Freshippo presented its climate resilience approach during the COP28 China Corner’s Side Event
Shen Li, Freshippo’s co-founder and head of sustainable development, spoke at COP28 China Corner’s Side Event, sharing the company’s approach to climate resilience.
“Climate change is a shared global challenge, and enhancing climate resilience in the agriculture, industrial and retail sectors is our collective responsibility,” she said.
Li shared Freshippo’s scenario-based approach to tackling different agricultural challenges via three agricultural methodologies.
Firstly, selecting suitable species based on climate conditions to help agricultural enterprises build climate resilience through contract farming.
Secondly, through climate disaster adaptive procurement, providing rapid response and maximum assistance to farmers to minimize their losses.
Finally, implementing climate disaster adaptive agriculture, which will support contract farmers to resume production following climate disasters.
“Agriculture will continue to be heavily impacted by climate change, making it the common mission of global agriculture practitioners to address climate resilience,” Li said.
As part of the presentation, Freshippo highlighted cases where climate adaptation was implemented successfully.
In one example, several peach orchards in Beijing were unexpectedly hit by a hailstorm in 2022, resulting in direct economic losses of over Rmb6m (US$800,00). In response, Freshippo graded visually damaged peaches as “hail-damaged peaches” and processed those peaches into freeze-dried peach crisps. This initiative helped growers sell the hail-damaged peaches, reducing waste by 200kg per 0.07ha. Additionally, it enabled peach farmers to increase their income by Rmb1,200 per 0.07ha.
Freshippo has also been working to overcome the extreme effects of the hot climate by opening a 13.33ha organic base in the Ulan Buh Desert in Inner Mongolia. Last year, it harvested 400,000 pumpkins. The area of pumpkin fields has expanded to 66.67ha this year. The growth of each pumpkin can help prevent water and soil erosion affecting about 3.99m2 of surrounding soil, benefiting the local climate and environment.
