Environment

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As we continue to fulfill our key role to feed and clothe the world’s growing population, minimizing our environmental impact is vital to our long-term success, by helping to ensure sustainable agricultural production, conserve natural resources and contain the effects of global warming and climate change.

To do so, we continually monitor our operations to identify and act on improvement areas, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water usage, electricity and energy consumption, and solid waste sent to landfill.

In particular, we took an important step in 2021 to accelerate LDC’s decarbonization journey and contribute to global emissions reduction goals in line with the Paris Agreement, with the setup of our new Carbon Solutions Platform.

Preserving land of high ecological value also remains a priority, and we continue to work to protect natural habitats connected with our operations, through:

Observance of our No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE) policy.
Development and implementation of Biodiversity Protection & Conservation Plans at LDC-managed citrus farms in Brazil.
Training farmers in our supply chains to adopt responsible agricultural practices that preserve habitats and biodiversity.

Spotlight on Carbon Solutions

Since September 2021, this new team is working with external climate experts and LDC teams worldwide to measure our emissions profile, set science-based emissions reduction targets and drive decarbonization efforts in our operations and value chains, supported by participation in carbon credits markets.

Environmental Metrics

We remain on target to reach LDC’s overall target to reduce its four environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) by 5% between 2018 and 2022.

In 2021, we continued to reduce emissions and waste generation – the latter by 21%, far exceeding our 1% reduction target year on year. Nevertheless, we missed our target to reduce all KPIs year on year. Energy consumption rose marginally and water consumption increased due to the exceptionally severe drought that affected our juice farms in Brazil, where increased irrigation of citrus groves was required.

GLOBAL	2018	2019	2020	2021	21 vs. 18	21 vs.19	21 vs. 20
Energy (kWh)	17.54	16.21	15.66	15.72	-10.4%	-3.0%	0.4%
GHG (tCO₂/MT) (with biog.)	0.043	0.042	0.034	0.034	-21.9%	-19.4%	-1.2%
Water (m³/MT)	0.55	0.49	0.49	0.52	-4.3%	7.2%	7.5%
Solid Waste (kg/MT)	1.14	0.48	0.29	0.23	-79.7%	-51.7%	-21.4%