A Conversation with Jane Franch, Vice President, Strategic Sourcing & Sustainability, Numi Organic Tea and Kayalin Akens-Irby, Chief of Staff Planet FWD

In preparation for the SHP Toolkit Webinar: The Carbon Footprint of Tea: A Conversation with Jane Franch and Kayalin Akens-Irby, I spoke with Jane about Numi Organic Tea’s focus on measuring their climate impact. I asked why Numi had made such a strong commitment to climate action. Jane mentioned a study done by the Tea Institute of India showing that under different warming scenarios, in 15 years tea cultivation will not be happening in Assam. Assam is one of Numi’s primary sourcing regions for the tea that is the backbone of their top selling tea.

“Tea cultivation will not be happening. We can see it there on the map,” Jane told me. “Right where our garden is located, tea won’t be able to be grown because the climatic conditions will not be suitable for tea cultivation.

So that’s a starting fact, right? We have to sit with that.

I feel emotional right now, even, you know, speaking of it. Because there are people on the other side of that. There are thousands of farmworkers who we depend on… who have not been the ones pumping the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

What Can We Do?

So as a mission driven company, who sources directly and builds our product around that kind of honoring of life and respect for all of our stakeholders, that really sits with us, right? And that in itself is an imperative. It’s a call to action to say, ‘What can we do? What else can we do? What more can we do? How do we approach this? What’s our piece in it?”

There are things that we can’t answer or resolve. But what we can do is understand our piece of it as clearly as possible and work as hard as we can on those pieces that we hold. And the first step in that is really understanding what our contribution is to global emissions.”

Join us to learn more about Numi’s approach to making a difference and how Planet FWD provides tools to do so!

Thursday, June 16, 2-3 pm ET.

Register here.