As we launch our latest sustainability report, our senior leaders share their thoughts in a blog series.
Here, Group ESG Director Joy Lam reflects on Crown’s evolving approach to sustainability and our progress over the past year.
By Joy Lam
Group ESG Director
Crown Worldwide Group
In 2023, we made great progress on our sustainability journey, powered by an incredible energy and willingness throughout the organization to ensure Crown is expanding its role in making the world a better place, by becoming an even more sustainable business.
I joined the company in June 2023 and have been taken aback by the enthusiasm and dedication of almost everyone I’ve spoken to. Crown is a company with a remarkable and progressive track record of giving back to – and doing the very best by – communities in which it operates.
It is a champion of equity and inclusion, with a diverse, talented and engaged workforce – comprising a plethora of leading experts in its respective industries. In the areas of social and governance, it has done so much good for so long, and continues to do so; work that we document in detail in the social section of this report.
But 2023 was about building on that, to drive even greater impact, particularly for the environment.
Our approach here has been a simple one, with the newly formed Sustainability Steering Committee placing a focus on four key areas: data, empowerment, investment and innovation.
And it is from this platform that we are building to further enhance our sustainability legacy.
We have been developing a greater understanding of climate change and sustainability issues among our global team.
We have invested in a carbon accounting platform to ensure we have the best possible data to inform our decarbonization strategy.
While those two key things underpinned much of our global coordination work in 2023, country managers and business heads continued to invest and innovate to reduce carbon emissions, empowered by an executive board that has moved in recent years to ensure sustainability is a strategic priority.
As a result, we have been able to transform our approach to reporting. For the first time, this report features an alignment of global reporting frameworks, with reference to GRI, CSRD, Ecovadis and others.
Through our materiality process, we are able to provide a higher quality overview of our progress, with greater transparency and coverage of key quantitative metric. These are now embedded in the business globally, and essential across the regions and industries we operate in.
I’m excited to delve into the data that our carbon accounting endeavors will produce, but I am equally pragmatic that while there is a lot of great work happening in the field of decarbonization, we have a long journey still ahead of us.
And not just at Crown, but across our industry. In most reporting classifications, we fall under ‘transportation’, a sector responsible for 20 per cent of global carbon emissions. Collaboration is going to be critical to our industry successfully curbing its impact.