CASE STUDY

Background

Unilever has set ambitious targets to contribute to “Protect

and regenerate nature”. To drive this transformation, our
brands will collectively invest €1 billion in a new Climate &
Nature Fund, which will be used over the next ten years to
take meaningful action to improve the health of our planet.
It’s early days but we’re starting to expand existing
programmes such as restoring landscapes, reforestation
and reinstating wildlife habitats. We’re focusing our efforts
on a priority set of crops, including palm oil, paper and
board, soy, tea and cocoa.
Achievement of these Multi-Year Priorities require that
Unilever and our partners are able to measure, model,
manage and monitor diverse attributes of the external
world, particularly forest, land, and water bodies. Some of
these attributes include:
Number of suppliers who are physically certified
sustainable sources
Unilever’s footprint in greenhouse gas emissions from
material sources
Water use by suppliers in growing agricultural raw
materials – visible reduction in key water catchment
areas
Detect rampant deforestation close to key suppliers
 The Technology

Unilever has set out to develop an enterprise grade

sustainability platform to acquire, store and analyse
internal, external data sources including satellite
imagery and location coordinates, as decision
parameters to further our sustainability commitments.
Machine learning on satellite imagery data helps detects
changes to the forest, land, and water cover changes to
the world in near real time.
One of the first use cases of this platform is to detect
deforestation in the palm supply chain that is currently
being deployed
The geospatial platform works with Raster (satellite
imagery data) and Vector (geolocation, shapefiles,
tabular data sets) datasets from multiple third party and
internal sources.
Some of the technologies Unilever is leveraging/plans to
leverage include:
GeoSpatial Technologies like Google Earth Engine,
Descrates Labs
GeoLocation Technologies like Orbital Insight
Blockchain Technologies like GreenToken
Supplier Risk Management Services
The Ask

We need you – top thinkers from all over India – to

become drivers of innovation with new technologies.
Unilever needs you to think tactically, but also have a
future-fit vision to achieve the above-mentioned
targets
Think of ways in which this technology can help
Unilever build
Deforestation free supply chain in palm oil, paper and
board, tea, soy and cocoa
Help protect and regenerate 1.5 million hectares of
land, forests and oceans
Implement water stewardship programmes in 100
locations in water stressed areas
While some of the technologies mentioned above are
currently being used or are on our roadmap, we
encourage you to investigate the vast expanse of
technologies that are currently being deployed in the
space of sustainability.
Being firm believers of practicality – your solution
should balance the trade off between cost and time to
deploy a solution and value add through innovation
through technology.
 Evaluation Criteria

Understanding the core

challenge & comprehensiveness
of approach 30%

30%
Practicality of the solution

Innovation through
Technology
40%
Additional Reading

Learn more about the Unilever Sustainable Living

Plan(USLP)
How is Unilever making Sustainable Living
commonplace
What are Unilever’s Sustainable Sourcing Goals?
Dig deeper into UNEP’s Sustainable Development Goals
Season 3