Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) have set themselves an ambitious target to improve health, reduce poverty, and create new opportunities for employment and education around the world by the end of this decade.
So how does the car manufacturer plan on delivering change to almost 12 million people? Carbon finance.
Traditionally a way of offsetting emissions through investment in clean energy solutions and for ClimateCare, the climate and development organization which has worked with Jaguar Land Rover since 2007, carbon finance it’s about going a step further and using this money to both cut carbon emissions and fund development in local communities.
Jaguar Land Rover has supported 50 climate and development projects in 17 countries around the world through the ClimateCare scheme, cutting 10 million tons of carbon emissions and improving the lives of 2 million people.
“We wanted to learn from our experience to date and set ourselves a challenge to do more,” explains Jonathan Garrett, director of corporate social responsibility at Jaguar Land Rover.
He plans to make smart use of carbon finance to both cut carbon and as a cost-effective means to deliver almost half the new target and create measurable opportunities for 5 million people by 2020.
A further 5 million people will be engaged through humanitarian, conservation and environmental projects and 2 million through educational initiatives.
Since 2007 JLR has reduced CO2 emissions by 21% per vehicle produced, as well as cutting waste-to-landfill by 75% for each car manufactured.
While identifying ways to reduce the impact of production, the company continues to operate one of the world’s largest carbon offset programmes - covering the entire manufacturing assembly process.
The largest carbon finance project that Jaguar Land Rover has supported so far is the Life Straw Carbon for a Water project in Kenya.
By purchasing all the carbon credits generated from the Busia region of the project, they have supported the provision of safe water to more than 700,000 people and funded a carbon reduction equivalent to that generated by UK manufacturing assembly for one year.
In order to achieve this free LifeStraw Family, water filters were distributed to households in the region by global health company Vestergaard.
These filters use no electricity and, crucially, mean that local people no longer have to collect firewood to boil their water, thereby reducing carbon emissions.
Every householder that is given a water filter is logged by number and geographic location and checked by a third party.
The carbon reductions are then independently verified by the Gold Standard Foundation, before being paid for by Jaguar Land Rover.
After a fantastic year for JLR thanks to record-breaking sales around the globe, the carbon finance scheme sees the company reinvesting some of the fruits of their labours for those less fortunate.
JLR’s parent company, Indian based Tata motors sees no less than 60% of its profits going towards good causes in struggling communities.
“It’s a win-win,” explains Jonathon Garrett.
“It gives back (to communities) in a big way with profits going back to community-related philanthropic projects.”
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