In response to the growing climate crisis and to help combat the cascading loss of nature, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation are committed to helping protect, restore, or more sustainably manage at least 50 million acres of land and one million square miles of ocean by 2030.
To achieve our 2030 nature goal, we will need every tool we can use: changing business practices, engaging and supporting suppliers in their programs, and applying philanthropic investments to act as catalysts. Accordingly, we are acting through three approaches:
- Working with suppliers to advance product sourcing and certifications that drive positive impacts for nature. This includes our 2016 goal to more sustainably source at least 20 key commodities by 2025.
- Collaborating with partners, including our suppliers, to scale up and reach our ambitious goals together – including using Project Gigaton’s nature pillar to track and report collective progress.
- Using philanthropy to support place-based initiatives that take a holistic approach to protecting critical landscapes and seascapes; and investing in systemic enablers that will unlock new capabilities and accelerate progress.
By aligning these actions to landscape/seascape needs and local stakeholder goals, we help create positive and lasting systemic environmental, social, and economic impacts for all sectors.
"The choices we make today will fundamentally determine our long-term resilience to the biodiversity and climate crises, which is why we must rapidly scale up the protection and restoration of nature in the next few years. Walmart’s investments in our lands and oceans are a significant milestone for these efforts – and a testament to the fact that investing in nature benefits both businesses and local communities. Conservation International is proud to have partnered with Walmart on the science behind this commitment.” — Dr. M. Sanjayan, CEO of Conservation International
“The world is experiencing an historic loss of biodiversity that undermines economic opportunity, food and water security, and community resilience. We need to value nature appropriately and immediately, so we can stop degradation and restore biodiversity, upon which we all rely. Walmart and the Walmart Foundation’s goals are a demonstration of leadership that can help galvanize important action in the private sector.” — Jennifer Morris, CEO, The Nature Conservancy
Walmart is currently focused on nine priority commodity groups – with our goal to transition these supply chains to regenerative production systems so that nature and humanity can together thrive.
The most recent information about Walmart and Walmart Foundation’s progress on our nature commitment can be found on our Environmental, Social and Governance reporting page.
Walmart and the Walmart Foundation have invested in a variety of tools and resources that can help suppliers move from assessing their nature risk exposure to collaborating with others. These tools have been built to provide direction, methodologies, mapping as well as useful guidance on designing roadmaps and strategies that place nature and humanity at the center of our suppliers’ nature strategies.
Assess Nature Footprint
The Sustainability Consortium’s Commodity Mapping Tool helps companies identify potential sourcing landscapes and the associated environmental and social risks of agricultural commodities produced in those areas.
Set Effective and Impactful Goals
The Accountability Framework initiative (AFi) supports companies and other stakeholders in setting strong supply chain goals, taking effective action, and tracking progress toward deforestation-free and conversion-free supply chains that respect indigenous, local, and worker rights.
Measure Progress
Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment is the home of OpenTEAM – an open-source initiative and data sharing platform that connects farmers and their sustainability data to supply chain initiatives in a standardized, transmissible format.
The World Resource Institute’s Global Forest Watch and Climate Risk Tool allows up-to-date monitoring of forest conditions around the world to enable rapid action through data and technology.
Strive for Impact
Field to Market’s Continuous Improvement Accelerator is a registry of sustainability projects across the US row crop sector where members can register, report progress, and link with potential partners.
Walmart understands that helping to protect, restore, and sustainably manage nature requires collaborations across production land and seascapes. Place-based initiatives (PBIs) create shared value for producers, suppliers, and communities by supporting healthy and diverse ecosystems. Activities across the landscape or seascape help restore and/or protect nature and the critical environmental processes that produce the goods and services we rely on.
These place-based initiatives may include pre-competitive actions like mapping high-conservation value areas across an entire jurisdiction or delivering technical assistance and incentives to farmers to use more productive and sustainable practices.
Working at large scales to adopt regenerative practices in the supply chain, and address challenges such as land use change and sustainable livelihoods, requires innovative collaboration.
Find Place-Based Initiatives
Walmart and the Walmart Foundation are working with non-profits and the supply chain to identify emerging initiatives that take this holistic approach.
Walmart has developed a map of some place-based initiatives driving protection, sustainable management and/or restoration at meaningful scales.
- Search for projects: This list of projects is meant to be dynamic, not exhaustive and will continue to be updated as we discover additional projects. You can explore the projects on this map. Please note, Walmart is not endorsing these projects and rather providing them as potential opportunities for consideration.
- Submit projects: If you are a nonprofit participating in a place-based initiative and would like to feature your initiative on our map, please submit the project information through this intake form.
Benefits from submitting a place-based initiative can include raising awareness of collaboration opportunities for new partners and connections with funding opportunities to help accelerate place-based efforts and scale up local projects.
For more resources on place-based initiatives and information on how companies can get involved, please take a look at this short reading list or the Jurisdictional Resources Hub on the Tropical Forest Alliance Webpage.
