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(18 October, 2022) — San Francisco, CA — Regrow Ag, the leading technology platform empowering food and agriculture companies to achieve net-zero carbon goals within their supply chains, today announced the launch of Sustainability Insights, a product that guides organizations in reducing Scope 3 emissions and reporting accurate sustainability outcomes.
As the trailblazer that established the category of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) services for agricultural ecosystem markets, Regrow Ag is further expanding its industry-leading product suite to help sustainability leaders develop a strategic and science-based approach to achieving sustainability targets.
“Nature-based solutions in agriculture are critical to future climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience,”
said Anastasia Volkova, PhD, CEO of Regrow. “But before companies can develop regenerative agriculture programs with farmers in their supply chain, they need verifiable data to inform their decisions. This is where Sustainability Insights comes in; it makes it possible for companies to make more strategic and informed decisions about taking action to reduce emissions.”
According to a September 2022 report published by the UNFCCC-supported global campaign Race to Zero, top farming and food companies could lose up to 26% of their value by 2030, with a sector average hit of over 7%, equivalent to some $150 billion in investor losses, “if they do not adapt to new government policies and consumer behavior tied to climate change.” On the flip side, Climate Champions estimate that “early movers who accelerate the transition by developing solutions for a net zero and nature positive future can gain a share of the USD$4.5 trillion opportunity that will accompany the coming land use transition, for example, by entering new markets for bio fertiliser, alternative proteins, and nature-based carbon credits.”
Regrow’s Sustainability Insights will help these companies, along with project developers, the public sector, nonprofits, and ESG consultants, solve two critical problems.
First, it identifies the highest-impact opportunities for supply chain carbon removal and emissions reduction. Second, using precise and dynamic data, it enables sustainability leaders to baseline, monitor and report critical metrics, including emissions factors, with increased credibility and confidence.
Sustainability Insights utilizes Regrow’s best-in-class science and technology to aggregate field-level farm data across ingredient/crop supply sheds and sourcing regions. Data includes information on key sustainable and regenerative agriculture practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, and reduced fertilizer usage. Sustainability Insights also estimates the impact of sustainable practice adoption on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction, carbon sequestration, crop yield, and emissions factors.
The data and metrics available through Sustainability Insights are key components of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting for Scope 3 emissions, and a more accurate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
Other impact assessment programs that use Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) data force customers to rely on default, static, non-specific information about their sourcing regions. This leads to a less-accurate understanding of emissions baselines and progress made toward sustainability targets. Sustainability Insights solves that problem by providing dynamic data and location-specific calculations, ensuring that emissions reports are accurate and opportunities for improvement are clearly defined.
The dynamic data and specific calculations provided by Sustainability Insights were recently reviewed by SustainCERT as part of a pilot program with General Mills. Reviewers concluded that Regrow’s data model was an effective toolset for accurately monitoring environmental impacts within companies’ supply sheds. The organizations shared their findings in this white paper, in hopes that it “will catalyze further investment by other actors in the supply chain to scale the approach, thereby allowing multiple corporations to harness this new toolset to align their Scope 3 GHG emissions with a 1.5°C pathway.” In short, this science and technology could become the new norm for how global supply shed emissions are measured and verified in agriculture.
“Sustainability Insights can have a massive impact on catalyzing the investment into and celebrating the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices,” said Volkova.
“I think these capabilities seemed like the ‘impossible dream’ for so long that many companies in the industry don’t realize that these solutions are actually available now through Regrow, and they’re scalable. With this tool, our partners are starting to see exactly how they’re impacting the environment right now, use our modeling insights to see which changes would result in the most sustainable outcomes, and then take actions that help them deliver real results against their net-zero goals.”
Click here to learn more about Sustainability Insights, and see how Regrow is already putting this technology to work with partners like General Mills.
