LVMH deepens its biodiversity commitments by renewing a five-year partnership with UNESCO and inviting the Tiffany & Co. Foundation to focus on marine areas, signalling a new era of luxury-sector nature stewardship.
LVMH has formalized a new five-year partnership with UNESCO, titled “For the Beauty of Life”, expanding its biodiversity and nature-regeneration efforts globally and bringing in the Tiffany & Co. Foundation to support ocean conservation in the next phase of the collaboration.
According to the announcement, the renewed agreement deepens a relationship originally launched in 2019. Under the new framework, LVMH will leverage UNESCO’s full spectrum of education, science, and cultural programmes, while the Tiffany & Co. Foundation enters with a focus on sustainable management of marine areas.
“Preserving together the beauty of the living is the objective of this strengthened partnership,” Director-General Audrey Azoulay at the signing ceremony in Paris, UNESCO. “Within UNESCO-designated sites, we are developing with LVMH nature- and culture-based solutions, such as agroforestry or craftsmanship, for the benefit of local communities around the world.”
LVMH director of image and environment Antoine Arnault said the luxury group is proud of the actions carried out locally under the first partnership with UNESCO. “LVMH is pleased to formalize this new chapter. In connection with local stakeholders, such as breeders and farmers, the Group intends to continue its role as an integrator and facilitator in shaping this renewed relationship with living systems.”
The agreement sets out three strategic priorities for 2025-2029, including nature-, culture- and education-based interventions, and the inclusion of the Tiffany & Co. Foundation to support marine conservation. LVMH described it as “the only private sector partner” of UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme, leveraging that unique status to develop a methodology for measuring biodiversity impact which can be transferred across its brand portfolio.
One of LVMH’s environment-development executives, Hélène Valade, noted: “Nature and biodiversity are very important for LVMH, because we are in an interdependent relationship with nature. No Champagne without grapes, no perfume and cosmetics without flowers, no dresses without cotton or silk. Our duty is to give back to nature what we borrow from it.”
UNESCO senior adviser for nature and biodiversity partnerships, Meriem Bouamrane, described the collaboration as: “a first of its kind at such a large scale,” combining private-sector business models with scientific and local knowledge. She added: “The big shift is to invest in the contribution of local people — to valorize the sustainable practices and contributions they make for the planet. It’s a change of mindset, seeing biodiversity as an investment, as a wealth in itself.”
LVMH’s broader sustainability and biodiversity commitments
This new agreement arrives as LVMH continues to publicly disclose and enhance its environmental commitments. The group’s ESG portal indicates comprehensive targets across climate, circularity and biodiversity. According to reporting, LVMH has pledged to halt deforestation and conversion of natural ecosystems within its operations and supply chains by 2025, and to ensure 100 percent of strategic raw materials are certified under biodiversity-sensitive standards by 2026. More ambitiously, it aims to regenerate five million hectares of fauna and flora habitat globally by 2030.
In a 2022 disclosure, the company reported that 1.37 million hectares of wildlife habitats were preserved or restored in that year alone. Coverage of the luxury sector’s broader biodiversity challenge highlights LVMH’s scale: one analysis noted that LVMH and its peer Kering have been pressed to define and measure nature-impact targets at a level comparable to carbon commitments.
Furthermore, the Tiffany & Co. Foundation, now part of the expanded partnership, has distributed over US$100 million in grants to support seascapes and landscapes, including more than 11 million km² of marine protected areas globally.
What this means for the luxury sector
By combining brand strength, science-based frameworks, and local community participation, LVMH’s renewed partnership with UNESCO signals a shift in luxury toward systemic nature stewardship, beyond isolated cause-marketing. LVMH emphasises that local communities “know the land, know the biodiversity, know the power of nature… We can’t act on biodiversity without acting with local communities.” With the Tiffany & Co. Foundation supporting marine-area plans, the ecosystem of collaboration spans terrestrial and oceanic environments, which reflects growing regulatory and investor demands around nature-positive business models.
Corporate disclosure data show that LVMH holds a science-based target to reduce Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 percent by 2026 from a 2019 base year, and to reduce Scope 3 emissions 55 percent per million € value added by 2030. That climate ambition co-exists with the biodiversity agenda, underscoring how luxury houses are being held to standards beyond mere carbon.
In practical terms, the “For the Beauty of Life” plan will extend pilot projects tested in the Amazon basin and UNESCO Biosphere Reserves to additional UNESCO World Heritage Sites and Global Geoparks, combining biodiversity, carbon, water, soil and cultural practice indicators. According to Bouamrane, the partnership offers “a new framework for public-private projects in conservation” and signals that “businesses and enterprises are part of the solution, not only a problem.”
LVMH reported revenue of €39.8 billion in the first half of 2025, with profit from recurring operations of €9 billion and an operating margin of 22.6 percent. The juxtaposition of such commercial scale with biodiversity-action frameworks underscores the broader luxury-sector imperative: to demonstrate that high-end commerce can coexist with — and indeed depend upon — nature’s resilience.
“Despite geopolitical and economic uncertainties, we remain fully on course with the same environmental ambition,” Valade noted. “Expectations from our clients and colleagues inside LVMH are very high about sustainable policy and our roadmap.”
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