Voluntary ESG Standards as a Regulatory Foothold November 18, 2022 by Leah Wolfe
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Themes explored in this section:

  • How have the standards PepsiCo voluntarily put in place helped prepare for incoming regulatory changes?
  • How has CDP helped shape sustainability reporting and regulatory changes?
  • What challenges can organizations expect in working to demonstrate a reduction of their climate impact?
  • How can the private sector, non-profits, and regulatory bodies work together going forward to most effectively accelerate decarbonization in the food supply system?
Anna Hawkins CDP

When it comes to collaboration between non-profits and the industry, CDP’s role is to bring best practices to companies at scale, and then help the industries align on their asks from suppliers and publicly traded companies through our standardized questionnaires, and then deliver that data back to the marketplace.

This is also the value of having targets validated by the Science-Based Targets Initiative. They create frameworks based on climate science to show how companies are setting targets in line with what’s required to keep global temperatures down to that 1.5-degree Celsius threshold.

Rob Meyers PepsiCo

There’s a healthy tension between having the ability to communicate credible outcomes and impact. You want to invest in the impact much more than you want to invest in the measurement and verification, and sometimes those can get upside down. In agriculture, we’ve done some it can become quite costly when you need to take soil samples in a grid, and all of a sudden half of the investment is going to all of the sampling.

This is where innovation and technology can come in to help us. We need better models, we need better science, and we need to be able to leverage and trust remote sensing. Those tools and systems need to be developed so that we can spend most of our money on actually driving the impact we need to drive.

Nadia Bishai PepsiCo

What reporting requirements do is elevate sustainability reporting to the same level of importance as financial reporting, which over the long run, will be critical to ensuring that ESG is at the core of company strategies. One thing that I like to point out is that the regulations build on current existing standards. Frameworks and standards like TCFD, ISSB, GRI, and lately, net-zero standards and science-based targets. All of these voluntary disclosure frameworks that CDP among others has been championing for years are essentially the basis of what the regulations are inspired by and based on.

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Regulatory trends in sustainability: How food brands should prepare in the next 6-12 months

SEPTEMBER 12, 2023 | 12 – 1 PM EST
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