Mahindra Holidays and Resorts India Limited

At a Glance

Industry

Hospitality

Project Types

Clean and Renewable Energy, Commercial Energy Efficiency, Supply Chain

Year

2021

Location

Mumbai

Summary

Krutika Dalvi endeavored to recognize the emission mitigation and carbon sequestration potential of Club Mahindra’s agri-food supply chain.

Goals

Club Mahindra, the flagship brand of Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India Limited, has relatively higher emissions from purchased goods than actual operating activities. The greatest opportunity to reduce CO2 emissions lies in climate-conscious material procurement from its suppliers. As a Climate Corps fellow with Club Mahindra, Krutika Dalvi was engaged in the task of identifying strategies for green purchasing and carbon sequestration that would assist Club Mahindra in achieving the carbon neutrality target by 2040.

Solutions

She approached the project by scrutinizing the emissions data of purchased goods and identified agri-products as the highest contributor. Agriculture is one of the drivers in environmental degradation and yet most susceptible to environmental change. Considering this, two Farm to Fork (FTF) strategies—sustainable self- production and green purchasing—coupled with carbon farming, were proposed as a plausible solution. Incidentally, in the locality of the pilot project location, Tungi, flagship property of Club Mahindra, rice is the major crop. It is cultivated mostly by a conservation agriculture technique termed as SRT by the local farmers.

Therefore, a study was designed to compare procurement of traditionally cultivated rice (puddling method) via conventional supply chain with:
1. Cultivation of rice by SRT on-site
2. Direct procurement of rice from SRT farms.

The feasibility of each FTF strategy was explored based on projected costs and benefits incurred in terms of production and yield per hectare. A web-based quantification tool CFT was used to estimate GHG emissions from this farm. Contrary, to persistent carbon positive emissions from the conventional supply chain, it was observed that rice cultivation using SRT has a tremendous potential to facilitate carbon sequestration in soils, if implemented scientifically over a longer duration of time. Therefore, a strategy to implement carbon farming along with FTF was devised.

Potential Impact

Implementation of the FTF strategies proposed by Krutika Dalvi, have a potential to meet 35% demand of total rice consumption at Club Mahindra Tungi while gaining ₹ 11,23,424 (NPV) on an upfront investment of ₹ 1,25,928. The on-site rice production is projected to reduce the price by 24% per kg. The CO2e emissions/kg of rice were observed to be eight times higher for the traditional method of cultivation in comparison to the SRT technique even after negating the effect of methane emissions from paddy and providing a 0.5 times higher yield/per acre.

Therefore, ~318 tonnes CO2e emissions and a carbon tax of ₹ 2,35,246 can be avoided annually by Club Mahindra just by switching to SRT rice. Club Mahindra can also reach its Carbon neutrality target of 2040 much earlier in 2031-32 itself. In this context, she has also devised a voluntary carbon offsets scheme-Farm to Fork scheme coupled with Carbon farming which will enable Club Mahindra to encourage local farmers to adopt SRT.

In return, the SRT farmers get paid to sell carbon credits for each metric tons of CO2e they sequester for Club Mahindra. The potential enabler-list of SRT farmers in Tungi, knowledge partner and carbon verifying bodies have already been identified for Club Mahindra’s perusal. The scheme is envisioned to offset financial and environmental risk, for Club Mahindra rather than inheriting it from its current supply chain.


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