From the Chairman

Building on our promise to improve lives and protect the environment

Much has happened in the world since we last reported on our comprehensive sustainability strategy. While people everywhere worked to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of natural disasters had a devastating impact on thousands of lives and nearly every continent, igniting renewed calls for urgent climate action.

These events also offered companies like ours an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the responsibility we share to protect our planet and preserve the health and well-being of people. At Eaton, it’s a responsibility we take seriously. We’ve long believed that we not only have a commitment to our stakeholders, we have a broader commitment to society. This is clearly reflected in our mission ─ to improve the quality of life and the environment. And it’s what drives our pursuit of our comprehensive sustainability strategy, which is built around creating sustainable solutions, reducing our footprint, engaging our employees and communities where we operate, and doing business right.

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In this report, I’m pleased to share an update on the progress we’ve made advancing our strategy, which encompasses our science-based targets to cut emissions from our operations by 50 percent and reduce our indirect Scope 3 emissions by 15 percent by 2030. These ambitious goals have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative. We further aligned our efforts with the world’s leading sustainability experts by becoming a signatory of the U.N. Global Compact’s pact, a move that conveys our commitment to doing business responsibly and advancing broader societal goals.

We intensified our operational rigor around how we’re pursuing our sustainability goals, and established our Sustainability Executive Council, a group responsible for the execution of our strategy that I chair personally and includes several members of our senior leadership team. And we expanded how we measure and report on our actions in order to provide greater transparency into our progress. Our newly created Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report outlines our governance and risk management strategies and offers an analysis of various climate scenarios that demonstrates we’re prepared for the climate crises of the future.

We’re proud of our work to improve the lives of those around us and the planet we all share. But our work continues. Regardless of the progress we’ve made, we must be unyielding in our efforts to protect the environment. It’s the promise we’ve made to the world, and it’s a promise we intend to keep for people today and for the generations that will follow. 

Craig Arnold
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer