Good afternoon. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the introduction and for the invitation to appear today.
My name is Mark Thompson, and I am Nutrien's executive vice-president and chief strategy and sustainability officer. I'm joining you today from Saskatoon. I'd like to honour our company's practice of acknowledging that this is Treaty No. 6 territory and the homeland of the Métis.
I'll start with a few words on Nutrien. Our company was created in 2018 through a merger between Agrium and Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, previously two of Canada's leading agriculture and mining companies. We're now the world's largest provider and producer of crop inputs and services. Our global business spans four operating segments across 13 countries, including our retail division, also known as Nutrien Ag Solutions, and the manufacturing and mining of potash, nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers. We have a fertilizer production capacity of over 27 million tonnes. Our retail business serves over 500,000 growers around the world.
We are headquartered here in Canada. Our operations here are extensive and growing. We operate six potash mines in Saskatchewan, four nitrogen manufacturing facilities in Alberta, and nearly 300 ag retail outlets primarily across western Canada. This is in addition to our two corporate offices in Calgary and Saskatoon.
On the issue at hand, food security is a global issue that affects all of us. Increasing concern over global food supplies makes Nutrien's purpose to safely and sustainably feed a growing world more important than ever. Nutrien plays a critical role in global food security by ensuring that farmers have the products, services and technologies they need to sustainably increase food production.
By some estimates, the use of fertilizers accounts for approximately 50% of global crop yields and is critical for growers to meet the continued growth in demand for food. We're taking action to help fill the gap for food and fertilizers caused in part by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the resulting disruption to the production and trade of energy, fertilizers, grains and oilseeds from this region. While it's impossible for one company to offset these supply impacts alone, we're doing everything we can to meet our global customers' demands.
In June we announced that we would safely accelerate the ramp up of potash production capabilities at our Saskatchewan mines to 18 million tonnes annually—in several increments over the next three years. In the past two years, more than 70% of additional global production brought online has come from Nutrien alone.
I'd be remiss not to mention our ambitious plans to do all of this while also solving for the challenge of climate change. When dealing in societal imperatives like food security and climate, we must think holistically and work collaboratively together. We can't simply choose one or the other. We must solve for both.
That's why in 2021 we launched our feeding the future plan, which includes commitments to help reduce our carbon footprint while preserving and growing food production. Some of these commitments set to be achieved by 2030 include achieving at least a 30% reduction in scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions intensity, while also investing in the transition to low-carbon fertilizers and scaling up a comprehensive carbon program that empowers growers to accelerate climate-smart agriculture and soil carbon sequestration, where growers are rewarded for their efforts through the generation of carbon credits and assets. On this latter effort, we are in our second year of piloting our carbon program, and we're now targeting 675,000 acres across North America. Interest from growers has been extremely encouraging.
Nutrien is working directly with growers to build customized croplands that reduce their carbon footprint. We assist in taking soil samples and baselines, providing products and technologies and verifying carbon performance. We're also paying growers directly for their participation, anticipating that we need to be ready to support growers in a compliance or voluntary offset market with a focus on scalable, long-term viability.
We're in regular communication with Environment and Climate Change Canada as well as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada on our learnings and findings, and communicating with provincial government stakeholders.
Enabling Nutrien's carbon program and market-based offset systems are key to helping the federal government achieve its stated ambition of creating pathways to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer use. To be clear, based on the advanced practices and performance of growers in Canada relative to other global crop-producing regions, reducing N2O emissions by 30% is extremely ambitious and presents significant risks if viewed in isolation from food production and security.
However, through our joint efforts, we believe we can make significant progress. To the point of today's discussion, we can help Canada tap into significant opportunity in agriculture to deliver on our nationally determined contributions, while addressing domestic and global food security through increased crop production—and build resilience for the future.
With that, I thank the chair and members of Parliament for your time today. I'm pleased to answer any questions you might have.