More than 90% of food companies don’t do enough to farm sustainably, according to new data from the World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA).
The alliance ranked 350 of the world’s major food and agriculture companies, including Tesco, PepsiCo and Domino’s, based on how they’re managing their impact on the environment, the healthiness of their products and working conditions.
While agricultural expansion drives almost 90% of global deforestation, only 6% have a time-bound commitment to eliminate deforestation entirely.
WBA nature transformation lead Jenni Black stated to reach net zero by 2050, deforestation needs to end by 2025.
“Food and agriculture companies have a huge opportunity to simultaneously tackle climate change and biodiversity loss by eliminating deforestation,” she said.
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Some 2% of the 350 companies understand their wider impact on nature, despite their reliance on the long-term health of the planet to grow crops.
“But despite some leading companies committing to end deforestation, our benchmark results show there is still a long way to go,” added Black.
There has been some small progress across the sector since 2021: almost 50% of companies have some form of climate commitments.
Of them, 46 companies have scope 1 and 2 GHG reduction targets in line with limiting global warming to 1.5C and report progress, up from 27 in 2021, while 13 report progress against science-based targets for scope three emissions, up from 7 in 2021.
