Recognizing the urgent need to address climate change, in September 2021 P&G announced an ambition to achieve net zero emissions across our supply chain and operations. To help pace our progress on reducing Scope 1 & 2 GHG emissions, we have established the following 2030 goal:
Reducing emissions across our global operations by 50% vs. 2010 baseline. From 2010 to 2022, we have reduced absolute Scope 1 & Scope 2 emissions across our global operations 57% through energy efficiency and renewal energy sourcing. As we continue to reduce emissions, we are also advancing natural climate solutions which will balance any residual emissions from our operations that cannot be eliminated by 2030.
Expanded use of renewable electricity helped enable our 57% reduction in our Scope 1 & 2 emissions. Even though we've exceeded our Ambition 2030 goal to reduce absolute emissions across our operations by 50% versus 2010, our work is by no means complete. While we are well on our way to utilizing 100% purchased renewable electricity, the next big challenge is reducing, and eventually eliminating, emissions from natural gas. There are significant hurdles that need to be overcome. With that in mind, we've partnered with 18 other manufacturers and local governments to create the Renewable Thermal Collaborative. This coalition is committed to scaling up renewable heating and cooling at their facilities in order to dramatically cut carbon emissions.
FY 21/22 update We update key categories of Scope 3 emissions on an annual basis, relying on estimates from LCA data as well as other available data sources. Prior updates have shown that ~ 98% of our Scope 3 emissions come from just 4 categories: Purchased goods & services, Upstream transportation & distribution, Use of sold products, and End of life treatment of sold products. As such, we plan to focus our annual updates on these key categories. We will also include an estimate for the category of Business Travel, which will represent emissions from business travel flights and be based on employee airline travel miles. We are including Business Travel as that is a category of interest to our own employees and our business travel partners can track employee airline travel miles and provide that data to us. We will periodically assess all Scope 3 categories to determine the relative contributions of the key categories that we report against and will report emissions on the 5 categories referenced above on an annual basis.
We are not reporting emissions from the category of Downstream Transportation and Distribution due to insufficient data to accurately estimate this category. This category includes GHG emissions from transportation and distribution after delivery to our customers and distributors. Our ability to track and measure this part of the distribution chain is very limited given the highly diverse distribution channels around the world. We will continue to monitor industry developments regarding downstream transportation and distribution and will periodically assess our ability to estimate this category of emissions.
For FY 21/22 we updated our methodology for estimating End of Life Treatment of Sold Products to better align with the guidance in the WRI GHG protocol. More specifically, we aligned with the minimum boundary definition for End-of-Life (EoL) which states that companies should only report Scope 1& 2 emissions of waste managers that occur in the disposal of their products. As a result of this change in methodology, our reported emissions for FY 21/22 decreased to 7,100,000 metric tons.
*Validated by the Science Based Target Initiative
All policy advocacy is coordinated through our Global Government Relations organization ensuring consistency and transparency in all policy related activities. Internally, government relations does this by being an active member of our cross functional P&G Corporate Climate Council which plays a key role in our Climate Governance Process; knowing the details of our climate policies and positions, and consistently representing them with all external stakeholders they interact with, including policy makers and trade associations. All policy advocacy work is done through our Global Government Relations organization ensuring a common approach to climate change engagement activities across business divisions and geographies.
Consistent with our ambition to achieve net zero GHG emissions, we seek to align our policy positions with a 1.5* Scenario. This does not mean we will support all climate related proposals that are advanced globally, but rather we assess each on a case by case basis to ensure the underlying policy mechanisms and proposals are relevant, robust, viable, holistic, and would contribute meaningful progress to reducing GHG emissions, For example, we support the advocacy efforts of the Climate Leadership Council which advocates for a comprehensive national policy on carbon emissions in the United States.
The trade associations of which we are members are aware of our policy positions. In all cases, any P&G position on a matter of public policy is the prevailing company position, irrespective of any trade association position. We are consistent in the positions we share with external stakeholders as well as in our trade association engagement – consistent with the core values of integrity and trust which are an integral part of our Company’s Purpose, Values and Principles (PVPs). If an association’s policy position is different than ours, we will engage the association in dialogue to discuss relevant discrepancies and encourage changes which would better align with our views.