Headline Partner – Tesco

We believe that climate change is the most urgent environmental threat facing mankind. It matters in every country where Tesco operates, to every company that supplies our business, and to all our customers.

We believe that retail businesses can play a powerful role in tackling climate change, and we are determined to play our part.

We have set ourselves the bold ambition to be a zero-carbon business by 2050 without purchasing offsets, and we are already making real progress in reducing our direct footprint.

But we know that this represents only a small fraction of the emissions generated by the products we sell. We also know that we have a very wide reach. We employ nearly half a million people globally, many more people work in the firms and businesses supplying our stores, and every week we reach millions of customers around the world. We aim to use that influence to mobilise the people whose lives we touch and generate a mass movement to protect the environment.

Over the past few years we have played a leadership role in bringing the problem of climate change to the attention of our suppliers, customers and competitors, and we are proud of the way we have set the agenda.

Our targets address the three ways in which we have an impact on carbon emissions. First, we produce emissions directly by heating, cooling and lighting our stores and moving goods to them. Our targets are:

• By 2020 we will halve emissions from our 2006/7 baseline portfolio of buildings
• New stores built between 2007 and 2020 to emit half the CO2 of a 2006 new store
• By 2050 we will become a zero-carbon business

We also have a target to halve the distribution emissions from each case we deliver by 2012.

Second, our suppliers produce emissions as they grow and manufacture the goods our customers want. So we set ourselves the target of:

We are working with our suppliers to deliver the target, collaborating with them through our Knowledge Hub to share experience, best practice and new ideas in an open way.

Third, our customers produce emissions as they consume the products they buy from us. As with every other part of Tesco’s strategy, our customers are at the heart of our battle against climate change. Households, particularly in developed countries, account for the largest share of total emissions, and in turn have potentially the greatest role to play in the transformation from a high-carbon to a low-carbon society. So we set ourselves the target of:

We are proud that our work and our commitments have been recognised externally. This year the Carbon Disclosure Project rated our carbon reduction strategy and performance as the best in the FTSE 350 and we were also the top retailer globally. We were also awarded the Guardian Sustainable Business Award for our work on carbon reduction.