Tackling climate risks and opportunities in global food production

How Tate & Lyle took action for reporting and resilience

We supported Tate & Lyle, a global provider of food and beverage ingredients and solutions, to understand the climate-related risk and opportunities for its business, update the way it reported these, and to map out actions that would help it build a more climate-resilient business. Our work was critical in enabling Tate & Lyle to align its climate-related reporting with international standards.

Understanding risk through engagement

Engagement with Tate & Lyle’s key internal stakeholders was crucial in enabling us to analyze the alignment of climate change reporting to Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) requirements in the business’s current corporate disclosure activities, as well as carrying out a climate change risk assessment for the business, and its key suppliers, and markets.

Driving change with dialogue

Delivering the work across the business meant reviewing the four TCFD pillars (governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets) with contributions from key personnel – including from enterprise risk management, investor relations, sustainability, procurement, commercial, logistics, and manufacturing. We interviewed these stakeholders to understand current disclosure processes and procedures across the organization, and to identify opportunities for improvement.

To understand Tate & Lyle and its supply chain’s resilience to physical climate change risks and the transition to a low carbon economy, we carried out a review of climate change projections and trends, policy, legislation, and progress elsewhere in the industry, and then ran workshops on the topics with key global functions. These workshops allowed us to identify where issues may already have made their impact in the organization, whilst increasing awareness and building capacity so that stakeholders understood the nature of the risks relevant to their function and the wider business.

Climate actions, business outcomes

Delivering the project helped Tate & Lyle to better integrate climate-related risks and opportunities into its current enterprise-wide risk management framework, and support ongoing financial and commercial resilience that is now recognized as being indivisible from effective climate change action.

At the same time, we also delivered an action plan and timeline to enable the business to understand what needs to be done to continue to improve the alignment of its climate-related reporting to TCFD.

In the words of Tate & Lyle Executive Vice-President of Corporate Affairs, Rowan Adams, the project “engaged our organization in finding new and innovative solutions to the climate-related challenges we face.”