Last year, the pulp company Suzano made significant progress in its “Commitments to renew life”, a set of 15 long-term goals established by the company on the environmental and social fronts. Among the highlights are the net removals of 9 million tons of CO₂e from the atmosphere and the removal of more than 9 thousand people from the poverty line.
With an integrated operation that unites its forests with its industrial units, between 2020 and 2021, Suzano achieved an accumulated balance – the sum of all emissions and removals – of around 25 million tons of CO₂e removed from the atmosphere, which represents the achievement of approximately 60% of the goal of removing 40 million tons of CO₂e from the atmosphere, by 2025.
In line with the commitment to be part of the solution to the climate emergency, in 2021 Suzano joined the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi), an initiative that seeks to drive ambitious climate action in the private sector, allowing organizations to set science-based emission reduction targets
In order to generate positive impacts on society in the more than 200 Brazilian municipalities where it is present, the company continued to expand its actions to generate work, income and social impact, benefiting more than 21 thousand people and achieving an advance of 5.7% in relation to the objective of the public commitment to lift 200,000 people out of the poverty line by 2030 – even with increasing poverty, food insecurity and the challenges brought by the pandemic.
In 2022, the company intends to continue building innovative and sustainable solutions together with communities and strategic actors present in its areas of operation, working on scalable solutions through the incubation and acceleration of social impact businesses, strengthening networks, territorial arrangements, and institutional partnerships for territorial resilience.
The company already has several social projects, such as the PDRT (Rural Territorial Development Program), an initiative that strengthens family farming, promotes access to public policies and contributes to the quality of life of rural producers. In the last year, the initiative helped to increase the family income of more than 2,900 families through regenerative agricultural production, generating more than 30 thousand tons of food.
Also last year, Suzano launched a goal for the conservation of biodiversity, committing, by 2030, to connect, through ecological corridors, half a million hectares of priority areas for preservation in the Cerrado, Atlantic Forest and Amazon biomes. Thus, the idea is to create a collaborative, diversified and continuous movement that effectively contributes to the conservation of species currently threatened by human action, but that also raises the level of environmental management.
“It is increasingly natural and necessary that the environmental and social fronts walk together to strengthen society in building a fairer and more sustainable future, in which we can produce more solutions and generate income but using fewer natural resources. We need to encourage reflection on our daily actions and how we can contribute to their preservation and conservation”, comments Cristina Gil, Suzano’s executive director of Sustainability and Communication and Brand.
In addition to the CO2 removal, poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation goals, Suzano has another 12 Commitments to renew life, which can be monitored at the company’s Sustainability Center. To learn more, click here.
