Kering group commits to full carbon neutrality

Kering has announced an ambitious plan to make its entire group carbon neutral within its own operations and across the entire supply chain, just weeks after it announced that Gucci had become carbon neutral.

To achieve this goal, the French luxury conglomerate will offset the group’s annual Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions from 2018, after first trying to avoid and reduce them, “as a next step in its long-term commitment to sustainability.”

“When it comes to climate change, we can no longer wait to take real action. We all need to step up as businesses and account for the GHG emissions that we generate in total,” François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of Kering, said in a statement. “Kering is committing to become completely carbon neutral as a Group across all our operations and supply chains. While we focus on avoiding and reducing our GHG emissions to meet our Science-Based Target, we will offset all our remaining emissions and support the conservation of vital forests and biodiversity around the world.”

Kering commits to carbon neutrality

The new commitment is an extension of Kering’s annual offsetting approach which was established in 2011 and initially incorporated Scopes 1 and 2 of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Since then, Kering has been leveraging its pioneering Environmental Profit and Loss (EP&L) accounting to analyze the Group’s GHG emissions, allowing it to “put in place customized supply chain initiatives and efficiency programs to effectively avoid and reduce its emissions.”

Kering has also set a Science-Based Target (approved by the SBT initiative) to reduce all its GHG emissions related to its own operations and supply chain by 50 percent by 2025 (from a 2015 baseline). These targets have seen the reduction of 30 percent carbon intensity in the group’s stores since 2015.

It is also aiming to increase its conversion to renewable energy to meet its 100 percent commitment for the group, whereby 100 percent of the energy consumption is renewable in over seven countries, 77 percent in Europe and 67 percent covered overall for the Group currently in Scopes 1 and 2 of the GHG Protocol.

Photo credit: Gucci, Facebook