BCtA Annual Forum 2021 | Keynote Adrien Geiger, L'OCCITANE

Hello everyone, and thank you very much to the Business Call to Action teams and the UN Development Programme for this invitation. I'm very, very honored to be with you today. I'll try to use my 10 minutes to share our experience with L'Occitane, and hopefully this will inspire some of you, many of you, to go on and to carry on. Basically, the way I've been introduced is very true. There is no way we can create value for the environment or society without inclusivity. If we really want to be sustainable, if we want to create value for the environment and society, we have to start locally. We have to start with local action with the stakeholders and include them, all the ecosystem with us. To illustrate that, I will show you what for me is really a strong story that is really important for us. I think many of you know our shea butter hand cream with 20% shea butter. It's our bestseller worldwide, and we sell one hand cream every three seconds in the world. This hand cream is made with 20% shea butter. Shea butter comes from Burkina Faso. We have been working in Burkina Faso with 10,000 women for more than 30 years. The way we did it, actually the way we started, was asking how can we help those women even more. The reason why we have 20% shea butter was because we thought the more shea butter we use in our cream, the more we can help them. And the way we work with them, we started really while we went there, of course, and really started working with them on how we can do better for them, for the environment, and for the whole ecosystem. So one thing very simple: the way they transform those shea nuts – the women we work with transform the nuts into shea butter – was by using wood, cutting trees, cutting shea trees to use for the oven, to heat the machine and to transform the nuts into a butter. Working with them, we realized that actually we could use the outside of the nuts instead of the wood of the trees, and it worked as well. So we managed to actually save trees. Then we went further. We said, actually those trees are the bread and butter for this ecosystem. So we worked with them to create a whole area of protection for those trees. Then we saw that this know-how they have to transform the shea into shea butter, which actually comes from thousands of generations, it's a great know-how, and it could be evolved and transmitted to the next generation. So we helped them to improve their know-how and to transmit it to future generations, so the next generation could carry on using this fantastic know-how. Then, because we also started to buy shea nuts in advance, or shea butter actually in advance, they were able to use this advanced investment in order to go to the bank and get a loan, and so invest in the education of their kids. And we also helped them to diversify the way they could use all this richness that they have from the shea tree. Because what is also really cool with the shea tree is it's at the center of a huge ecosystem, with many animals and plants and ingredients interacting with it. So 20 years later, we can say that actually the environment is better than it used to be before, the society is better than it used to be before. We have more educated women, more educated kids, better know-how with a way to transmit to the next generation, and a better environmental ecosystem with trees protected and wildlife connected to it. So by selling a shea butter hand cream, we are creating value for the environment and society, but we did it with local action, using our connection with those people, with the fantastic women we're working with, and then expanding with them. But it starts there, locally, in Burkina Faso. And for us, that's the way forward. That's what we're doing also in Provence with our verbena, trying to use the connection we have with the producers to bring them into regenerative agriculture. Another good example to illustrate this is we have set up a very intense goal to be net positive carbon by 2030. In order to do so, we are strongly reducing our carbon emissions, but we also need to offset it. We need to have sinks to absorb this carbon. And we know how bad it is to just buy credit and see maybe intense forests being grown in places that were not needed. So we worked with a fantastic company called Livelihood. We created a fund with them, actually the third fund that they have created. And there, the whole idea is that they go directly with the population to create regenerative agriculture or planting with the farmers, next to the villages, next to the people, in order to make sure that the way we find nature-based solutions to capture carbon is not only here to help us reduce our impact but also creating value for the local environment. And what is fantastic with this is that actually we can get huge scale because we are a big company, quite big, and so we need to capture a lot of carbon to be completely neutral. With them, we have participated in the first position of 150 million for this carbon fund, and we will be able to claim by 2030 that we are neutral. And so to finish, I think what is important is those local actions that we are doing, that we all need to do. We have to share everything we learn from it. This open source approach is super, super important. If we all try in our environment, in our business, to trace from the very beginning and see how we can create value for the environment and society, including all the stakeholders at the local level, and then share all the knowledge we have, we can really create huge value and transform our industries. So I hope that I'll inspire some of you, and that many of you will try to do the same. Thank you very much for listening to me.