General Mills and Future H2O-B: Aiming For Ambitious Water Sustainability

General Mills and Future H20-B: Aiming For Ambitious Water Sustainability

Introduction

Drawing on cutting-edge science, best available data, and high-fidelity, breakthrough algorithms and analysis, Future H2O helps corporate clients optimize the tradeoffs they face for water—today, tomorrow and into the future.

In 2022, General Mills Inc (GMI), a U.S.-based company that distributes more than 100 food brands around the world, came together with Future H20 to explore how GMI could prioritize water sustainability efforts within their supply chain, specifically in California. Future H2O-B was chosen as a consulting company to pilot the draft Science-Based Targets Network framework methodology for water and to work with GMI and another company to help refine and validate the methodology.

The Challenge: Meeting Corporate Sustainability Goals and Regulatory Compliance

A significant portion of the agricultural products that GMI relies on are sourced from areas that require irrigation, including the Central Valley of California. That region has been experiencing severe, recurring drought and – like many parts of the world – serious groundwater depletion.

GMI has been actively scanning across its entire enterprise for the basins in most need of action against drought in the most pressing ways. The company has been seeking solutions to secure water for the most important part of their supply chain – solutions that were also aligned with their sustainability targets, such as advancing regenerative agriculture on 1 million acres of farmland by 2030. They also want to ensure compliance with California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act most , which establishes a regulatory framework for improving groundwater management over 20 years.

One of the difficulties of finding such solutions: How to decide on whether to work on groundwater or surface water? Ideally, science should tell you which one to prioritize. The analysis Future H2O-B performed indicated GMI should work on groundwater. The next challenge: Where?

Future H20’s Approach: Framework to Local Targets

Working alongside GMI to understand its current needs, plans for growth and anticipated challenges, Future H2O-B developed a data-driven, quantitative groundwater management framework. Our team used a model that has satellite data fused into it from NASA’s GRACE mission, a satellite that measures groundwater depletion (and accretion) via gravity anomalies, to identify two of GMIs top ten basins where the need to act against drought was greatest and GMI’s water use was equivalently high.

Why is satellite data important? Two reasons: It gives a more integrated measure of the status of the aquifer than point estimates from wells; and the approach can be used in places like India, where point data from wells are rare.

The targets Future H2O-B set coincide in two timelines, because managing groundwater is akin to a savings account. Rapidly withdrawing funds depletes the resources available, and to ensure funds are plentiful when times get tough — like prolonged periods of drought — saving more along the way is imperative.

GMI now has the tools to stop groundwater decline in real time. Concurrently, GMI also now has specific strategies that will improve groundwater levels over time. The framework allows GMI to estimate within bounds how much water it needs to put back into aquifers to stop aquifers from declining any further.

Future H2O-B measured GMI’s share of what needs to be put back to take a trend that's negative and make it zero. And our team showed GMI how it can raise levels above the current status quo—an ambitious but attainable reality.

GMI’s allocation is actually smaller than our science team originally thought. That’s good – because it’s achievable. And it’s also challenging: To move the needle on groundwater decline, GMI needs to rally the corporate community in the watershed as a whole. Fortunately, GMI belongs to a coalition of similarly minded companies and NGOs called the California Water Action Coalition (CWAC). By leveraging CWAC, GMI could help transform groundwater at a watershed scale.

Outcomes: Science that Leads to Change

The framework Future H20-B developed for GMI is the first-of-its kind in the corporate sustainability space:

• The framework is informed by the most up-to-date modeling and rigorous hydrological science, developed by leading experts, and balances risk with practicality.

• The framework allows GMI to look at groundwater and surface water quantity together and decide which one it should focus on first.

• The framework allows GMI to serve in a leadership capacity in California, thinking beyond their own contributions to the watershed. They can seek corporate partners who also rely on the region to move the needle significantly.

Our team is confident that if applied with fidelity and urgency, the framework can lead to transformative change at the basin scale.

Next Steps

The framework only measures GMI’s share of the water security solution in California, but not how to get there; the next step is for GMI and Future H2O-B to use the science and the algorithm to create the best portfolio of interventions to achieve GMI’s allocation. Basically, that means putting those interventions into Future H2O-B’s tailored model and measuring the intervention’s impact on groundwater decline – seeing how they flatten the decline curve. Those interventions include regenerative agriculture, Flood MAR and probably some surface and groundwater trading. With our framework, GMI also now has the capability to apply our approach enterprise-wide, to identify where they should focus on groundwater vs. surface water and set course targets.