Tell Procter & Gamble to end forest destruction once and for all!

The Canadian Boreal Forest has been home to Indigenous peoples and herds of caribou for millennia. Tropical forests around the world are crucial to preventing climate chaos. But both are being clear cut by Procter & Gamble to source pulp for Charmin Toilet Paper and palm oil for consumer products.

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Dear Fund Manager,

When two-thirds of Procter & Gamble’s shareholders voted to urge the company to eliminate deforestation and intact forest degradation from its supply chains, you expected real action. Undoubtedly, you’ve heard from P&G that it has unveiled an updated sustainability plan. I am writing to you today to let you know that P&G’s plan is long on words and short on action.

Given P&G’s lack of adequate action, I hope you will continue your engagement with P&G on these issues. Specifically, as a way to register your concern and to drive change in the company’s practices, I urge you to consider casting votes against key directors on the company’s board, if structural change is not forthcoming.

As you have heard before, consumers like myself want to see P&G establish and enforce mandatory requirements to ensure deforestation-free and degradation-free sourcing of paper from the Canadian boreal and palm oil across the humid tropics. I would hope to see P&G demonstrate leadership by taking clear action to end ties to logging of Caribou habitat, destruction of tropical rainforests for palm oil and violations of Indigenous People’s rights, as well as effective and transparent monitoring and independent verification mechanisms to validate claims of progress and sustainability. P&G should go beyond its reliance on certification schemes and should commit to engage directly with communities in its supply sheds. This includes working with human rights experts to establish verification mechanisms to ensure suppliers have fulfilled their requirement to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ and communities’ rights to give or withhold Free Prior and Informed Consent to operations on their lands.

To date, P&G has done none of these things.

While P&G has a stated preference for pulp from FSC-certified forests, and recently released a Charmin advertisement touting that the brand protects forests by using FSC-certified pulp, the company continues to source from high-risk pulp producers that log forests with threatened species habitats without the stronger protections that FSC requires. What’s worse, in its new “Wood Pulp Sourcing Policy” P&G characterizes weak forest certification systems as sustainable, thereby permitting its suppliers to exploit these standards in areas where protections for threatened species like boreal caribou are essential.

P&G’s boreal suppliers do not require the free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) of Indigenous Peoples whose traditional territories are impacted by their forestry operations, and its palm oil suppliers give mere lip service to the need for FPIC, as conflicts in their concessions drag on due to these companies’ failure to secure the social license to operate. While P&G’s latest pulp sourcing policy announces the company’s “support” for FPIC, the policy lacks an affirmative commitment to ensuring its suppliers adhere to this critical practice or transparent processes for how the company will address issues of noncompliance or provide clear consequences for violators in its supply chain. This is true in its palm oil sourcing as well as its pulp sourcing.

Given the urgency of addressing the dual climate and biodiversity crises, it’s essential that P&G make substantive commitments to publicly report on and reduce its impact on forests -- both for the communities and species that rely on these ecosystems, as well as to address the associated risks posed to P&G’s shareholder investments. As a starting point, these should include: requiring suppliers to prove their compliance with FPIC; avoiding primary/intact forests in its supply chains; ceasing its characterization of weak certification systems as responsible; and accounting for and reporting its progress on reducing its scope 3 emissions, particularly in relation to its forest carbon footprint. Above all, to reduce pressure on threatened forests, P&G should cease relying entirely on virgin forest pulp for these products and instead incorporate more sustainable alternatives, including recycled content.

P&G’s latest announcement for shareholders favors lofty language over concrete commitments to ceasing intact forest degradation in the world’s most important carbon storehouses.

In conclusion, I hope you will continue your engagement with P&G on these issues. As P&G’s 2021 shareholder meeting approaches, I urge you to consider casting votes against key directors on the company’s board, as a way to register your concern and to drive change in the company’s practices. Thank you.

Sincerely,
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