Data-Driven Enablement
Natalia Moulin Aguiar's Story
Equipping the Organization for Proactive Sustainability
Natalia Moulin Aguiar is Sustainability Performance and Program Delivery Manager at Philip Morris International (PMI). She has a background in environmental engineering which she leverages in her role to drive PMI’s climate-related strategies and environmental disclosures. Her motivation stems from the passion she feels from the people she works with, and PMI’s commitment to embedding sustainability into business practices.
About PMI
Philip Morris International (PMI) is one of the world’s leading tobacco companies. Led by science and innovation, and with the right regulatory encouragement and support from civil society, PMI is working to replace cigarettes with smoke-free products.
Sector: Tobacco product producer
Geography: Headquartered in the USA with global operations and multiple brands
Employees: 82,000+ globally
Website: www.pmi.com
Challenges
faced
In her role of providing verified environmental data and implementing a systematic approach to monitoring sustainability progress, Natalia and her team feel proud of receiving and maintaining the high quality data in our reporting.
One of the objectives is to ensure the accuracy and reliability of data related to PMI’s sustainability performance across its operations. Given the size of PMI’s global operations and value chain , maintaining data integrity is crucial. The increasing and evolving mandatory and voluntary disclosure requirements further contribute to the criticality of this work.
One important factor in all of this has been PMI’s product transformation towards a smoke-free portfolio, with 38% of revenues coming from smoke-free products as of 2024. Navigating this change in the context of sustainability motivates Natalia and her team to support PMI’s ambitious sustainability aspirations.
Actions
taken
Conscious of the importance of data integrity for informed decision-making, Natalia and her team implement data verification protocols that ensure the reliability of sustainability-related data. PMI’s nonfinancial disclosures have been evolving from initially being voluntary to becoming driven by mandatory regulatory requirements and external stakeholder expectations. In her capacity in Operations, Natalia has also worked cross functionally to help put into place robust monitoring processes to track PMI’s progress against its sustainability commitments. The process aims to embrace a notion of ‘control and assurance by design’ to establish, from its onset, trustworthy and transparent nonfinancial disclosures.
Through extensive supplier engagement led by several teams across PMI, the company is able to increase the use of primary data for calculations, such as Scope 3 emissions, enhancing data quality and transparency. Natalia has helped drive PMI’s strategy to progressively replace spend-based accounting in PMI’s GHG inventory with primary data. This effort is expected to contribute to enhancing data quality and GHG accounting from PMI’s suppliers, drive reductions across the value chain, and enable PMI to fulfill upcoming regulatory requirements.
PMI’s long-term executive compensation program reflects the company’s commitment to position sustainability at the core of the corporate strategy. With the introduction of PMI’s Sustainability Index, key sustainability strategies are brought to focus. Natalia and her team have also leveraged the company’s board-level sustainability related aspirations, in specific those related to climate change and PMI’s GHG emission reductions, to drive organic emission reductions across operations and support deployment functions in this journey. A critical enabler for this strategy was the introduction of PMI’s Internal Carbon Pricing in 2020 .
Resonance
of impact
The work led by Natalia and her team has had an impact across PMI. By standardizing data collection and deploying enhanced data verification processes, Natalia and her team have contributed to transparent, data-driven communication across PMI and externally through their sustainability reporting.
Their efforts have earned recognition from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) with a triple A rating for their disclosures on climate change, water security, and forests for the fourth consecutive year. With PMI’s ambition to maintain the CDP triple A-rating, Natalia sees this as an opportunity drive further innovation and actively engage stakeholders across the value chain.
Looking ahead, Natalia is dedicated to supporting the integration of sustainability into PMI’s business strategy, doing her part to ensure that sustainability is systematically embedded in company decisions. By harnessing her strengths and expertise, she aims to provide reliable and business-relevant sustainability metrics to inform strategic developments and decision-making.
Finally, a key milestone for the future is supporting the company in achieving carbon neutrality by 2025 through innovative programs and collaborative initiatives. These efforts will focus on emission reductions via technological changes and improvements, as well as comprehensive employee engagement programs to drive fundamental behavioral changes.