Cartier is the latest luxury label to join Gucci’s CEO in a pledge to increase its sustainability efforts.
French jeweler and watchmaker Cartier has joined the Gucci-led CEO Carbon Neutral Challenge, the brainchild of Gucci CEO and President Marco Bizzarri.
The challenge encourages international businesses to reduce their footprints through adopting low-carbon practices, and taking full responsibility and accountability for total greenhouse gas emissions generated “right away.”
Cartier joins secondhand platform The RealReal, technology company SAP, Lavazza Group, Nestlé’s San Pellegrino, and mining consultant firm Levin Sources, among others.
Aside from emissions reduction efforts, the challenge encourages nature-based carbon neutral solutions for all other emissions, such as Scope 3, to help mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss.
“We firmly believe that aspirations for a sustainable industry can only be achieved through collaborative initiatives” Cartier President and CEO Cyrille Vigneron said in a statement. “As citizens of the world, we believe it is our duty to protect its biodiversity and make a positive impact on the planet.”
CEO Carbon Neutral Challenge
Bizzarri launched the campaign in 2019, calling for collective action to reduce emissions “immediately, not over a decade.” In an open letter to his peers, he called for corporations to take accountability and responsibility in the fight against climate change.
“We are entering a new decade of corporate accountability. As businesses, we all have a responsibility to meet the reality of our global climate and biodiversity crises head on and find solutions that can amplify efforts to conserve and restore nature, while mitigating climate change,” read Bizzarri’s letter.
“At the core of this was a call to adopt nature-based solutions and the acknowledgement that they represent 30 percent of the climate solution.”
Bizzarri said companies cannot wait for technology or “climate smart solutions” to catch up and scale up. “This could take years that we don’t actually have,” he wrote.
Prior to Cartier’s pledge, the IPCC released the third installment of its Sixth Annual Assessment, urging for immediate efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all industries by 2025.
“Given the escalated warnings in [the IPCC] report, it is becoming even clearer since I issued the CEO Carbon Neutral Challenge in 2019 that we need to act now for nature, as it is simply not enough to focus solely on reducing emissions over the coming decades,” Bizzarri said in a statement.
He applauded the commitment from Cartier, a Richemont brand. “Taking this leadership step to prioritise emissions reduction through their science-based target and holding themselves accountable for all their residual emissions every year by investing in nature-based solutions to protect, manage and restore natural ecosystems, are actions that are urgently needed to tackle the climate and nature crises,” Bizzarri said.
The move comes after Cartier and Gucci parent company, Kering, announced the launch of the Watch and Jewelry Initiative 2030 last October. They made it official earlier this month at the Watches & Wonders fair in Geneva when both also announced they had left the Responsible Jewelry Council over its failure to cut ties with Russia amid its ongoing attack on Ukraine.
“It is not part of our Richemont values to be part of an organization in which some members are supporting conflicts and wars,” Vigneron said.
Cartier commitments
Cartier became a member of the Science Based Targets Initiative in 2021 as part of its efforts to reduce its climate impact. It set a 2030 deadline to reduce emissions by nearly half, and switching to 100 percent renewable energy sources.
Through these targets, it committed to reducing emissions 46 per cent by 2030, to increasing the annual sourcing of renewable electricity from 48 per cent in 2019 to 100 per cent by 2021 and to continuing to annually source 100 per cent renewable electricity through 2030.
Cartier’s CO2 emission reduction targets are aligned with a 1.5°C trajectory for its entire footprint, the company says, and consistent with the reductions required to keep global warming to the Paris Agreement 1.5°C target.
In 2020, it launched Cartier For Nature, which works to support nature-based solutions to protect, manage, and restore ecosystems.
Last year, Cartier along with Prada Group, LVMH, and OTB Group set up the Aura Blockchain Consortium aimed at bringing blockchain traceability across the luxury sector supply chains, specifically diamonds. Aura works much like a nonprofit on a unified goal of creating a tamper-proof digital record that can track both environmental and social metrics.
