Because water is essential to nature, communities, and business, The Coca-Cola Company and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched a transformational partnership in 2007 to help conserve the world’s freshwater resources. Expanding this focus and building on our progress, we renewed our collaboration through 2020 to achieve even greater impact by helping address the natural resource challenges that impact fresh water.

Together, we are working to more deeply engage the company’s value chain; involve additional partners to achieve greater scale and impact; and spark commitments from businesses, governments, and consumers to take action to value, conserve, and protect the planet’s natural resources.

We are focused on helping to ensure healthy, resilient freshwater basins, measurably improving environmental performance across the company’s value chain, integrating the value of nature into public and private decision-making processes, and convening influential partners to solve global environmental challenges. Progress toward these new goals includes:

• Identified geographies where freshwater conservation efforts will be directed through 2020, with a focus on the catchments of the Mesoamerican Reef and the Yangtze River. 
• Committed to sustainably source 13 key agricultural ingredients and released our Sustainable Agriculture Guiding Principles to support this work; worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the entire value chain of Coca-Cola’s products through comprehensive reductions in manufacturing processes, packaging formats, delivery fleet, refrigeration equipment and ingredient sourcing; joined seven major consumer brands in founding the Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance, which will call upon leading experts to evaluate feedstock sources based on land use, food security, biodiversity and other impacts; and improved water-use efficiency 10 percent  over 2010.
• Began to evaluate the impact of implementing sustainability standards on ecosystem services using select partnership freshwater geographies.
• Initiated collaboration with key stakeholders in the Coca-Cola system, companies in the Coca-Cola value chain, civil society organizations working on freshwater conservation in our geographies, academic institutions performing research on natural capital, and multilateral initiatives that invest in projects to improve the global environment; and engaged in the global water dialogue through participation at World Water Week in Stockholm  and hosted a regional planning process event, “Water for Our Future,” in preparation for the 7th World Water Forum in Korea 2015.

For more information, visit the partnership’s 2013 Annual Review.