How partnerships, technology and trees come together to drive more equitable outcomes
Image credit: Nancy Bourque
The Arbor Day Foundation, which celebrates its 50th
anniversary this year, has planted 500 million trees over the past five decades
— this year, it has committed to planting that same amount in the next five
years. As Ben Wilinsky — Arbor Day’s
Director of Partnership and Innovation — shared in a Tuesday morning panel, the
Foundation is taking a closer look at the role urban forestry can play in
helping cities mitigate and adapt to climate change while simultaneously
tackling inequity on a community
scale.
Lack of trees in urban spaces is a direct determinant of a slew of human health
issues from obesity to asthma to heat stroke. An integral part of the
Foundation’s five-year planting goal is to plant trees in forests and
communities of greatest need. Arbor Day and its corporate partners are utilizing
a new suite of digital tools called NatureQuant to prioritize investments where
they are needed most.
NatureQuant delivers remote-sensing technologies
to assess and promote nature exposure. It uses satellite imagery to take stock
of a community’s natural elements such as trees and ponds, then uses machine
learning to provide a numerical NatureScore to a community's natural resources
and the likely effects they will have on human health.
Taking it further, NatureQuant uses its Nature Priority Index (NPI) to
combine NatureScores with 17 social and economic factors — including income,
employment and housing. It then screens for neighborhoods that are both
nature-deficient and socioeconomically disadvantaged. The representatives from
Arbor Day, PwC and
Williams-Sonoma said the NPI has been an
invaluable tool for in strategic tree planting in the communities that need it
most.
PwC partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation and NatureQuant for urban forestry
projects in Detroit, Chicago and Brooklyn. Williams-Sonoma is
partnering with the Arbor Day Foundation to meet its own science-based targets.
Both Williams-Sonoma and PwC found that getting community engagement and buy-in
where their projects are undertaken helps bridge the gap between climate action
and equity.
NatureQuant CEO and co-founder Jared Hanley said the company is building hard
data sets to build public support for boosting urban forestry — the first step
in building consensus and “tree
equity”
in underserved communities.
Leaning into the intersection of people and planet, one will find trees at the
center. They are conduits of community wellbeing and climate wellbeing wrapped
up in one glorious package.
Notes from the net-positive journey
L-R: Sol Salinas, Prakash Arunkundrum, Miguel Sossa, James McCall, John C. Havens, Carl Picconatto | Image credit: Sustainable Brands
The realization that achieving net-zero emissions may not be enough to undo the
damage we’ve done to the world has led to a growing number of net-positive
ambitions and
strategies
throughout the business world. Any organization can play a part in the
net-positive journey; and Capgemini is
working with a community of high impact organizations that share a commitment to
accelerate action, using net positive thinking to get a regenerative and
sustainable future for all.
As Sally Uren, Chief
Executive at Forum for the Future, pointed
out, doing less bad is no longer good enough. Forum works with organizations to
discover what it would look like to put more in than they took out. Her
journey
eventually coalesced with the greater net-positive movement; and to her delight,
systems change thinking became an organic part of it.
Capgemini and its partners are now taking net positive to the next level; and
Capgemini has committed a vast amount of its resources to discovering what a
regenerative, net-positive business model looks like in practice.
“We are on a trajectory towards collapse,” said Sol
Salinas, EVP, Americas
Sustainability Leader at Capgemini. “We’re living in the world of “The
Lorax.”
Who’s going to speak for the trees? We have to speak for the trees.”
Clearly, businesses have an outsized voice to speak for the environment; and
more and more household names are using their scale and influence to do just
that.
Logitech, for example, is committed to be
carbon positive by
2030
and is working on introducing carbon labeling to all of its products — a growing
trend, especially with food
products.
“We're going to come right out and tell you how much our product is polluting,
what we're going to do about it, and how we're going to put power back in the
hands of consumers,” said Prakash
Arunkundrum, Head of Global
Operations and Sustainability at Logitech.
Logitech’s carbon label started from a realization that if Logitech didn't do
it, who would? And if someone else did it by 2050, it would be too late. Net
positive is about the intersection of the planet and people, Arunkundrum said,
and how to make business’ impact not just less bad but better.
Climate Impact Partners (CIP) helps brands
certify their products as carbon neutral through offsetting
solutions
such as planting trees.
The meaning of terms including “net zero,” “net positive,” etc are lost on most
consumers, even amidst corporations, said CIP VP Miguel
Sossa. CIP exists to bridge these
disparities and drive greater engagement of using business for a regenerative
future.
“In and of itself, conservation is just doing less bad,” said James
McCall, Chief
Sustainability Officer at HP Inc. “We’ve
got to move beyond less bad to doing more good, and that’s the concept that net
positive embodies: How do we, as companies, start to be a force for good —
beyond our own footprint?”
“The doomsday side of things is not just depressing; but shockingly, it really
doesn’t inspire people,” said John C.
Havens, Lead of Sustainability
Practices at IEEE. “It doesn’t create a picture of what
could be.”
If the societal metrics of success are only around economic
growth,
civilization will fail, Havens said. But if humanity establishes as a baseline
of long-term ecological and human wellbeing based on Indigenous experience and
wisdom, bio-centric success will prevail.
“If you want to have an impact and go far, you have to partner broadly and drive
change,” said Carl Picconatto,
Director at the Emerging Tech Innovation Center at
MITRE — a US not-for-profit that applies a
systems-thinking approach to provide solutions that enhance national security
and way of life.
Though MITRE was late to embedding regeneration into its core, Picconatto says
it now exists to empower governments to make meaningful change for regeneration.
As a pilot and research company, MITRE is launching microgrid power projects,
supply chain and data tracking, and more — all “mission critical” challenges in
the journey toward regeneration/net positivity.
Regeneration requires that collaboration and competition become one and the
same. Humanity can't afford thirty years of inaction; but the panelists agreed
ten years of experimentation and innovation is within the budget of a
net-positive world.
Grounding governance and sustainability strategies in social determinants of health
Image credit: Darrel Und
In this afternoon breakout, Lauren
Wilkins — CEO Action for Racial
Equity Fellow at sustainability strategy consultancy Point
B — moderated a panel with Rachel Vestergaard,
founder and CEO of Empower Co; and Laura
Sutphen, Managing Director of
Social Impact + Inclusion at Golin. First
grounding the conversation in terminology and definitions, Sutphen provided the
following to level set:
-
Intersectionality describes ways that systems of inequality intersect
based on gender, identity, class, disability and other human factors. From a
systems perspective, how two independent things interact.
-
Environmental justice is about the ways that the built environment has
been created and carved up in ways that expose Black, Brown and Indigenous
folks to more pollution, more toxic environments, etc.
-
Environmental justice is nuanced differently than climate justice. The
climate crisis disproportionately affects people who are low-income, Black,
Brown, and Indigenous people.
-
Social determinants of health are the social, economic and human-based
systems that keep us healthy — for example, transportation access, safe
neighborhoods, gun violence incidents. Social determinants of health look at
constructs around humans that constitute holistic health.
Focused on women’s empowerment, Vestergaard introduced her company’s W
Standard™
— which measures six critical domains of women’s empowerment: health, time
saving, food security, leadership, knowledge/education, income/assets. She
explained that each “W+ unit” represents a 10 percent improvement in a woman’s
life in the domain measured. Vestergaard attests that women control the new
financial resource, creating further positive impact — citing as an example that
“companies with gender-balanced leadership have better climate-mitigation and
adaptation policies.”
Golin’s recently released Justice For All
research
is a national survey of the perceptions and responsibility of environmental
justice. This topic has been studied for a long time, however not much talked
about business in terms of charting solutions. Sutphen shared some highlights:
-
Just over half (54 percent) report familiarity with environmental justice
but only 1/3 could accurately describe it and more than 25 percent could not
define it.
-
Almost half of leaders believe that environmental justice is for the
environment only, and not connected to race or communities. Leaders don’t
see environmental issues and racial justice as linked.
-
More than 85 percent of US consumers believe that environmental injustice —
a type of discrimination where people of low-income or minority communities
are forced to live close to environmentally hazardous conditions — is
important. But only 1/3 of them are satisfied with the actions taken by
companies to address this issue.
Sutphen claimed “when we marry these issues, we can make better decisions” and
more progress.
Looking at opportunity and upside, Vestergaard sees the opportunity now more
than ever to get specific with data and measurement given that intersectionality
is a large, multifaceted, abstract concept. Sutphen emphasized the power of
storytelling in helping companies break down the complexity into impacts —
especially human elements in the E, S and G of ESG.
It takes a village: A model for pre-competitive and local collaboration for improving climate, social conditions
Image credit: AlteredSnaps
A first-of-its-kind collaboration in Georgia is rallying the business
community to achieve state-wide net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Drawdown
Georgia Business Compact — which includes Delta
Airlines, Cox
Enterprise, Elevance
Health, Goodr and
Norfolk Southern — is engaging
collaboratively to set priorities, scale impact, and measure and report on
climate solutions and the co-benefits resulting from them — including increasing
equity, creating jobs, boosting public health, and a host of positive
environmental impacts.
80 percent of health is influenced by factors outside of the doctor’s office,
said Hakon Mattson, VP
and Chief Sustainability Officer at Elevance
Health](https://www.elevancehealth.com/. Climate change is the greatest social
determinant to health, he explained, with overarching impacts on other issues
such as food
insecurity.
Climate change is a loop of co-detriments, so a loop of co-benefits must be
engaged to address it.
Jasmine Crowe-Houston is CEO and
founder of Goodr — a food-waste management company using technology to combat
hunger and food waste. Goodr is tackling food waste to address not only hunger
but the methane emissions associated with food waste — a massive factor not
only in climate change but in public
health
of BIPOC communities. Partnerships and collaborations are hugely important in
building meaningful a village of collective changemakers. Crowe-Houston said
Goodr has leveraged resources including instant food delivery services and local
farmers to utilize the existing infrastructure, not redesign the wheel and
create opportunities for reaching previously unengaged stakeholders. For
example, many farmers receiving food waste from Goodr aren't used to reporting
on waste metrics; but Goodr’s platform enables such unengaged stakeholders to
join the fight against climate change and inequity.
As Clarence Jackson,
Senior Director of Sustainable Supply Chain and Business Operations at Cox,
pointed out, village-building and networking moves individual efforts past
silos. Collaborating utilizes the interconnectedness and systems thinking
required to solve the world’s pressing problems. He pointed to a recent
Edelman study showing
that trust is at an all-time low for the government and the media. But people do
trust companies — highlighting that household brand names are well positioned to
show up and make change.
As a fortune 20 company, Elevance Health has some control over its social and
environmental impact, but it still needs external partners to achieve success.
Mattson said joining initiatives such as Drawdown Georgia has been key to
building a regional tribe that’s truly capable of tackling the social and
environmental crises of the 21st century.
The panelists pointed out that Drawdown Georgia promotes market-based motivators
for sustainability versus top-down government or policy mandates — an approach
that's hugely powerful in traditionally red states. Southern states are not
traditionally in tune with climate action, Crowe-Houston acknowledged — and
she's excited to find bold new ways to lead climate social action in
traditionally conservative spaces by leveraging market drivers and a village of
organizations bound by purpose.
Developing, aligning and activating authentic brand purpose
L-R: Pip Cross, Aidaly Sosa, Simon Mainwaring, Jill Tomandl | Image credit: Sustainable Brands
In another Tuesday afternoon breakout, three speakers explored the importance of
intentional brand positioning in order to activate a strong purpose
statement. Philippa (Pip)
Cross, Sustainability Lead at
Barkley, adeptly guided the conversation among Jill
Tomandl, VP of Global
Product Development, Innovation and Brand Sustainability at Smashbox
Cosmetics; Aidaly Sosa,
Head of Marketing USA at Tony's Chocolonely; and Simon
Mainwaring, founder & CEO of We
First.
Smashbox, part of The Estée Lauder Companies, is
a studio and makeup brand founded by Dean and Davis Factor — great
grandsons of Hollywood makeup legend Max Factor. As an all-performance
beauty brand, the Smashbox product line was created to survive on sets with hot
lights and numerous costume changes. Its mission is to “support those who are
driven, dream big and put themselves to the test, and empower the community
through creativity.”
Tomandl shared the brand’s “Be Seen”
product
— a ‘perfect’ red shade of lipstick, created for and by women of color. Red is a
powerful, unapologetic color, she explains. And to scale the power, the brand
has partnered with the nonprofit Black Girl
Ventures — which creates access to capital
and community for Black and Brown women founders.
Tony’s Chocolonely is a social-impact
brand that sells chocolate to end illegal child labor and modern slavery — a
prevalent issue in cocoa farming, particularly in West Africa. According to
Sosa, the company exists to change this by following its roadmap of three
pillars:
Tony’s brand purpose is to increase standards in the cocoa industry, alluding to
traceable beans from farming to product at shelf. At the end of every year, the
business looks at how many coca beans were bought from farmers and how much they
were paid. Tony’s Chocolonely is driven by an impenetrable belief that child
labor can be eliminated. Sosa said that the business helps farmers with training
on the ground and does not shy away from communicating where and how it can
improve — especially areas where there is child labor and human trafficking.
With the prompt that not every brand purpose goes back to a social issue like
these, Mainwaring declared that companies “need to be clear-eyed about the
marketplace” and “companies and brands are better served to lean in three to
five years out.” He maintained that every brand has a purpose; yet companies
should reverse engineer from the future rather than looking back.
Two related themes emerged: complicated social and environmental issues, plus
the importance of language. Mainwaring instructed that simple, consistent and
scalable storytelling is one ambition — compressing complexity into simple
language. With Tony’s Chocolonely, people want to indulge; the colorful, playful
packaging brings people in to the brand and its story: “crazy about chocolate,
serious about people.” With Smashbox, Tomandl added, the packaging lends itself
to simplified storytelling with its branding iconography.
Mainwaring asserted that brand purpose is an expression of something and
everything we are doing — for example, DEI and supply chain transparency are
“like ornaments on a Christmas tree — what is the trunk of the tree?”
Communities as beneficiaries in business models
Image credit: 4VI
At a sustainability conference, it’s easy to talk shop with the like-minded
professionals in attendance, as many at SB’22 San Diego share similar views on
the urgency of climate change and the need for social improvements.
But how do you approach — and include — those outside of this bubble? Not
business-level stakeholders, but those outside of the sphere altogether? A
Wednesday afternoon panel tackled that issue, examining a few pertinent examples
of how a range of organizations interact with those on the ground in the very
communities they claim to support — encouraging collaboration and next-phase
solutions to the climate crisis in ways often overlooked.
“It’s really important to reinvest in community,” said moderator and Paulman
Farms farmer Roric Paulman. Paulman is on
the front lines as a rare connection between the ground-level farm community in
Nebraska and larger entities who direct support to build necessary
infrastructure and lifelines in his community of 20,000.
Another interesting ground-level perspective came from panelist Calum
Matthews, VP Sustainability &
Strategy at 4VI — the recently
remodeled and
rebranded
social enterprise organization for Tourism Vancouver Island. The island, one
of Canada’s most popular tourist destinations, is ground zero in the
overtourism conversation. Matthews spoke about engaging the island’s Indigenous
community and other stakeholders in how to build a sustainable, welcoming model
for tourists, but protecting the land and
people
within these often-smaller regions.
“All of our communities have different needs,” he said. “Many of our communities
are also at capacity.”
Molly Renaldo, senior partnerships
manager of CPG & Dairy at Fair Trade USA, shared how her organization is
evolving relationships with communities in developing countries to give them
clear and autonomous access to resources to help their growth.
In one example, she spoke about tea company NUMI — which
pays an additional premium to its tea farmers. Those funds go directly into an
account run by a democratically elected committee chosen by the entire farming
group. She said that the governance and development of this system inspired some
of the leaders — often women — to run for (and win) local office in their
communities. She added that it created a trickle-down effect where young girls,
often also on the farms, become inspired and can realize tea farming as a path
to a better life.
Back in the US, Marcus Krembs, head
of sustainability US & Canada at Enel North America, spoke about engaging
rural communities on climate in a very direct way.
“Climate is not what we lead with,” he said, “it’s jobs and economic
development.”
He stressed the possibilities to evolve the conversation with rural America by
showing how a clean energy
transition
can lead to more stable jobs for these smaller communities and to more economic
development throughout an entire region.
As strategic partnerships leader at Truterra, LLC — a program launched by
Land O’Lakes — Julie DiNatale
is in charge of building relationships across an agricultural network of more
than 1,500 farmers. Her thought process around engaging the agricultural
community centers on creating as many touchpoints as possible for people to feel
involved in the process — all pointing towards a future that’s regenerative and
economically viable.
The overarching theme throughout the discussion was one of inclusion: ensuring
that all parties have a seat at the table and feel welcome to share their views
and concerns, and have a part in creating solutions.
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Christian is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and outdoor junkie obsessed with the intersectionality between people and planet. He partners with brands and organizations with social and environmental impact at their core, assisting them in telling stories that change the world.
Geoff is a freelance journalist and copywriter focused on making the world a better place through compelling copy. He covers everything from apparel to travel while helping brands worldwide craft their messaging. In addition to Sustainable Brands, he's currently a contributor at Penta, AskMen.com, Field Mag and many others. You can check out more of his work at geoffnudelman.com.
Consumer & Brand Purpose Marketer
Hope Freedman is a passionate Purpose practitioner who guides brands to discover, strengthen and activate their social missions to increase consumer loyalty, grow revenue, deepen employee engagement, and positively impact communities. She brings her extensive background in CPG marketing, advertising, and communications – on both client and agency sides – to enhance brand differentiation and consumer engagement from strategy to execution.
Her work ranges from optimization of current CSR programs, resources, and partners to thought leadership initiatives for clients. Hope focused on developing differentiated brand social initiatives through a proven, insight-driven methodology for clients including PepsiCo, Unilever, Edgewell and others as a strategist in Edelman’s global Business + Social Purpose practice (read more ...).
Published Nov 7, 2022 7am EST / 4am PST / 12pm GMT / 1pm CET