Every year, Global Citizen strives to make our festival bigger and better while working to make our impact on the environment smaller than ever. This year, Global Citizen teamed up with coconut water company Vita Coco to offset our festival’s carbon footprint.
As a New York City-based company, Vita Coco says it’s important to the company to have a both a local and a global impact in the communities it touches. That’s why Vita Coco funded projects through Code Redd, a nonprofit that works to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to offset the carbon footprint of the 2018 Global Citizen Festival in Central Park.
As part of this initiative, Vita Coco funded emissions reduction efforts in Indonesia and Brazil, where the company sources many of its products, through Code Redd’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative. Together, the organizations are helping to restore forests and support education, water access, women's empowerment, agricultural intensification, and local business development and job opportunities in these countries as well.
These efforts will help preserve standing forests and support the communities that guard them, which, on a larger scale, will help to counter greenhouse gas emissions and offset the carbon footprint of the Global Citizen Festival — which includes environmental impact factors like the energy required to light up our stunning stage, and the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases emitted in the transportation process of thousands of concert-goers getting to the park.
The Global Citizen Festival is working to move toward becoming a zero-waste festival, and with the help of partners like Vita Coco, we’re making great progress and taking steps to become more sustainable and to mitigate the festival’s environmental impact.
Since 2014, Vita Coco has invested in socio-economic efforts in the communities where they source their coconut products from through an initiative called the Vita Coco Project. Vita Coco is continuing to expand its social impact program by proactively addressing and supporting sustainability initiatives with Global Citizen.
“We’re committed to doing what feels right for our consumers, our farmers, and the planet. Teaming with Global Citizen allows us to continue growing our Vita Coco Project initiatives in a sustainable way,” says the company’s Executive Vice President of Brand Strategy Jane Prior.
Over the last four years, Vita Coco has worked to support its farmers and their families in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The Vita Coco Project has built 15 classrooms, helping to increase access to education for K-12 students, and its training programs and model farms have changed the lives of more than 3,400 coconut farmers.
And the company has similarly worked to nourish the planet by providing more than 12,700 coconut seedlings to farmers to help reinvigorate coconut cultivation and make it more sustainable. Those seedlings will result in the harvest of 1.27 million new coconuts every year.