Environmental Management Promotion System

In 2014, the Environmental Management Strategy Committee was established to take a more strategic and innovative approach to environmental management by management-led promotion. In 2021, the ESG Management Strategy Meeting was launched to strengthen management strategies from an ESG perspective, including environmental considerations. In addition, Environmental Manager Conferences are held for each region—Japan, China, Asia, North America and Europe—to globally advance environmental management across the Kubota Group.

• Sites engaged in the business of operation or maintenance of environmental plants

The ESG Management Strategy Meeting provides opportunities for management to discuss the Kubota Group’s issues and response strategies from an ESG perspective. The discussions covers the medium- and long-term direction of the Kubota Group’s environmental management, such as medium- and long-term targets and key measures in light of global environmental issues such as climate change and the business environment, and the meeting determines priority items and plans. Environmental issues were discussed on four occasions in 2023 at meetings in February, July, October and December.
The results of the committee meetings are reported to the Board of Directors and the Executive Officers’ Meeting, and are distributed throughout the Group. It also promotes management based on the plan-do-check-action (PDCA) cycle by assessing and analyzing the progress of the entire Group’s environmental conservation activities and reflecting the results when formulating new plans and policies. We will continue to promote effective environmental management led by members at the management level.

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  ESG Management Strategy Meeting

The Kubota Group holds Environmental Manager Conferences for each region aimed at strengthening the environment management system and reducing environmental loads and environmental risks on a global basis.
To realize the Environmental Vision, it will become necessary to accelerate the further reduction of environmental impacts globally. Moreover, as production has increased in overseas areas, it is necessary to thoroughly implement environmental risk reduction measures. We revised the method of holding the conferences, which were held every second year up until 2019, making use of the online format to stimulate sharing of information such as policies and exchanges of examples within regions. Instead of the usual stand-alone conferences in each region, in 2023 we held joint conferences for the China and Asian regions and the same for the North American and European regions in an effort to facilitate exchanges between regions. Local company presidents, environmental managers, and staff members participated in the overseas conferences, while the Japan conference brought together environmental managers and staff members from 24 sites across Japan, including Group companies. The focus of the conferences was on communicating the Kubota Group’s policies and initiatives, as well as sharing progress on the Medium-Term Environmental Conservation Targets. Participants also presented case studies on mainly energy-saving measures and environment risk countermeasures. Also, the environmental manager in Thailand was invited as a guest speaker at the Japan conference to present the environmental activities being implemented there.
As for conferences held in overseas regions, since 2017 the Kubota Group has been building a framework to enable local business sites to host their own conferences in order to efficiently promote governance, strengthen collaboration, and raise the level of activities within their own region. A conference of five companies in Thailand was launched in December 2017, another with three companies in China’s Jiangsu Province in December 2018, and another with six companies in North America in August 2019. Each of these conferences is addressing regional-specific topics by setting targets, regularly inspecting each other’s plants, strengthening legal and regulatory compliance, and sharing good practices.
The Group will continue to work diligently to further raise its level of environmental conservation activities across the entire Group by drawing on the contributions of the Environmental Manager Conferences.

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  Joint North America-Europe conference (held online)

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  Joint China-Asia conference (held online)