Follow the growing amount of collaborative work — cross-functional, cross-sector, pre-competitive and more — bringing about massive, disruptive, needed shifts to business as usual.
Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) is the foremost coalition of companies advancing energy and climate legislation in the US. A project of Ceres, BICEP convenes 34 member companies that advocate a low-carbon economy as a path to create jobs and stimulate growth.
Today, Unilever announced plans to partner with leading mass social movements Global Citizen and Live Earth: Road to Paris, which respectively commit to activating consumers to demand climate action at COP21 and reducing extreme poverty by 2030.
Effectively communicating sustainability must go beyond a dire series of predictions — it's about sharing real-world evidence of the economic, social and environmental challenges faced daily on our planet and the solutions for those challenges.In honor of Earth Day and the remarkable progress being made toward a myriad sustainability solutions, the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives at Arizona State University has launched a "Solution A Day" social media campaign, in the spirit of the Initiatives’ mission to engage a broad audience to celebrate those solutions.
As we approach the world’s 21st year of international climate change negotiations (let that sink in), it has never been more critical for citizens to begin demanding and building climate action. That is exactly why Prince Ea has teamed up with Code REDD's Stand For Trees campaign to create an unprecedented reflection on the consequences of our climate inaction, and an inspired vision of collective change.
Among mounting concern over the dire water shortages in California and around the world, several well-known companies are taking matters into their own hands, reducing water in their production processes and educating consumers around water conservation.
This year’s World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report lists water as the number one risk in terms of impact – it even surpasses failure to adapt to climate change, which currently sits at fifth place. The impact of water can already be seen and felt across different parts of society:
On Tuesday, the Fair Wear Foundation (FWF) — a Dutch non-profit that works with companies and factories to improve labor conditions for garment workers – launched the Living Wage Portal, a platform through which FWF aims to uncover and overcome the many obstacles that prevent garment workers around the world from earning a living wage.FWF says the best wage is a negotiated wage, set by businesses and workers together. But in major garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh and Cambodia, productive dialogue between workers and factories is rare — a key roadblock to better wages. Other major obstacles addressed in the portal include:
“We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”— Isaac NewtonI agree 100%How many times can we honestly say that we really agree 100 percent with someone else on an issue? Often this is because finding points of disagreement with other people is one of the ways that we establish legitimacy and expertise in addition to our sense of self.Put simply, whilst we might almost totally agree with someone on an issue, we can also be motivated to find and highlight the nuances of where and how our understanding (unrecognised genius) and clear thinking provides us with a more accurate, pragmatic or relevant analysis.
Last week, EcoVadis, operator of a collaborative, sustainable global supply chain platform, announced the launch of Railsponsible, an initiative to drive sustainability throughout the railway supply chain. Six companies in the railway industry - Alstom Transport, Bombardier Transportation, Deutsche Bahn, Knorr Bremse, Nederlandse Spoorwegen ("NedTrain") and SNCF - participated as founding members of Railsponsible for the launch on March 4th in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
The Climate CoLab has announced twenty-two contests that seek high-impact ideas on how to tackle climate change.A project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Collective Intelligence, the Climate CoLab seeks to harness the knowledge and expertise of thousands of experts and non-experts across the world to help solve this massive, complex issue.The Climate CoLab has a rapidly growing community of over 30,000 members from across the world. Anyone is welcome to join the platform to submit their own ideas, or comment on and show support for other proposals on the site.
Three leading natural products brands — organic baby food company Plum Organics, nut butter and organic confections brand Justin’s, and organic, cold-pressured juice brand Suja Juice — are proud to announce a new initiative with Conscious Alliance (CA), a national nonprofit committed to supporting communities in crisis through hunger relief and youth empowerment. The coalition has banded together to launch one of the nation’s first Backpack Programs featuring only natural and healthy products.
As California’s devastating drought enters its fourth year and local organizations are appealing to residents to rein in their water use, a diverse coalition of companies with skin in the game — food and beverage giants General Mills, Driscoll’s and Coca-Cola North America, Gap Inc., Symantec and home builder KB Home — are coming together to launch a new campaign urging companies to enact more aggressive measures to maximize California's local and state water resources.
This is the final question from a roundtable discussion with the directors of sustainability research centers at six top business schools.Through Georgia Tech’s new QEP (Quality Enhancement Program), we will develop very deep educational partnerships with a few key institutions, be those NGOs or local government or corporations.
This is the fifth of six questions from a roundtable discussion with the directors of sustainability research centers at six top business schools.So there are a couple different ways that we support the research process as an Initiative.One is that we bring in funding and then disperse it to faculty for research on sustainability. We’ve done that with some corporate funding, as well as philanthropic individual donors or foundations. We put out those calls for proposals, and it helps us to identify who among the faculty is doing research and sustainability.
If the ideal business has sustainability embedded throughout, why not embed the same lens throughout an MBA program?That’s what faculty members had in mind for the Sustainable MBA program at Duquesne University’s Palumbo Donahue School of Business.
Within a few years, every undergrad at the Georgia Institute of Technology could understand what it means to create sustainable communities.That’s the goal of a new institute-wide initiative called Serve•Learn•Sustain.
This is the fourth of six questions from a roundtable discussion with the directors of sustainability research centers at six top business schools.We have a big opportunity to influence curriculum within the entire university right now. And in the context of that we’ll have the same opportunity within the College of Business.In a nutshell, as part of reaffirming its accreditation every 10 years, Georgia Tech needs to put together a five-year Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) that touches undergraduate education across all colleges.
Tom Catania’s role at Whirlpool Corporation wasn’t specifically to shape the company’s sustainability efforts. But in more than 25 years with the appliance manufacturer, the last 14 as Vice President for Government Affairs, Catania’s job called on him to help identify public policy conflicts and bring together diverse interests to find consensus.His role at the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise is much the same. “My focus had always been on trying to identify public policy issues and turning them into business opportunities, and I think we were pretty successful at doing that,” Catania said.
I held a roundtable discussion with the directors of sustainability centers and institutes at six top business schools to learn more about how they engage with industry. One of the questions was: What are your expectations for funding or engagement time when working with industry?For curriculum-based projects, we don’t lead the discussions with anything that involves a fee for services.
How do companies deal with mushrooming sustainability data requests coming in from all directions – raters, investors, B2B customers? In Part 1 of this dialogue, Bridgestone Americas’ Director of Environmental Affairs, Tim Bent, discussed the company’s Sustainability Hub, developed with the help of PivotGoals project manager Jeff Gowdy to interface Bridgestone’s environmental, social, governance and economic data with incoming questionnaires.