SCIENCE-BASED TARGET

The Coca‑Cola Company has a long history of tracking our environmental impact across our value chain. Since the late 1990s, we have been tracking energy usage from our production facilities across the world, a subset of our manufacturing impact. In 2013, with the development of our “drink-in-your-hand” target, we established 2010 as our baseline year and calculated our total GHG emissions across areas of our value chain, increasing our understanding of the relative priority across the value chain.

We achieved our 2020 target and have since increased our climate ambition to evolve with current climate science.  

We have a science-based target (SBT) to reduce absolute emissions by 25% by 2030 against a 2015 baseline and an ambition to be net zero carbon by 2050.

The SBT differs from our previous “drink-in-your-hand” target, as instead of a relative target (to reduce emissions per volume) it is an absolute target to reduce our total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25%, regardless of our volume growth. This change is aligned with current industry best practice and reflects an ambitious decoupling of our GHG emissions from our sales growth.

Our carbon footprint quantifies the total GHG emissions produced directly or indirectly from our company’s activities. These are broken down into the following:

1. Scope 1 Emissions (Direct GHG Emissions): Emissions occurring from sources owned or controlled by the company. This includes the combustion of fossil fuels within our buildings and fuel consumption in fleet vehicles.
2. Scope 2 Emissions (Indirect GHG Emissions): Indirect emissions resulting from the generation of purchased energy. This includes the emissions resulting from the generation of electricity, heat and steam purchased by The Coca‑Cola Company from a utility provider. 
3. Scope 3 Emissions (Other Indirect GHG Emissions): All other emissions in the value chain, both upstream and downstream. This includes emissions from growing and processing the ingredients for our products, from producing and landfilling our packaging and from the use of our refrigeration units by our customers.

The calculation of our corporate-level GHG emissions is aligned with GHG Protocol standards (Corporate Emissions and Corporate Value Chain, Scope 3 Standard) – the best in practice standard for corporate GHG emissions managed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the World Resource Institute (WRI).

We have several processes to ensure that risks relevant to sustainability, including climate change, are evaluated on a regular basis. We regularly summarize the top risks for discussion with company leadership, including the Board of Directors, and recommendations from the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) also inform our approach.

From a corporate perspective, we develop and issue climate strategy guidance across the business. This corporate guidance is developed by a core team driving our corporate strategy on issues related to climate change, with input from a broad set of functions, such as Enterprise Risk Management, Procurement, Operations, Technical and Public Affairs and Sustainability, as well as some of our geographic regions and bottling partners.

Each geographic unit, function or department is responsible for actively managing and monitoring its respective risks throughout the year. Relevant risks that could materially affect our business and financial results are disclosed in the Annual Report on Form 10-K. This includes risks relating to climate change and its potential impacts on our business, such as those related to water scarcity and quality and supply chain disruption.