Al Dahra 2025 Sustainability Report Shows Regenerative Farming and Supply Chain ESG Progress

Al Dahra, a global agribusiness headquartered in Abu Dhabi operating in 15 countries across Africa, Europe and the Middle East, has released its sixth consecutive annual sustainability report documenting progress across climate, water stewardship, regenerative agriculture, responsible sourcing, employee engagement and community impact as the company transitions from building sustainability foundations to executing them at scale. The report highlights Romania operating approximately 76 percent of cultivated land under reduced tillage, one of the largest such deployments in Europe, alongside the rollout of no-till farming in Egypt showing measurable improvements in soil health and water efficiency, while biofuel-powered shipping routes expanded more than fourfold and modal shifts to inland barge transport reduced approximately 200 truck movements per week. Arnoud van den Berg, Group Chief Executive Officer at Al Dahra, said sustainability is central to long-term value creation in a world facing growing pressure on food systems, climate and natural resources, and that 2025 represented progress from building foundations to delivering at scale across resilient farming systems, governance and data capabilities and measurable emissions reduction.

 

Climate Baseline and Agricultural Carbon Accounting

 

Al Dahra completed a comprehensive greenhouse gas inventory across Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in 2025, including both FLAG and non-FLAG categories under the GHG Protocol's Forest, Land and Agriculture guidance, establishing 2025 as a new baseline year for the company's climate performance tracking. The decision to shift focus toward carbon intensity per crop and per hectare rather than absolute emissions reflects the agricultural sector's unique operational reality, where land area and crop yield are the most meaningful denominators for assessing the environmental efficiency of farming systems and where absolute emissions may rise even as practices improve if cultivation area expands. To support this agricultural carbon accounting approach, Al Dahra initiated its transition to Sandy by Trinity AgTech, a carbon and natural capital reporting platform purpose-built for agriculture, recognising that general sustainability reporting platforms are insufficiently calibrated to the specific data types and measurement methodologies required for credible agricultural emissions management.

The appointment of a full-time ecologist in 2025 to guide the development of nature-positive practices and ensure biodiversity considerations are consistently embedded across operations provides the dedicated internal expertise needed to move from policy commitments to operational biodiversity integration at the farm management level. For an agribusiness operating across 500,000 hectares by 2030 spanning diverse ecosystems from European temperate agriculture to African and Middle Eastern arid environments, the ecological expertise needed to design and implement nature-positive farming practices cannot be imported from external consultants on a project basis but requires embedded specialist knowledge that understands each operating context.

 

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Supply Chain ESG and Logistics Decarbonisation

 

Al Dahra completed a comprehensive ESG risk mapping exercise across its supply chain in 2025 and selected Sedex as its supplier ESG assessment platform, establishing a scalable framework for responsible sourcing across what the company describes as a complex global agricultural commodity supply chain serving more than 40 markets. The Sedex platform selection provides Al Dahra with access to the world's largest collaborative platform for sharing responsible sourcing data, enabling more efficient supplier assessment and due diligence than bespoke questionnaire approaches while allowing benchmarking against the thousands of other companies using Sedex across shared supplier relationships. The more than fourfold expansion of biofuel-powered shipping routes alongside the modal shift to inland barge transport in Romania reducing approximately 200 truck movements per week demonstrates that logistics decarbonisation is proceeding at operational scale rather than remaining a stated intention without implementation.

The combination of regenerative farming practices, precision irrigation, carbon intensity measurement and supply chain ESG assessment positions Al Dahra to meet the growing regulatory and customer requirements for agricultural supply chain sustainability documentation, including the EU Deforestation Regulation's traceability requirements for commodity supply chains and the corporate Scope 3 emissions reporting obligations that downstream food and consumer goods companies face under CSRD. For a company whose revenue model depends on supplying agricultural commodities and animal feed to commercial enterprises and government agencies across 40-plus markets, the ability to provide credible sustainability documentation for its products is becoming a commercial prerequisite rather than a voluntary differentiation.

 

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People and Safety Performance

 

The first Global Employee Engagement Survey achieved an 80 percent participation rate and an engagement score of 76 percent, six percentage points above the industry benchmark, with 82 percent of employees expressing pride in working for Al Dahra and 81 percent saying they would recommend it as a great place to work. The health and safety performance improvements, including zero fatalities in 2025, a reduction in Lost Time Injuries from 48 to 44 and training compliance rising from 38 to 65 percent supported by total training hours increasing from 41,000 to 59,000, demonstrate meaningful operational safety management improvement across what is inherently a physically demanding agricultural workforce spanning diverse regulatory environments. The community investment of over AED 2 million across education, community development, health, culture and social wellbeing, alongside a new ambition to positively impact 100,000 lives by 2030, extends Al Dahra's sustainability programme into the social impact dimensions that are increasingly expected of large agribusinesses operating in developing and emerging market communities.

 

Outlook for Al Dahra's 2030 Sustainability Platform

 

Al Dahra's ambition to operate a global, irrigated, sustainable, digitally driven farming platform spanning 500,000 hectares by 2030 provides an ambitious scale target against which the sustainability practices documented in the 2025 report must be deployed consistently as the company continues to grow. Whether Al Dahra can maintain and improve the sustainability performance metrics demonstrated in 2025 while simultaneously expanding its farming footprint substantially across new geographies will be the defining operational test of the report's stated transition from foundations to execution. The convergence of food security imperatives in the Middle East and Africa, regulatory pressure on agricultural supply chain sustainability in export markets and the commercial opportunity of being positioned as the world's largest digitally enabled sustainable farming platform creates conditions in which Al Dahra's sustainability investment serves both compliance and competitive differentiation objectives simultaneously.

 

Source: PRNewswire