Walmart – Viktoria Waldenfels – 2024

Summary

Viktoria Waldenfels helped refine Walmart’s value chain decarbonization action plan by modeling reduction levers and identifying Key Performance Indicators to track progress.

Goals

Walmart has a goal to achieve zero emissions in its operations by 2040 (Scopes 1 and 2) and was the first U.S. retailer to set an emissions goal that does not rely on carbon offsets. In addition to these reduction efforts, Walmart has been engaging its suppliers through Project Gigaton since 2017. After suppliers reported action that is expected to mitigate 1 billion metric tons of emissions from global value chains by 2030, achieving the company’s goal six years ahead of schedule, Walmart is continuing its efforts to activate its suppliers on climate action. To help accelerate the achievement of Walmart’s targets, Viktoria was hired to support the refinement of the value chain decarbonization plan and to model KPIs monitoring Walmart’s decarbonization efforts and supplier actions.

Solutions

Viktoria modeled and refined indicators through which Walmart can track its progress in reducing its overall footprint. Furthermore, she assessed scenarios to evaluate Walmart’s emissions reduction potential. Viktoria used the following approach in her project:

• Benchmarked KPIs and areas of action prioritized by peers and suppliers for value chain decarbonization
• Interviewed more than 20 relevant WMT stakeholders across various departments (including Energy, Responsible Sourcing, Metrics, Project Gigaton, Walmart Foundation, Policy, and Sustainability) to map existing initiatives and monitoring capabilities and to assess possibilities for future data collection, tracking of progress and supplier activation
• Modeled Walmart’s current and projected energy consumption under different grid greening and energy procurement scenarios
• Analyzed current developments in Regenerative Agriculture and Customer Energy use as main levers to reduce Walmart’s Scope 3 footprint – Formed recommendations to measure progress on Walmart’s climate targets and drive activation across the value chain

Potential Impact

As a retailer with operations in more than two dozen countries, a supplier base of over 100,000 businesses and millions of customers around the world, Walmart has the potential to not only reduce its own emissions, but also help support the adoption of clean energy and reduction of emissions of thousands of suppliers. By contributing to Walmart’s decarbonization roadmap and making progress trackable, Viktoria’s work can help Walmart’s efforts to meet its decarbonization targets and mitigate potential future risks stemming from changes in CO2 pricing, energy transition, and shifting or new frameworks.