Name: Morgane Yvergniaux | Climate and Nature

Company:  Pernod Ricard

Connect with Morgane on LinkedIn

Welcome to our series aimed at spotlighting the individual leaders within BIER member companies and stakeholder organizations. Learn how these practitioners and their companies are addressing pressing challenges around water, energy, agriculture, climate change, and what inspires each of them to advance environmental sustainability in the beverage sector and collectively, overall.

Briefly describe your role and responsibilities and how long you have worked with your company.

I joined Pernod Ricard five years ago to take on a newly created role as Head of Sustainable Terroir. At this point, Pernod Ricard was relatively early in identifying regenerative agriculture as the future for our business and a crucial step in ensuring our supply chain is resilient and secured for generations to come. I was brought in to lead the development and implementation of this strategy, which we call Nurturing Terroir – also one of the four key pillars of Pernod Ricard’s global sustainability roadmap, ‘Good Times from a Good Place’. My work focused on securing the sustainability of our sourcing by addressing the origins and agricultural practices behind our key ingredients. This included developing strategies to mitigate and adapt to external pressures, such as climate change, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, and community well-being, across our supply chain. Over the course of four years, I helped define the vision, structure, and tools necessary to embed sustainable and regenerative agriculture practices throughout our global affiliate network.

As our pilot programs and team expanded, I stepped into a newly created role to establish and now lead a larger team of experts on Climate & Nature, which unites our work across three key pillars: Terroir, Climate, and Nature. The Terroir team continues to support our affiliates, suppliers, and farmers in advancing sustainable and regenerative agriculture. Our Climate team manages our Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) commitment and climate adaptation strategy. Most recently, we launched a dedicated Nature team, which is advancing our work on biodiversity, water stewardship, and pollution mitigation. This includes a scientific partnership with the French National Natural History Museum to develop robust methodologies for measuring biodiversity outcomes.

In this role, I focus on managing risks while ensuring our actions generate measurable, positive environmental impacts, fully aligned with our 2030 targets to have all affiliates engaged in biodiversity initiatives and 100% of key raw materials sustainably sourced.

How has the company’s sustainability program evolved over the years, and what are your specific priorities for 2025?

Pernod Ricard’s current sustainability strategy, Good Times from a Good Place, was launched in 2019 and marked a significant turning point in how the company approached environmental and social responsibility. Structured around four strategic pillars: Nurturing Terroir, Valuing People, Circular Making, and Responsible Hosting, the first phase of the strategy (2019–2024) focused on building a strong foundation. This included setting a clear vision, developing robust methodologies, establishing metrics, and aligning efforts across affiliates and with external stakeholders and peers.

That foundational work has enabled us to develop a coherent, science-based framework and enhance our internal capacity, particularly in areas such as climate and nature. We’ve completed in-depth climate scenario analyses to identify key business vulnerabilities and emissions drivers. We also piloted a high-level assessment using the Science-Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) framework, mapping areas where our operations and supply chains put pressure on ecosystems, and where we are most exposed to water stress, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss.

Now, as we move toward 2025, we’ve reached a critical inflection point: the second chapter of our strategy. While continuing to manage risk remains essential, our focus is shifting toward delivering value creation through precision and impact. Rather than expecting all affiliates and distilleries to address every issue uniformly, we tailor interventions based on a granular understanding of local vulnerabilities and pressures, which we call “hotspots”. These include both direct operations (e.g., distilleries) and upstream activities such as agricultural sourcing and packaging.

Our top priorities for 2025 center on:

• Focusing action where it matters most – concentrating on operations and sourcing regions that face the most significant environmental pressures or hold the greatest opportunity for positive impact.
• Building holistic transition plans – integrating climate, biodiversity, water, pollution, and community resilience into a single strategy per hotspot, rather than treating these topics in isolation.
• Enhancing local collaboration – engaging with local stakeholders, including authorities, NGOs, and even actors outside our supply chain, to co-develop solutions tailored to each landscape’s unique socio-ecological context.
• Tailoring expectations – customizing targets and approaches for each affiliate, supplier, or site based on local realities rather than applying one-size-fits-all directives. For example, we no longer ask all suppliers to deliver uniform GHG reductions, but instead define locally relevant Scope 3 pathways.

This approach reinforces the essence of our Nurturing Terroir philosophy: viewing each landscape not just as a raw material source, but as a living mosaic of environmental, economic, and social interdependencies. As we refine our sustainability roadmap in the lead-up to 2025 and beyond, we are increasingly focused on building long-term resilience by addressing local risks and by generating shared value in the ecosystems where we operate.

How do you feel being a BIER member will help you successfully address the key areas you are addressing in 2025?

As we enter a pivotal phase of our sustainability strategy, the relevance of BIER’s collaborative model is more important than ever.

One of the greatest strengths of BIER is the ability to learn from peers across the beverage industry. During the last in-person meeting hosted by Pernod Ricard, I had the opportunity to connect with fellow members and gain insight into a wide range of approaches, challenges, and levels of maturity across key sustainability topics. Some discussions introduced entirely new dimensions to my thinking, and that kind of peer-to-peer exchange is truly invaluable, particularly as we deepen our focus on climate, nature, and tailored local interventions in 2025.

In addition to peer learning, BIER provides a trusted space for collective intelligence on emerging and complex issues, such as evolving carbon markets, deforestation regulations, and interpreting frameworks like the GHG Protocol. While we have strong internal expertise and public affairs capacity at Pernod Ricard, BIER complements that by offering a collaborative forum where we can explore nuanced questions, validate concerns, and, when appropriate, coalesce around shared positions. This strengthens our ability to navigate uncertainty and advocate effectively.

Ultimately, what makes BIER uniquely valuable is that it reinforces the notion that we’re not alone in tackling these systemic challenges. Being part of a network that fosters open dialogue, shared learning, and collective influence will be instrumental as we move forward with our 2025 priorities, particularly in scaling nature-based solutions, building resilient supply chains, and translating ambition into local, context-specific action.

Name one of the practical solutions or best practices you learned in working with BIER and its members and why it was important to you and/ or your company.

One of the most valuable takeaways from working with BIER and its members has been the ability to benchmark approaches and methodologies, particularly in emerging or complex areas such as emissions accounting, water stewardship, and nature-based metrics.

Benchmarking has been especially helpful in validating our direction and refining our technical approaches. Beyond benchmarking, one practical, on-the-ground example is our innovative, one-of-a-kind, collaborative water replenishment project in Mexico, Charco Bendito. While this initiative sits slightly outside formal BIER programming, it exemplifies the kind of shared value and peer collaboration that BIER fosters. The project not only contributes to critical water restoration in a high-risk watershed but also reinforces our shared responsibility as industry leaders to go beyond compliance and deliver tangible, place-based outcomes.

In both cases, benchmarking and collective action, the value lies in not having to navigate these challenges in isolation. Whether it’s testing methodologies, interpreting evolving standards, or advancing nature-based solutions, the ability to compare, validate, and collaborate with peers helps us move faster and more confidently. That sense of not being alone in the work, and being able to shape shared solutions is exactly why BIER remains a uniquely valuable forum for us.

Share a recent accomplishment of your company’s sustainability initiatives/achievements you are most proud of and why.

One of the accomplishments I’m most proud of, both personally and professionally, is the internal trust we’ve built at Pernod Ricard to shape a shared, integrated vision for climate and nature. Over the past five years, we’ve moved beyond fragmented efforts to establish a unified strategic foundation rooted in resilience, not just decarbonization. While carbon remains a key component, our ambition goes deeper: building long-term resilience across ecosystems, communities, and supply chains.

This evolution has necessitated a redefinition of what resilience means within our context. That clarity was crucial in developing the second chapter of our sustainability strategy and informing our broader positioning for upcoming regulations, such as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). From governance and metrics to internal alignment, the work we’ve done in this space has laid the groundwork for meaningful, localized action.

I’m also proud of the organizational commitment behind this transformation. Even amid global volatility, our leadership has reaffirmed sustainability as a long-term business priority. That continued endorsement, from strategy to delivery, is a powerful signal, not just to our team but across the organization.

While much of the past five years has been focused on vision, strategy, and system-building, developing methodologies, metrics, and tools, we’re now entering a new phase: implementation and impact. Having the support and structure in place to deliver our ambitions is what makes this moment so significant. It’s not just about what we’ve envisioned, but what we’re now empowered to execute.

If you had one superpower that could be used to radically accelerate and scale sustainable best practices, which one would it be, and how would you use it?

If I could have one superpower, it would be the ability to ignite a global shift in consciousness, one where consumers, communities, and companies alike deeply understand their power and responsibility to drive sustainability and collaborate to achieve a united impact.

At Pernod Ricard, our iconic brands create moments of conviviality, bringing people together in meaningful ways. I would love to see those same consumers become ambassadors of sustainability, choosing brands not just for taste or heritage, but for the values they represent.

This kind of collective awareness would radically accelerate progress. It would shift sustainability from a corporate initiative to a shared societal movement, where every actor plays a role, from producers to policymakers to the people enjoying a drink with friends.

While it’s not a traditional superpower, the desire to awaken that kind of collective responsibility and agency is powerful in itself. Because when expectations rise and accountability is shared, we move from compliance to transformation. That’s where real, lasting change begins.

BIER Publications referenced in this interview:
2023 Water and Energy Use Benchmarking Study