« For 160 years, SUEZ has delivered essential services to improve the quality of life. Our water and waste businesses are deeply rooted in communities. By their nature, they are at the heart of sustainable development challenges. By recovering our waste in the form of new materials or energy and by giving wastewater a second life, we are working to develop a more circular economy. By treating water to make it safe for the natural environment, we help to protect biodiversity. By creating alternative water resources through desalination or wastewater reuse, we are taking action to ensure availability and preservation of our fresh water resources. We contribute to community decarbonization targets and energy independence by producing energy from wastewater or waste.

We operate our water and waste businesses with passion and pride.

However, we must step up our efforts. Our planet is facing an unprecedented loss of biodiversity and natural resources. The latest IPCC report highlighted the inadequacy of the commitments made in the Paris Agreement to secure a maximum temperature increase of 1.5°C and limit climate change risks. It is increasingly clear that these two crises – climate change and the decline of natural capital and associated biodiversity – are intrinsically linked.. Their consequences primarily affect the most vulnerable. Now more than ever, the challenges of sustainable development for our society – impacting climate, nature and social factors – are interdependent.

This is why we wanted to address each of these pillars in our new 2023-2027 Sustainable Development Roadmap with the same level of ambition. For the first time, this Roadmap provides a cross-functional approach to contribute, alongside our customers, partners and all our stakeholders, to meeting the challenge of the ecological transition for communities. Today, we are making 24 commitments to strengthen and expand the contribution of our activities in this field. These commitments aim to structure our actions around a strong, shared ambition wherever we operate.

To fight climate change, we will be supported by three levers. Our businesses not only consume, but also produce energy. We will therefore harness the potential of waste more strongly in the service of the energy transition so that we will soon produce more electricity than we consume in the Group. We will also increase the share of renewable energy in the Group’s consumption to 70% of our total electricity consumption by 2030. To contribute to carbon neutrality, we will continue taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our activities, with a specific investment plan for carbon capture and storage.

Regarding nature conservation, the COP15 emphasized the need to collectively equip ourselves with more resources in an effort to halt the loss of biodiversity. We are fully focused on this approach and are making 10 new commitments to conserve nature. These commitments will enable us to act on the five factors responsible for the decline of biodiversity as identified by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), such as measuring and combating land degradation.

In the social pillar, we are committed to reconciling human and economic development, particularly through new targets set for inclusion and equal opportunities, employee training and engagement as well as health and safety. We will spend more on inclusive organizations and double the number of people benefiting from our integration programs.

Now is not the time for talk or statements. Our commitments are action-based, ambitious and measurable. More specifically, we have defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each of them. Their delivery will be rigorously monitored by the Group’s Management Committee, as well as through annual reporting.

In a world of accelerating transformations, I am convinced that our activities can play a key role to increase the resilience of communities. I am confident in the commitment of our employees to implement, together with our various stakeholders, the ambitious Roadmap we have set out. Through our collective mobilization, together we will drive forward the ecological transition and safeguard the resources for a common future. »

 

Sabrina Soussan, Chief Executive Officer of SUEZ

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