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  |  04.09.08
FIJI Water announces its carbon footprint and joins the Carbon Disclosure Project

Today we announced our carbon footprint and reported on our progress to date toward fulfilling the promise of FIJI Green. We’re thinking of this as FIJI Green’s first “annual report,” even though it’s all online and not a big book. (And we’ll update you more than once a year that’s what this blog is for!)

Why does this matter? We believe consumers will make environmentally responsible purchasing decisions if they have the information they need. The trouble is that they often don’t have this information. It’s like trying to tackle the obesity epidemic by removing nutrition labels from food and beverage products that doesn’t make any sense, and neither does trying to tackle climate change without giving consumers the carbon footprints of the products they eat, drink, and use.

We hope that companies in our industry and beyond will provide comparable lifecycle carbon footprints for their products, so that we can all work together to address the issue of climate change. In this spirit, we have become the first privately held company ever to join the Carbon Disclosure Project’s (CDP) Supply Chain Leadership Collaboration. The CDP is the world’s largest investor coalition on climate change and has been the leader over the past several years in working with companies to disclose their carbon footprints. We will work with the CDP to disclose our carbon footprint and encourage our suppliers to do the same.

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FIJI Green Gal
Aliya, that's a great question. For our 2008 offsets, we are launching a reforestation project in Fiji. In future years, we will want to diversify by location and by type of project (reforestation, renewable energy, etc.). This is simply because we can reduce investment risk by diversifying the projects, just as with any well-managed portfolio. With respect to the idea of fair share by location, however, climate change does not function according to national/geographic boundaries. Regardless of where greenhouse gas emissions are generated, those emissions exacerbate climate change for the whole world. Similarly, regardless of where offset projects are located, their emission reductions benefit the whole world. Think of the Earth's atmosphere there are no walls between different countries' airspaces, and therefore emission increases or reductions anywhere will affect climate on a global scale. To illustrate that last point: Tropical deforestation accounts for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions the second largest source after power generation, and twice the emissions of all the world's cars and trucks. While the tropics are near the Equator, the destruction of their rainforests is causing climate change impact that is currently most severe at the North and South Poles. One reason deforestation is happening so rapidly is the lack of incentive for tropical countries to protect their rainforests when they could make money by selling the wood and converting that land to plantations and pastures instead. Simply put, these countries want to get paid for protecting their rainforests and forgoing other revenue sources, while other countries don't want to pay for what they think of as "doing nothing." This standoff is why the Kyoto Protocol doesn't make any provision to reward forest conservation. Our work with Conservation International to save the Sovi Basin addresses this key missing element in the Kyoto Protocol. While we shouldn't consider the Sovi Basin an "offset" because it's not additional, we believe this conservation effort is the right thing to do in light of the significant impact of tropical deforestation on the Earth and its residents.
04.12.08 @ 4:37 PM
Aliya
I have a question about offsetting is it directed only to reforestation and renewable energy sources in Fiji? Is it possible to do the split of offsets by percentage equivalent to the product lifecycle emissions by location? So that the offsetting works fair to the places where emissions are produced? Thank you!
04.12.08 @ 4:28 PM