Protecting forests and other natural resources: key to maintaining biodiversity, combating climate change, and sustaining livelihoods
Wood is a valuable resource across our value chain. It’s therefore essential that we manage this natural resource responsibly, ensuring a sustainable supply of renewable wood for tobacco growing and our operations, while striving to conserve and rehabilitate forests.
Inefficient use of agricultural land, weak regulation, and inadequate woodland management across all types of industries have put natural forests at risk.
Wood is a key resource for our tobacco growers. They use it to build the barns in which they cure tobacco leaf and as an energy source for the curing process. It's therefore important we play a role in ensuring that renewable wood resources are available and that forestry practices across our business are sustainable and responsible.
We follow a due diligence approach, identifying and prioritizing wood use, management, and conservation challenges, and coming up with appropriate responses to overcome them. Sustainable forestry is central to the research and development carried out in our ADET centers in Brazil and Zambia, and our findings are applicable to any small-scale tobacco production system that requires renewable wood supply.
Our ADET centers are model tobacco farms, where we carry out applied research and development on a host of topics – all with the aim of ensuring tobacco farming remains sustainable, viable and profitable for our growers, while respecting and complying with the relevant environmental requirements and regulations.