Missed Opportunities

This project is a great starting point to escalate conservation actions in key watersheds. The challenge remains to be how to perform such escalation. We need additional resources to sell the project to other companies to invest in the same objectives.

Project Narrative

The lack of planning in the transformation of land cover has caused the degradation of natural ecosystems that provide multiple ecosystem services, among which are the provision of water for consumption. This, in addition to the alteration of hydrological cycles due to global climate change, has evidenced crises due to access to water in multiple places in the world. Many companies that provide goods and services directly dependent on the use of drinking water have assumed their share of responsibility to mitigate these crises. That is the origin of 'Water for the Planet', a water replenishment program through which PepsiCo, in collaboration with The Nature Conservancy (The Nature Conservancy), seeks to return to nature the water used in its processes through the establishment of green infrastructure in strategic basins for your business. On November 15, 2016, an agreement was signed between PepsiCo and The Nature Conservancy, in which PepsiCo granted a donation of USD $ 3,000,000 to support a water replenishment strategy in Latin America, within the framework of the Water Funds. Such strategy would be focused, originally, in 5 cities of 4 countries: Monterrey and Mexico City (Mexico), Guatemala City (Guatemala), São Paulo (Brazil) and Bogotá (Colombia). A year and a half later, PepsiCo requested the incorporation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) to the project, committing an additional USD $ 200,000. The objective was to establish collaborative work between The Nature Conservancy and PepsiCo to invest in the development and strengthening of Water Funds, to support a large-scale watershed conservation initiative in five countries (six basins) in Latin America, with positive impacts on the water and people, which represents a multiplicative and long-term effect. The expected results were to 1) Implement conservation activities in the field that provide benefits in quantity and quality of water for users in key watersheds, and that contribute to PepsiCo advance in its goals of preservation of water resources. 2) contribute to the long-term sustainability of watersheds under water stress, of which PepsiCo and other users extract water. Thus, it helps the communities in which the company operates and contributes to making its production plants more sustainable. 3) through participation in the promotion of technical studies and conservation work in the field, leverage key support and funding from other public and private organizations, which are needed to achieve large-scale impacts through collective action.