Bayer Announces Pledge To Be 100 Percent Carbon Neutral By 2030

Today, Bayer AG announced three commitments that place sustainability at the heart of the company’s business strategy, including a pledge to be 100 percent carbon neutral in our own operations by 2030. These commitments are ambitious, but we have a responsibility and an opportunity to be an impact generator for some of the key challenges of our time. I’m excited to be a part of the effort to improve the world that my kids will inherit.  

 Our corporate commitments are centered around two goals: 1) helping improve health and nutrition for the people that need it most; and, 2) reducing our environmental footprint. 

As the largest operating division in Bayer AG and one of the largest agricultural businesses in the world, Crop Science has established its own sustainability objectives for 2030. Our division’s goals are:

• In partnership with farmers and our customers to reduce field greenhouse gas emissions of key crops by 30 percent in the major regions we serve.
• Reduce the environmental impact of crop protection by 30 percent; and,
• Empower 100 million smallholder farmers around the world to have more access to sustainable agriculture solutions to help increase local food supply and reduce poverty in rural communities.

All of us in Crop Science understand not only that life on earth requires us to do our part to help create a sustainable future, but, to be transparent, our long-term success is not selling more products, but giving farmers the best solutions to grow more food using less water, energy and land for production purposes. We are committed to improving lives through a food system that is better for farmers, consumers and the planet. Fulfilling this vision will require us to fundamentally re-imagine what it means to be an agriculture company.

We are setting some challenging targets. Some of the technologies that will be required to achieve our goals have not yet been invented. But unless we aim high, we will not push ourselves and the industry to learn, invent and shape what’s truly possible. And we are going to continue to be transparent throughout this journey outlining measurable targets that can be tracked by independent, established and credible experts and will be based on input from a variety of societal stakeholders.

As Product Supply function, we have a clear role in helping to achieve our company’s sustainability objectives. Product Supply is the largest single operating function in Crop Science with 17,000 employees responsible for the planning, manufacturing and distribution of our products and solutions. We oversee 140 facilities around the world where we produce a wide range of agricultural products. Like most manufacturing supply chain organizations, we have typically measured our effectiveness, broadly speaking, around production quality, operational safety, efficiency of distribution and cost management. But today, that is not enough.

We have a responsibility to ensure that sustainability is at the core of everything we do.

So how will Product Supply help Crop Science and Bayer achieve our sustainability goals? Well, in some ways, we’ve already started. Bayer had ambitious 2020 goals to reduce our specific CO2 emissions. We already achieved this 23% reduction in 2018 – but we did not stop there. We continued to lower our absolute emissions and impact. We reduced direct CO2 gas emissions at one of our plants in Muttenz, Switzerland by 10% in a two-year period.

Another initiative in South America saved more than a billion gallons of water versus traditional irrigation methods – enough to serve a population of 30,000 people for a year. We have employed new digital tools that have enabled corn growers to increase their yields by three to four percent, utilizing more than 5600 fewer hectares (14,000 fewer acres) of land.

In 2020, Product Supply will undertake a comprehensive analysis to develop a function-wide baseline for our sustainability goals and progress towards absolute reduction of our impact. In order to achieve these reductions, we will:

• Increase our operational efficiency and consequently apply energy management to reduce energy consumption
• Accelerate the switch to renewable resources on all sites
• Use digital tools to improve sustainability in our Supply Chain, e.g. through Smart Transportation
• Strengthen further the sustainability mindset of the entire organization

We understand getting to our goals will not be easy. We don’t have all the answers and we know we can’t do this alone. We will take every opportunity to partner and collaborate with others who share our concerns. We are committed and we are passionate because the future of the planet deserves nothing less from each and every person on the globe.