As I reflect on the last five years since launching our 2030 Commitment, it is clear we and our stakeholders are operating in a very different context today. The world has been experiencing increased geopolitical uncertainty, persistent pressures on personal and corporate incomes, the real-life consequences of the climate crisis, as well as the emergence of AI. We now face different, more systemic challenges, often completely outside our direct control, requiring deeper understanding and thoughtful collaboration to begin to transform, even disrupt, existing ways of working across our markets and supply chains.

We understand more of the interconnectivity of the multiple sustainability crises, from the potential impacts on nature of alternative feedstocks and fuels, to the links between climate change adaptation, poverty and our future consumers. While corporate targets set the tone and our priorities, we must continue to translate corporate level information to the product-level, combining data and progress so that our employees, customers and suppliers can make informed choices to maximise impact, minimise risk and create value.

In this environment, excellent execution is leadership. Despite the pandemic and volatile trading conditions, I am pleased to see that Croda has lived its Purpose, Smart science to improve lives™ in delivering against many of our milestones on the journey to becoming Climate, Land and People Positive, even delivering a few 2030 targets well ahead of schedule.

On track with decarbonisation, understanding our nature impacts while benefitting our employees and wider society

Since verifying our Science Based Targets in 2021, we have focused our investments and business decisions on our Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions. These are a challenge for our industry as many chemical reactions require high heat. We have maintained emission reductions in line with a 1.5°C trajectory by designing decarbonisation into our capital investment decisions and reassessing how we procure energy. We are disconnecting GHG emissions from value growth, and our internal carbon price has helped build the business cases for this work.

Over this period, we also committed significant effort to understanding GHG emissions in our value chain, our Scope 3. These are out of our direct control and we have been “learning as we go” with customers, suppliers and industry collaborations. We are following a similar journey towards understanding our impacts and dependencies on nature, recognising that our most important work needs to be across our value chains.

From a standing start four years ago, Croda Foundation has efficiently invested more than £5m of Croda profits into a range of inspirational and impactful projects. These have already sustainably improved more than 22m lives around the world, engaging Croda employees and technology to increase impact where possible. We are paying our employees a Living Wage globally and are seeing the benefits of including an increasingly diverse population in decision making at all levels, in particular the result of increasing women in leadership positions. At the heart of this work, we have embraced safety as a value across our entire organisation and are observing good progress in the declining number of injuries at work. Living our purpose and values continues to make Croda a safer, more inclusive and rewarding place to work.

Preparing for a Net Zero, Nature Positive economy: Innovating Sustainably at the heart of Croda’s strategy

While maintaining focus on execution, we have also started the work to explore what our technology portfolio could be and where Croda will help customers win in a Net Zero and Nature Positive world. One of our core philosophies is to take a leadership position in sustainability and innovation in our chosen markets: we see the biggest opportunities for improving impacts at the intersection of these agendas. I believe meeting the sustainability challenges of our sector represents a major opportunity for a company like Croda. Over the next strategy cycle we will make clear choices on the impacts we will deliver, connecting them to value creation, and we will focus on stretching but deliverable objectives.

Through our passion for this work, I want to inspire our leaders, attract future leaders to join us, and engage everyone on this journey. It will be our people who will make this happen, so I thank everyone at Croda and our partners for their commitment, hard work and positive approach to delivering against our impact goals, we achieve more together.

Steve Foots
Group Chief Executive