As stated in our Environmental Charter, MC recognizes the critical importance of natural capital, including biodiversity, and is committed to maintaining, protecting, and restoring it. We have positioned “Conserving and Effectively Utilizing Natural Capital,” including consideration of biodiversity, as part of our Materiality, which are issues for management to address in order for MC to achieve sustainable growth. Based on these policies and materiality analysis, MC analyzes its nature-related issues using the TNFD framework and strives to minimize negative impacts on its natural capital from its business activities. Natural capital issues are taken into account when reviewing and making decisions on loan and investment proposals.
Forests are regarded as one of the most important types of natural capital because of their vital role in preserving biodiversity as well as capturing and storing greenhouse gases. Therefore, MC is working to reduce the deforestation impact of its activities to zero, including through the establishment of individual guidelines for each of the forest risk commodities we handle (soybean, timber and paper products, and palm oil ) with the aim of ensuring that procurement of these commodities is not connected to deforestaion. To confirm compliance with the Mitsubishi Corporation Policy for Sustainable Supply Chain Management, which outlines MC’s actions to address human rights, labor rights, and environmental issues in the supply chain, we also require all MC suppliers to understand, support and implement this policy. Furthermore, we conduct annual supplier surveys to ensure that our policies regarding the handling of products with high environmental or social risks are being observed. (See the Supply Chain Management page for further information.)
In addition, we are engaged in corporate philanthropy activities aimed at conserving biodiversity, including the Tropical Forest Regeneration Project and the Global Coral Reef Conservation Project.