Diageo India (United Spirits Ltd.), among the country’s leading alco-bev companies, launched its third annual ESG Reporting Index 2024 today, highlighting continued progress in the company’s ‘Spirit of Progress’ ESG action plan. The Reporting Index shares impacts across three key objectives outlined in Diageo’s Spirit of Progress plan, this includes pioneering grain-to-glass sustainability, promoting positive drinking, and championing inclusion and diversity, all underpinned by doing business the right way.
The Reporting Index is developed in accordance with the globally acclaimed GRI Standards Index and maps Diageo India’s performance against the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs). The index provides additional sector–specific disclosures as part of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board’s (SASB) framework.
Hina Nagarajan, Managing Director & CEO, of Diageo India said, “As we release our 2024 ESG Reporting Index, I’m proud of the remarkable progress we’ve made under our ‘Spirit of Progress’ action plan. We are committed to leading the way in grain-to-glass sustainability, fostering positive drinking, and championing inclusion and diversity throughout our operations and communities, with an unwavering allegiance to doing business with integrity. We will continue to lead with purpose, leveraging our scale and working collaboratively with partnersto drive meaningful impact and sustainable growth.”
Highlights from Diageo India’s ESG Reporting Index 2024:
1. Pioneering Grain-to-Glass Sustainability: The company’s ambition is to build a resilient supply chain to help its communities adapt to climate change and support its business in the long term by focussing on driving water stewardship and lowering carbon emissions.
a. Preserving water for life: Water Stewardship has been a long–standing priority for the company through preservation– especially in water-stressed areas. This is achieved by improving operational efficiency, replenishment programmes, community initiatives and collective action.
▪ Water in operations: Since the 2020 base year, the company has achieved a 48% improvement in water use efficiency for distillation and a 31% improvement in packaging.
▪ Water in communities: Diageo India has created water replenishment capacity of over 9,000 Cu.M in the reporting year and has replenished more than 1 million cubic meters of water over the past three years across its water-stressed sites. As a result of sustained efforts, the company has exceeded its total water replenishment target by 25% and three years ahead of its 2026 goal. The company has worked with government, NGOs, and local stakeholders on projects to improve water quality and availability in priority catchments, de-silted dams to increase water infiltration and provided access to water for many smallholder farming communities. Through its water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programme, the company has improved lives by constructing 264 sanitation facilities and providing more than 13,000 litres/hour of clean drinking water capacity in villages across Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Rajasthan. In addition, the company’s Alwar distillery, home to the Godawan artisanal single malt,achieved the prestigious Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) certification (Core), making it the first distillery in Asia to be certified against this leading standard. The company continues to implement catchment–based water stewardship initiatives through collective action on water.
b. Accelerating to a low-carbon world: The company is accelerating action towards a low-carbon future, and itsclimate action plan is in line with the UN SDG goals.
▪ Carbon from operations: The company has eliminated the use of coal fossil fuel by using biomassrenewable-fueled boilers at own distilleries since 2022. It has also reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 87% since 2020 through concerted efforts to reduce energy demand, and enhancing theuse of low-carbon fuel alternatives and renewable electricity to achieve its target of net-zero carbon emissions (Scope 1 & 2) across direct operations by 2030. Diageo India has also increased its in-house solar energy capacity to 2.6 MW and achieved 98.6% renewable energy use status in direct operations since 2020, enabling the company to accomplish 100% renewable energy status ahead of its 2030 target.
▪ Carbon from community: As part of efforts to drive climate resilience the company’s brand ‘SignaturePackaged Drinking Water’ is associated with a mangrove regeneration project in Puri, Odisha, where 31,500 mangrove seedlings are being planted. Additionally, over 1 lakh trees were planted to offset residual greenhouse gas emissions. The company has also planted more than 2 lakh trees as part of its afforestation drive in Alwar, under the ‛Trees Outside Forest in Rajasthan’ (TOFR) programme.
▪ Carbon from supply chain: Beyond direct operations, Diageo India works closely with suppliers (Scope 3 emissions) encouraging switching to low–carbon alternatives, while adopting newer technologies andbest practices in the supply chain.
c. Being Sustainable by Design: The company is focused on eliminating waste from its value chain, collaborating with farmers to regenerate landscapes, and creating innovative solutions to grow sustainably.
▪ Regenerative agriculture: The company is collaborating with its suppliers and agronomic partners to improve farm management practices across its raw material supply chains and to promote the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices.This includes the company’s partnership with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), to implement a regenerative agriculture programme across 60 villages in Ambala (Haryana) and Ludhiana (Punjab) and a micro-enterprise initiative to empower 100 smallholder women farmers in Nashik. In addition, the company has launched a three-year pilot projectwith rice farmers in Nizamabad, Telangana. The project will cover 500 hectares and support 63 farmers across 15 villages in the first year while leveraging regenerative agriculture practices. The company is a member of the Sustainable Rice Platform (SRP) to help engage with existing farmers’ institutions such as Village Committees and Farmer Producer Companies while bringing convergence with government schemes.
▪ Packaging: The company continued to make progress with light-weighting packaging to reduce carbonfootprint, increase the use of recycled content and recyclability across formats. During the year, over 99% of materials used were widely recyclable, and the company is well poised to achieve its target of 100% by 2030. Notably, 55% of the packaging material purchased was made of recycled content, in line with the company’s focus on minimisingdownstream waste through circular economy initiatives. The company has removed mono-carton from 95% of its portfolio, introduced recyclable PET containers and collected 100% of the plastic waste generated as part of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) initiative.
2. Promoting Positive Drinking: Diageo India champions responsible drinking by encouraging moderation and addressing the harmful use of alcohol through focussed interventions to curb underage drinking, drink driving and binge drinking.
a. Curbing underage consumption: In FY24, over 1,91,861youth participated in the Act Smart India programme that uses powerful storytelling as a tool to create awareness about the dangers of underage drinking.
b. Anti–Drink Drive: 4,35,164 consumers participated in ‘Wrong Side of the Road’, the company’s anti-drink driving learning experience which is being implemented across 31 Regional Transport Offices in various states.The company aims to create awareness and educate 1 million consumers about the risks of drink driving by 2030.
c. Moderation: DRINKiQ is an online platform dedicated to responsible drinking. The objective of this initiative is topromote moderation and reduce alcohol-related harm.
3. Championing Inclusion and Diversity: The company actively promotes inclusion and diversity across their businesssupported by market leading policies and practices, and with the partners, suppliers and within the local communities.
a. Diageo India has made significant improvements in gender representation with 50% of the Executive Committee comprising of women. As part of its Spirit of Progress targets, Diageo India is working to increase the representation of women to 33% within the organisation.
b. Employee Resource Groups for women and the LGBTQIA+ community are also established to focus on building awareness, advocacy, development, advisory, and create a strong support network for its members.
c. The company is expanding its inclusive culture and has over 52 persons with disabilities (PwD) as part of Project Saksham which provides long-term support for their employment and development.
d. The “Learning for Life” programme is designed to improve employment and livelihood opportunities for persons from under-represented communities. 2,060students were trained for the hospitality sector through a National Skill Development Council (NSDC) certified programme. Over 50% beneficiaries of this project are women. The programme has been expanded in collaboration with the Skill Council for Persons with Disability (SCPwD) and 110 PwD have been trained for roles in the Business and Hospitality sector.
e. Diageo India has trained over 9,400 people through Diageo Bar Academy, a comprehensive learning platform for bar owners and bartenders.
f. Diageo’s subsidiary, Royal Challengers Sports Private Limited has won the bid to own and run the Women’s Premier League team for Bengaluru. The team won the 2024 WPL, and this win promotes the company’snarrative of inclusion and diversity, aligned with itspurpose of celebration.
g. Diageo India was recognised as the Gold Employer for LGBT+ Inclusion by the India Workplace Equality Index (IWEI), India’s only benchmarking index for LGBT+ inclusion. The Company was ranked 16 out of the Top 20 in Equileap’s Gender Equality Report & Ranking for Emerging Markets.
h. The company was featured on the list of LinkedIn Top Companies 2024: The 10 Leading Workplaces in Retailand Consumer Goods in India.
4. Doing Business the Right Way: Governance plays a vital role in the company’s ambition to lead the Indian Consumer Product Goods (CPG) industry on ESG and create enterprise value. It is the foundation of Spirit of Progress and, includes strategic thinking about long-term value and impact created, and the risks and opportunities of the operating environment and business model.
o The Board is comprised of diverse, experienced, and seasoned professionals with adequate representation of independent directors including the Chairperson of the Board. The Nomination and Remuneration, Risk Management Committee, Audit Committee, and the CSR and ESG Committee are chaired by Independent Directors.
o The Board includes the Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental, Social and Governance Committee which is responsible for managing the organisation’s ESGperformance through periodic reviews of its strategy, goals, and targets.
o ESG Governance is being driven through cross-functional teams which are responsible for embedding ESG aspects in the business processes and reports to the Executive Committee every quarter.
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