Cargill and World Resources Institute (WRI) will partner for two years to work across value chains to better manage deforestation and water risk.
With the partnership, Cargill leverages WRI’s maps, analytical tools and expertise, while WRI will benefit from Cargill’s global insights from working in food and agriculture in 70 countries around the world.
Cargill is also joining WRI’s Corporate Consultative Group, the Global Forest Watch Partnership to address deforestation and the Aqueduct Alliance to address water risk.
Supply chain watch
Initially, efforts to protect forests will focus on two commodity supply chains: soy in Paraguay and palm oil in Indonesia.
Global Forest Watch will be a critical resource for prioritizing action areas and improving transparency.
Global Forest Watch combines satellite technology, supply chain information, and new analytical methods to measure forest change.
In Paraguay, Cargill works with more than 3,000 farmers in the Atlantic Forest to source soy, and has been building a sustainable soy program there since 2009.
WRI’s analysis will assess deforestation risks in Paraguay and across Latin America to help ensure soy is sourced more responsibly.
Cargill has also committed to creating 100% transparent, traceable and sustainable palm supply chain by 2020.
Global Forest Watch will implement supply chain policies through its tools and methods to assess deforestation risk by looking at individual palm oil mills and concessions.
Global Forest Watch’s recently released weekly GLAD forest clearing alerts will be useful for informing sourcing decisions and evaluating deforestation risk faster than ever before.
Calculating water risk
In addition to forest protection, WRI and Cargill will work together to identify and reduce water risk.
This work will support updates to the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, which uses a robust, peer reviewed methodology offering the best-available data to create high-resolution, customizable global maps of water risk.
Companies around the world face operational and supply chain risks such as droughts, floods and water supply variability, which can affect their bottom lines.
Working with Cargill will allow WRI to enhance the data and indicators provided in Aqueduct, and improve current measures of water-related business risk.
Using open source datasets that describe the origin and fate of freshwater nitrogen and phosphorous fluxes, WRI will also work with Cargill to develop a methodology for evaluating water quality impacts on freshwater systems.
This methodology will be pilot tested in the US, and will identify opportunities to improve water quality in the communities where Cargill operates and sources.
Finally, Cargill will join the Skoll Global Threats Fund to support WRI’s Water Program in the development of the world’s first Global Water-Food Security Analyzer.
The project aims to leverage existing information and science to manage environmental and economic risk associated with agriculture globally.
The Global Water-Food Security Analyzer will be freely available to the private and public sectors, providing global data on water and climate risks to agricultural production and commodities, as well as the associated economic, environmental, health, and geopolitical impacts.
