Friday in Five from Unibloom

We are into peak golden quarter for food and retail and the time of year when targets are being finalised for 2025.? Now is the time to ensure that your carbon metrics for the year ahead are being signed off alongside your financial metrics and to have those hard conversations where we up the ambition.? But you can only do that with the data and that’s what Unibloom is here to support you with! ? This week we’re bringing you news from Denmark on their new ag tax, low expectations from sustainability leaders on net zero ambition and a new circular economy playbook from EMF.?

Welcome to our bi-weekly newsletter where we intend to inspire you with real life business action on climate, biodiversity, nature, circularity and social justice through the lens of driving business value.? Coming to you every other Friday, we want to celebrate the wins, draw attention to the challenges and occasionally even mythbust and we guarantee to do it in under five minutes.??

Summary

• Denmark announces ag tax
• 75% of sustainability leaders believe they won’t hit net zero
• EMF launches new circular economy playbook

Denmark announces ag tax

The Danish government has approved the first carbon tax on agriculture.? The tax will kick in from 2030 at which point farmers will have to pay 120 Danish krone (€16) per ton of emitted CO2e, and then subsequently rising to 300 krone (€40) from 2035 onwards.? Denmark is a significant exporter of pork and dairy and agriculture is expected to account for around 46 percent of emissions by 2030 and so this move is an attempt to dramatically reduce emissions.

Farmers will be rewarded with a tax break of around 60% for lower carbon production systems.? In addition to the carbon tax, Denmark will implement a large peatland restoration initiative, alongside a 250,000 hectare reforestation scheme to drive improvements in biodiversity and natural carbon storage.

75% of sustainability leaders believe they won’t hit net zero

A new study from Leafr has found that 3 in 4 sustainability teams are under-resourced and 75% of leaders don’t believe they will achieve net zero.? The study with a large number of multi-sector sustainability leads also found that;?

‘Only 29 % of businesses feel their efforts are integrated with their broader business objectives.? Meanwhile, 35 % felt their initiatives were not aligned at all’.

This disconnect between sustainability strategies and business strategies is something we hear about consistently at Unibloom and the reality is that this is fuelling the lack of belief in achieving targets.? We have to integrate sustainability targets and business targets together and treat carbon as a business metric that we need to hit, in the same way as we do financial metrics.? Our experience, however, is that we are still seeing carbon reduction being treated as a discrete initiative in the majority of businesses, but we know a better way to do it with digitisation and data-driven scenario & solution modelling.?

EMF launches new circular economy playbook

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has just launched a playbook targeted at marketeers to support them to navigate the challenges and opportunities of marketing circular initiatives. ? Making circularity aspirational for consumers is a key challenge in making the circular economy mainstream.? We? desperately need the creativity and consumer insights that come from marketeers to harness the potential the sector offers to both resource and emission reduction.? Historically we have seen a lot of circular pilots fall by the wayside because of a lack of marketing investment and engagement to bring them to life for consumers and the playbook seems a great starting point to kickstart engagement with marketing teams.??

What we heard from three leading food & feed producers this week, when we demo Unibloom’s Climate Transition & Scenario Modelling Tool:

1. ?"This (Unibloom) is exactly what we need. We already have tools for carbon footprinting and Life Cycle Assessment baselines, but we’re currently handling modelling, climate investment planning, and transitions manually or with consultants—and it’s very ad hoc. I want to enable all teams to collaborate on finding better, more effective solutions." – Procurement Lead
2. "We need to balance cost increases with the pressure to reduce emissions, which is challenging as we have to relocate several ingredients. However, I lack an effective way to model or pinpoint these changes. I need both procurement and innovation teams to engage with the solutions so we can strategically plan our next steps."
3. “We have recently adopted and been approved for SBTi, and the implementation is currently underway within the organization. “Can you also help optimise recipes? We face challenges in optimising grain blends to achieve the right quality at low cost, based on available grain and its location.” - Sustainability Lead & CIO/IT

Curious to learn more about how you can cost-effectively plan, model and engage on your climate transition journey? Ping us for a demo!??

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