By Chanjief Chandrakumar, thinkstep-anz and Donna Lucas, RMCG

From 1 January 2025, mandatory climate reporting is being phased in for large Australian business and financial institutions. The new rules will be phased in over the next three years, and will require affected business to prepare annual sustainability reports.

While most onion businesses will be below the business size threshold for reporting, their supply chain and customers will start asking for this information from growers to include in their own reporting.

New project to quantify onion industry emissions

The new levy funded Onion Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) project will quantify the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water use efficiency for onion production in Australia’s main growing regions.

The project will assess on-farm emissions as well as those related to inputs such as fertilisers. The project aims to produce an LCA snapshot for the Australian onion industry, as well as confidential reports for participating businesses so they can see where they stand in comparison to industry averages.

What’s in it for onion businesses?

As a participant, your business will receive a concise, strictly confidential report detailing the GHG emissions and water use efficiency per kilogram of onions sold.

This information will be valuable to you if your customers request such data. We know that some customers are already asking for this type of data. This is likely to increase in the future as other businesses in the supply chain are required to report their emissions.

Moreover, you can use the insights from the report to identify opportunities for your business to reduce emissions, save costs, or other areas for improvement and efficiency gains.

Industry benchmarks

Aggregated, deidentified data will help estimate national averages. If sufficient data was available, regionally aggregated estimates may also be produced, allowing participating businesses to compare their emissions to both national and regional benchmarks. With regional benchmarks, we will ensure that the regions selected are large enough to prevent the identification of individual businesses.