farmers on the cultivation of allanblackia, a crop which provides a new type of oil that can be used to make margarines and spreads. In collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), we are developing and sharing appropriate business models for different crop systems, ensuring environmental sustainability through integration of key principles for forest landscape restoration into different planting schemes. In 2010, we received a Biodiversity Innovation award for our allanblackia project from the Union for Ethical BioTrade.
The award recognised our work on developing a business model to promote conservation while generating income for smallholder farmers in Africa. We have also committed to certification schemes for tea with Rainforest Alliance and for oil palm with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil that demand a high degree of commitment to biodiversity and conservation of high biodiversity value habitats within farms.
Experience on our own farms and that of our suppliers has shown us that it is possible to adopt more biodiversity – sensitive agricultural practices on many farms, without harming agricultural yield or profitability. We are now working with our suppliers to encourage the use of such practices within their own operations.
Protecting biodiversity in Kenya
We have been working to protect the indigenous and exotic trees that cover over 10% of the Kericho tea estate. We also launched the Trees 2000 project to mark the millennium. By the end of 2010 the project had contributed more than 990 600 trees to Kenya’s landscape.
Seven tree nurseries were established to grow indigenous seedlings for planting around the estate and surrounding community. The aim is to increase biodiversity and complement existing conservation and environmental protection programmes designed in partnership with colleagues from Unilever’s Sustainable Agriculture Programme. To remind people of the need to preserve our environment, all visitors to our Kericho estate are invited to plant a tree.
The Kericho estate has also contributed to the conservation of the nearby Mau Forest, which is under threat from human activity and deforestation. We have supplied tree saplings for refforestation projects and helped to finance staff to work on forest conservation.
To find out more about this and our other biodiversity initiatives please see the case studies in related links.
External recognition
In 2009 a new analysis was published, evaluating how well a company manages its dependence and impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and covering companies in the food, beverage and tobacco sectors. The analysis was based on the Natural Value Initiative’s (NVI) Ecosystem Services Benchmark. The analysis aims to enable investors to assess the level of risk of investing in companies that rely heavily on certain ecosystem services to carry out their business.
Ecosystem services are the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems, such as freshwater and timber. The NVI states that over 60% of these services worldwide are being degraded or used up faster than they can be replenished.
The benchmark results were published in October 2009 and presented to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Finance Initiative Roundtable in South Africa. Unilever was placed at the top of the benchmark ahead of more than 30 companies. We scored 78% overall, while the sector average was 48%. Unilever’s agricultural sourcing was recognised as best practice within the foods, beverage and tobacco industries in the UK, Brazil, the US, Australia, Switzerland, Malaysia, the Netherlands and France.
The benchmark methodology considers five performance categories: competitive advantage; governance; policy and strategy; management and implementation; and reporting. Unilever was deemed to be strongest in the categories of competitive advantage and policy and strategy.
The NVI is funded by the Dutch government and made up of three organisations: the world’s first international conservation body Fauna & Flora; the UNEP Finance Initiative (a strategic public–private partnership between UNEP and the global financial sector); and the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a business school in Brazil.