May 2022: Manuel Arriagada, Chief Executive Officer at Salmones Camanchaca, in an interview with Diario Sustentable

We must continue to integrate sustainability into every aspect of our business. Sustainability is achieved day by day, through our habits and our decisions. We will continue the cultural change started in 2019, which will bring it alive within each employee.

Salmones Camanchaca presented its first Integrated Report 2021 in mid-April, which reports in a single document the company’s economic, social and environmental performance. This document anticipates the regulations issued by the Financial Market Commission (CMF), which require the entities it audits to include sustainability and corporate governance information in their Annual Reports, starting in 2022.

The Chief Executive Officer of Salmones Camanchaca, Manuel Arriagada, referred to the importance of producing this document for the first time and described the company’s most important sustainability milestones during 2021.

Why is integrating sustainability and financial reporting into an Integrated Report important?

The Integrated Report is a natural evolutionary step in our approach to managing sustainability throughout our value chain. We are bringing forward this best practice required by the CMF for 2022, which closely links our financial and operational performance with our commitment to sustainability in a single document that reports our most important objectives and achievements.

What were the company’s main achievements in 2021?

Salmones Camanchaca launched its Sustainability Model in mid-2019, with the objective of identifying and prioritizing the issues that the company must address, grouped into five strategic pillars: Healthy and Nutritious Food, Healthy Ecosystems, Thriving Communities, Meaningful Employment, and Profitable and Responsible Business.

We made significant progress in 2021 executing this strategy, maintaining the organization’s commitment to sustainability and integrating sustainability into the business. We negotiated the first “Sustainability Linked Loan” for the sector, granted by the Loan Market Association (LMA) and the Loan Syndications and Trading Association (LSTA), which links the interest spread on this loan to the fulfillment of ambitious sustainability objectives and indicators.

We were also invited to join the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) for Chile, which includes the largest companies listed on the Santiago Stock Exchange, and the DJSI MILA Pacific Alliance, which includes the largest companies listed on the Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico stock exchanges. We were included in the 2022 Sustainability Yearbook published by the prestigious risk rating agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P), who awarded us with the “SP Global Industry Movers” seal for companies that have achieved the most sustainability progress, as assessed during the DJSI evaluation.

In 2019 we committed to becoming carbon neutral in our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2025, and we then prepared a strategy that we have been fulfilling every year. Accordingly, we reduced our Scope 1 and 2 emissions in 2021 by more than 16,000 tons of CO2 equivalent. Furthermore, 56% of our biomass was certified as complying with the ASC standard, the most demanding sustainability standard for aquaculture.

We also resumed our community engagement strategy during 2021, as many of these initiatives had been restricted by the pandemic. The central objective of our community engagement strategy is to contribute to the legitimacy of our business, which involves making internal changes within the company, associated with systematic changes in how we engage with our local communities. Our social engagement and investment projects in 2021 included the Boyacompostar project, the first Funding Competition, and others.

We arranged more than 122 activities in ten neighborhoods during 2021, and 86% of the workforce were recruited locally, which is aligned with our local recruitment policies. The circular economy BoyaCompostar project involved 30 families from two areas in the Los Lagos Region. Its objective was to reduce organic waste by using a Vermicomposter made from disused buoys, which will reduce C02 emissions by almost 7,000 kg.

We also arranged the first funding competition, where Ch$20 million was distributed to 42 projects with a social impact. The results were more successful than we expected, so we are already working on the second competition.

But we also introduced benefits for our employees. For example, we implemented the BUK HR platform, which integrates all the associated processes into a single portal that streamlines access to information and employee procedures. We reduced our accident rate from 2.7% to 2%, while the claim rate decreased from 46.4% in 2020 to 29.2%. The proportion of women in the workforce increased to 31%.

What are the main sustainability challenges?

We must continue to integrate sustainability into every aspect of our business. Sustainability is achieved day by day, through our habits and our decisions. We will continue the cultural change started in 2019, which will bring it alive within each employee. We understand that this is a process, but we must still move forward in a very determined manner.

We must also achieve the company’s main sustainability objectives, which include reducing antibiotic use, securing ASC certification for most of our sites, and strengthening community engagement and community outreach. But the greatest challenge that we began to address in 2021 was to reduce our environmental risks, based on mitigation mechanisms that would better prepare our aquaculture concessions to deal with such risks, by implementing new technologies, devices and equipment. This would secure greater robustness for our business and protect everything that the company can control.

Does this report align Salmones Camanchaca with the worldwide trend among large companies?

This Integrated Report complies with international sustainability standards. It will be available to the public and our investors, so they can evaluate the company’s practices, policies and environmental, social and governance objectives.

Source: diariosustentable.com