This week marks one more busy week on the sustainability circuit right here in Brussels. At Politico’s Sustainable Future Week, companies and lawmakers trade views and concepts for a sustainable future.
This yr, as a important sponsor of the occasion, Coca-Cola in Europe will spotlight the significance of multistakeholder partnerships that may scale up options. Collective motion is required to ship long-term constructive impacts for nature restoration and the safety of important ecosystems — and throughout the broader, interconnected sustainability agenda.
Along with longstanding Coca-Cola Europe associate, international conservation group WWF-Central Japanese Europe (WWF CEE), we’ll share the outcomes and learnings of our eight-year partnership to preserve and restore very important wetlands, floodplains and ecosystems alongside the Danube River. We need to show that reversing the consequences of species and ecosystem loss and re-enriching the tapestry of nature by way of conservation and restoration is feasible after we come collectively. And we need to encourage others to hitch us. An aligned understanding of the essential want for water stewardship is on the coronary heart of our partnership.
We have to not solely preserve, however the place attainable restore ecosystems and biodiversity, together with rivers and wetlands .
WWF-CEE firmly believes that conservation of life on earth is feasible if we shield essentially the most distinctive and basic ecosystems and habitats, and that we have to work with nature reasonably than towards it to deal with these challenges. We have to not solely preserve, however the place attainable restore ecosystems and biodiversity, together with rivers and wetlands .
The world is experiencing elevated water shortage with calls for for protected, usable water exceeding provide in sure areas.
Water can also be a precedence for The Coca‑Cola Firm as a result of it’s important to life, the communities we function in, and, after all, to our enterprise. The world is experiencing elevated water shortage with calls for for protected, usable water exceeding provide in sure areas. With operations practically in all places on this planet, we now have a duty to speed up our efforts to assist deal with water stress, shield native and shared water sources and assist construct neighborhood local weather resilience.
Pushed by this frequent agenda, in 2014, WWF-CEE, partnered with The Coca-Cola Basis and the Worldwide Fee for the Safety of the Danube River to assist and promote river and wetland restoration throughout the Danube basin. For many years, in Europe, wetlands have been drained and rivers straightened and lower off from their floodplains. Consequently, much less water is held within the panorama and populations of fish and different species have plummeted
Collectively, we leveraged The Coca-Cola Basis’s funding to boost a complete of practically €20 million, principally from EU sources, in assist of the Residing Danube Partnership. We then partnered with dozens of native communities, authorities and stakeholders and in accordance with the WWF, The Residing Danube Partnership by 2021, replenished a quantity of roughly 13.45 million cubic meters, and restored over 5,462 hectares of significant wetlands, rivers and floodplains.
Right now, biodiversity loss in these areas has been reversed. Plant species have returned and, along with them, so have bugs, birds and different wildlife, lots of which had not been seen for a lot of many years in these areas. Native communities can now benefit from the surrounding nature for recreation. Importantly, by way of this partnership, we now have demonstrated that we will make a distinction in a comparatively brief period of time by way of collective motion.
Key components for these profitable outcomes embody the long-term dedication from the companions concerned and intensive engagement with native communities, reasonably than seeing stakeholder engagement as a tactical tick-box train. We’ve been capable of construct on the core strengths of every associate and leverage the distinctive experience out there, from WWF in addition to from Coca-Cola’s bottling companions within the area.
We’re significantly pleased with this system’s achievements in constructing belief and assist with native communities by participating them early on and welcoming them to expertise the every day life impacts of nature restoration. This is a crucial perception to counter among the skepticism surrounding nature restoration efforts and their potential to ship constructive impression. Take a digital tour to see among the initiatives and tasks we now have been engaged on collectively as a part of the Residing Danube Partnership.
Now could be a essential time to increase this partnership and produce different stakeholders in to scale up collective motion, commensurate with the urgent challenges attributable to nature degradation, biodiversity loss and the freshwater disaster. Over the approaching months, we are going to actively have interaction different corporations, authorities businesses, consultants and stakeholders to hitch our efforts for a residing Danube.
To speed up collective motion, we want governments and the EU Fee to place in place enabling coverage frameworks. WWF has been calling for bold EU nature restoration laws, and Coca-Cola took the lead amongst a coalition of companies to assist this name for concrete and efficient motion to reverse the biodiversity disaster. Collectively, in mild of the upcoming EU elections, we advocate for the significance of nature-based options to assist deal with the interlinked challenges of local weather change, biodiversity and water stewardship.
This partnership has proven what is feasible when corporations and conservationists work collectively on a long-term technique to deal with our rising freshwater and nature challenges. As WWF says: Collectively attainable. And The Coca-Cola Firm provides: for a greater shared future.