In collaboration with the expert consultants at FrameworkESG, edited this update of Umpqua Bank’s 2020 ESG report. View and download the full report at the link below.
July 2021
Umpqua Bank – ESG report 2020
Tag Archives: sustainability
XPO Logistics – Sustainability Report 2020
In collaboration with the expert consultants at FrameworkESG, edited this update of XPO Logistics’ 2020 sustainability report. View and download the full report at the link below.
May 2021
The Energy Transition: Risks and Opportunities | GARP
- This white paper surveys changes sweeping the global energy industry as net-zero carbon policy and alternative technologies begin to displace fossil fuels.
- Researched and wrote 5,000-word report, drawing on primary research, press coverage and subject matter interviews; researched and designed data visualizations.
- Target audience: Finance, traders and risk professionals in the finance, oil/gas, utility and renewables sectors.
- On behalf of the Global Assn of Risk Professionals. Published February 2021.
- Download the full report here or at garp.org.
Can a new architecture revive the UN Global Compact? | The Guardian
As business enthusiasm wanes, the UN Global Compact unveils new investment opportunities. Will it be enough to attract more participation?
In collaboration with some 1,000 business allies, the UN today issued an updated “architecture” aimed at intensifying companies’ role in advancing economic development, improving human health and reversing environmental degradation.
At the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in New York City, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the growing need for private companies to coordinate their market efforts with UN’s long-standing development goals.
The business engagement architecture is designed to “drive and scale up corporate actions to directly advance United Nations goals,” Ban said.
The blueprint, Building the Post-2015 Business Engagement Architecture, marks a high point in the UN’s ambitions to engage with business. When it was launched in 2000, Ban said, “there was no clear agenda for business”.
Today, the GC is the world’s largest voluntary organization of its kind, comprising 8,000 companies and 4,000 civil society organizations from 145 countries.
“For the first time in the history of United Nations, UN goals, sustainability development priorities, are directly linked to long term corporate goals,” said Georg Kell, executive director of the Global Compact. “This is a genuine innovation and brings a strategic level of collaboration to the effort. We offer, for the first time, a comprehensive and integrated menu of opportunities for engagement.”
The architecture that the UN released today, in collaboration with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the Global Reporting Initiative, formalizes three broad new programmes focused on education, agriculture and peace.
The new Business for Peace platform, for instance, aims to help companies invest in conflict-affected and high-risk areas. Long-term job creation, economic growth and infrastructure restoration are vital to nurturing peace in often-fragile conditions of post-conflict regions, said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, vice chair of the UN Global Compact board.
These three new programmes join an existing pool of efforts focused on women’s empowerment, children’s rights, climate, water and anti-corruption.
Re-firing commitment
The new plan – 13 years after the GC’s founding – comes as the clock runs down toward the 2015 deadline to achieve the Millennium Goals.
Enthusiasm seems to be ebbing. A CEO survey released by Accenture during the conference found that most companies aren’t integrating social, environmental and governance issues into their core strategies. (Download a copy of the report here or get more information from Accenture here.)
The poll of more than 1,000 global executives found that 45% of CEOs believe that sustainability will be “very important” to the future success of their business, a decline of nine percentage points from a similar study in 2010.
As GSB’s Jo Confino pointed out in his assessment of this study, these findings bookend a pair of two earlier studies (from the UNGC and CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), that find progress slowing – or even backsliding – in corporate efforts.
US players missing
North American companies, which make up roughly a third of Fortune’s list of the 500 largest global companies, comprise only 18% of Accenture’s respondents.
With their high visibility and deep resources, more US players would help. Yet US companies have been somewhat hamstrung by concerns over legal liability if they commit to the compact’s 10 principles.
The UNGC is working to help legal counsels separate and neutralize these perceived risks from conventional contractual liabilities and open the door for more US entrants, Kell told me in a Q&A following the launch.
“We want to grow from 8,000 to 20,000 hopefully by 2016, but we can grow only with quality,” said Kell, who last year took steps to prod and shed inactive GC members.
Finding the right balance – and meeting the goals – is critical, said John Ruggie, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, during the launch:
Look around you and you will already see signs of some of the consequences. They take the form of resource nationalism, increased protectionism, sectarian violence, extreme populism on the left and right, xenophobia, homophobia and generally rolling back globalization out of fear of the other and by anger at fear of being left behind. That would not auger well for people planet or profits…. The stakes are high, the time is short, the cost of getting it wrong is incalculable and the opportunities to getting it right are legion.
~
See the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/un-global-compact-architecture
Responsible investment has a vital role in securing peace post-conflict | The Guardian
A new UN initiative aims to help spur recovery in post-conflict regions by guiding companies to invest responsibly
War and peace are linked inextricably by economic development. Often, even when the shooting stops, long-term peace is impossible without economic development. Yet investment will not flow where conflict lingers.
This grim Catch-22 has resurfaced lately with the unfolding catastrophe in Syria. Day by day, the death toll, physical destruction, and refugee displacements mount. The disaster is creating countless long term, chronic woes too. The destruction of 3,600 schools, for instance, in Syria has swelled by two million or so the global tally of young people forced out of school by armed conflict to some 50 million overall.
In Syria and elsewhere this creates a pool of underemployed youth, and a potential time bomb of social unrest.
Once conflict ends, if there are no jobs for young people, rebels and soldiers, “The guns will come back out… In the absence of economic development, peace is difficult to achieve, and harder to maintain,” Sir Mark Moody-Stuart told me. From his tenure as Chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Moody-Stuart is familiar with the challenges, and opportunities, facing investment in conflict-afflicted regions.
Data on the economic toll of the loss of peace is difficult to come by, but an analysis by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), estimated that had the world been completely peaceful in 2011, global GDP would have been roughly $9tn higher — almost equal to the German and Japanese economies combined.
These days, as vice-chair of the board of the UN Global Compact, Moody-Stuart is working to get the private sector to reconsider these opportunities. “Not so very long ago, divestment from troubled areas was the goal,” he said.
Today, however, former critics are increasingly willing to “sit down with investors and senior management to engage constructively and work together on strategies that both develop business and contribute to peace and development,” he said.
I met with Moody-Stuart in New York at a midtown hotel where he was unveiling a new UN effort to help guide private-sector investment into regions where they can help peace was taking root. The platform, Business for Peace (B4P), will be formally launched today by the UN secretary-general at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit. B4P builds on a decade’s worth of earlier efforts that are documented in areport, Responsible Business Advancing Peace, also released today.
The cases documented therein — and discussed at today’s meeting — are a reminder that the path peace via development is a highly local challenge, where solutions vary by context.
Peaceful cheese, fewer guns
Cheese is the focus of a long-running effort in the Caucasus. Starting a decade ago, cheese makers from regions spanning Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey came together under a single brand that has developed strong export sales.
The shared interests prevented the alliance from collapsing during the Russia-Georgia war of 2008. “It was one only regional alliances to survive,” said Diana Klein, conflict advisor at International Alert. Peace and development have their own momentum, she added, “If it’s working, it’s much harder for a single participant to act out.”
Some efforts can run counter to conventional wisdom. In the Philippines’ a subsidiary of Swiss cement giant Holcim set up a plant north of Manila where communist rebel group was active.
In 2005, the group attacked the facility, taking weapons from guards and causing $120,000 of damage. Rather than boost its guards’ firepower, Holcim took a slower, more complex path, meeting with community members to learn more why its plant — a large local employer — was targeted.
Their surprising findings? The guards’ firearms were part of the target. Rather than meet threat with force, Holcim opted for un-armed guards, a change which required careful community education.
“They had to convince their own staff they were safe, to convince the community that the guards are truly not armed,” said Sir Moody-Stuart, otherwise the guerillas may come back. Since this “social fencing” approach began, not a single incident involving firearms has happened.
A marathon effort
Building companies and attracting investors in the wake of conflict is a “very, very hard challenge,” said Klein of Conflict Advisors. “It requires a marathon mentality.” These investment efforts are reaching into some of the most challenging conflicts in recent memory.
In Sudan, still recovering from genocide in Darfur and the subsequent bifurcation of the nation, a team of B4P-affiliated investors with stakes in Sudanese oil services companies find their most difficult issue — company affiliation with human rights violations — impossible to resolve.
But while some strata of the market remain opaque, others are opening. Bit-by-bit the economy is coming back to life. Telecoms provider Sudatel, partially government owned, has emerged as the young country’s first multinational, operating in five neighboring countries. With 60% of Sudan’s population under 20 years of age, the company is focusing on serving young consumers. “To live together, people need to communicate,” said Ehab Osman, Sudatel’s CEO.
~
See the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/responsible-investment-role-peace-post-conflict
Can new supply chain approaches prevent another Rana Plaza? | The Guardian
Tougher factory and supply chain standards won’t be enough to prevent disasters like the Bangladesh factory collapse. Can development tactics succeed where conventional approaches have failed?
Foxconn workers in a Chinese factory. Can new industry tactics prevent supply chain disasters? Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters
Ideally, tragedy begets reform.
That’s the tale we’ve learned from past industrial disasters, including the 1911 inferno at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in Manhattan, which killed 146 and marked the dawn of a fundamental shift in US workplace standards.
The changes took decades, to be sure, but the tragedy spurred the development of fire and building regulations, the creation of labor and women’s unions and a culture of real regulatory enforcement.
What, then, do we to make of reactions to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory six months ago?
The deaths of some 1,130 garment workers in the Dhaka, Bangladesh, sweatshops drew a storm of public outcry. But in supply-chain circles, the tragedy has revealed more about the limits of our potential to “fix” global supply chains that, in some cases, have grown too big and too complex to avoid human-rights failures.
Facing this reality, a new generation of supply-chain experiments are borrowing tactics from conventional development efforts. These look beyond conventional rules- and business-transaction based approaches to address the root causes of many factory malpractices. In general, they’re working to improve education, health and community conditions in ways that benefit both workers and their employers.
Initial Rana reaction
When Rana Plaza collapsed, the response – among top-tier corporate brands – was rapid. Within a month, a cadre of mostly European fashionchains, including H&M, Zara, C&A, Tesco and Primark, signed a legally binding agreement to help fund and enforce safety improvements in Bangladeshi factories.
US and Canadian retailers took a different path.
Under the umbrella of the National Retail Federation (NRF), key brands backed an alternate agreement reaffirming ongoing efforts to take a ground-up approach, training workers, factory owners, officials and foreign brands in parallel.
The split response led to an unseemly tit-for-tat round of criticism.
The heads of IndustriALL, a global union supporting the European effort, called the rival plan a “pale imitation.” The NRF effort also drew criticism for not requiring its suppliers to allow workers to organize.
The head of the NRF volleyed back, in The Wall Street Journal: “The IndustriALL plan seeks major funding by private business without providing accountability for how funds are spent, as well as binding retailers to specific resourcing requirements without taking into account the impracticality of such a requirement.”
Distracting as it is, the infighting reveals the spectrum of current possibilities – from the EU’s conventional approach to NRF’s ground-up agenda – and many of the limits that circumscribe supply chain efforts circa 2013.
Limits of good intentions
However earnest, corporate efforts to improve supply chain operations have not kept pace with the compounding complexity of globalized supply chains. Links have grown too numerous; buyers’ influence dissipates too rapidly.
Eric Olson, BSR’s senior vice president, walked me through the vexing math facing would-be supply-chain trackers. A typical Fortune 500 company will have hundreds or thousands of first-tier suppliers. But supply chains can easily extend to 15 layers or more.
“There’s almost no company on the planet that has figured out how to cascade their supply chain efforts into the second tier,” Olson said, “let alone the third, fourth and so on, even though 80% of the impacts are happening further out in the chain.”
Meanwhile, a recent survey of some 1,700 UN Global Compact corporate members highlights another limitation. While most companies set goals for their suppliers, only 18% actually help their suppliers set and review goals their own goals – and only 9% take steps to verify the efforts, according to Global Corporate Sustainability Report 2013.
“While companies are making progress in terms of thinking about supplier sustainability and setting expectations, the supporting actions that will drive adherence have shown little or no increase over the past few years,” according to the report.
Wider scope, deeper reach
If conventional supply chain practices are running up against inherent limits, what next?
In some of the world’s least-developed markets, a new generation of more holistic experiments is showing promise.
These experiments stem from the recognition that mandating standards to a factory manager often ignores developing-world realities, such as poorly educated workers, degraded public health, economic insecurity and antagonistic worker-manager dynamics.
If these factors can be improved, the potential to advance more ethical, productive factory ecosystems would rise overall.
As an example, Olson points to HERProject. The program, acollaboration between BSR and 22 multinational companies, is delivering curricula focused on health and financial topics to some 200,000 women workers in 200 factories and farms in Asia and Africa.
Early findings show that when offered to women through their workplaces, the factories benefit via reduced absenteeism and turnover. Greater work-place trust, in turn, is helping managers collaborate with workers on setting conditions. A Levi Strauss & Co. supplier in Egypt reported a four-fold return from the program
There’s no denying this approach is more difficult. Yet it’s clear that, if supply networks continue to stretch and globalize, conventional supply-chain tactics are ill-suited to less developed markets.
If high street brands can cultivate common cause with development goals, a smarter approach to supply chain management will be a welcome byproduct.
~
See the original story here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/supply-chain-development-tactics
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/supply-chain-development-tactics
Profiting from sustainability: 5 tips for corporate boards | The Guardian
Whether you call them directors, supervisors or governors, companies’ top overseers must get involved in sustainability. Here’s how
Of all the challenges facing corporate sustainability leaders, a lack of board-level support can be one of the most frustrating. While a chief executive’s top priority is day-to-day operations, directors’ main job is to think big, look out for long-term material risks to shareholder interest and advise on strategic opportunities. By these standards, sustainability should be a natural fit for most directors.
In practice, though, boards have engaged less with sustainability than many CEOs or shareholders would like. A study by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) that looked at all shareholder proxy initiatives found that the largest share, 45%, dealt with environment and social issues – and, in the past five years, shareholders voted to support these initiatives at steadily higher rates.
“Investors see sustainability questions as highly material to company strategy,” says Aron Cramer, CEO of BSR. “Whether it’s the decision to enter frontier markets like Myanmar or how best to operate in a climate-constrained world, these factors materially effect whether a business thrives or not. These are exactly the kind of things boards should be thinking about.”
Sustainability-minded CEOs are looking for some help from their boards, too. A 2010 poll of CEOs conducted by the UN Global Compact concluded that 93% of chief executives wanted their board members to discuss and act on environmental, social and governance issues. Yet that same year, only 75% of CEO respondents reported that their company directors took an active role in “considering and acting on sustainability”.
If both investors and CEOs are pushing for boards to get smarter about sustainability, it’s curious that progress has been so slow. The culprits, Cramer says, are corporate convention and a lack of education. Directors are typically drawn from financial, legal and management backgrounds; thus very few have formal sustainability training.
The UN Global Compact – the world’s largest corporate citizenship and sustainability initiative – hopes to tackle this sustainability-IQ deficit with its LEAD Board Programme, which it’s getting ready to trial this fall. So far, five companies have agreed to trial the [program, which will consist of two half-day sessions delivered by an expert mediator: power and gas utility Enel and petroleum producer Eni (both of Italy); power and gas utility Eskom (of South Africa); chemicals maker Yara (of Norway); and cellular company SK Telekom (of South Korea).
Five best practices for boards
The UNGC has been developing the program since January of 2011, consulting with Cramer and a dozen or so other global sustainability leaders. Some of the top practices the program will emphasize include:
* Define the business case for sustainability. Boards should help define how and why sustainability can benefit shareholder interest by boosting sales, cutting costs and/or enhancing profits. Once directors map out the issues that are most material to the company, they can single out top priorities, which in turn can help the chief executive lead the mission – and get buy-in from employees and business partners.
* Establish or approve targets. Just as they do for sales, market share growth, and other key indicators, boards should help establish or approve sustainability targets – both in the short- and long-term – for their companies’ sustainability performance and include them in the business strategy. A wide range of metrics is available, from mature standards such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index to more industry-specific measures, or early-stage metrics can be developed in house.
* Set clear standards for performance and recruitment. Boards should align annual performance reviews of incumbent executives with criteria that make sustainability a priority, just as they do with stock price, sales growth and other conventional performance indicators. When hunting for a new executive, boards should include sustainability in the search criteria. Candidates should be able to demonstrate clear understanding of – and a commitment to – their industry’s best sustainability practices.
* Link remuneration to long-term goals. Executive bonuses have long been linked to short-term financial targets. Given that sustainability stabilizes growth over the long term, but must be implemented in the near term, it follows that CEOs should be rewarded along both timelines. For example, progress toward long-term interests can be rewarded by linking part of pay to stocks, bonds or reserve payments released a decade or so in the future. For near-term rewards, boards can link a share of CEO’s regular cash compensation to the achievement of year-to-year sustainability objectives.
* Take responsibility for implementation and communication. Communicating sustainability achievements to shareholders is also vital, whether in a separate sustainability report or integrated into the financial reporting. Directors should also formally sign off on the company’s sustainability report. Although this is not legally necessary in most jurisdictions, director signatures send a high-profile confirmation to stakeholders that sustainability and transparency are company priorities.
Required reading
If all goes according to plan, the curriculum will be tweaked according to feedback from the pilot companies and then rolled out to all comers in 2014.
In time, these voluntary lessons may become required reading in some markets, Cramer notes. South Africa was the first country to mandate an integrated reporting standard, including sustainability metrics, for listed companies. Trading exchanges in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Sao Paolo are moving in a similar direction, he says.
As the sustainability reporting standards spread, more corporate directors will want to get up to speed, before they’re obliged to do so.
To learn more about the nuts and bolts of the curriculum, start here: LEAD Board Programme. Deeper details aren’t yet available, but will surface in coming months.
~
Check out the original article here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/un-global-compact-leaders-summit-leadership
Sports sustainability gurus share their all-star plays | GreenBiz
Back in 2008, when the US Tennis Association launched an ambitious effort to lower the environmental impact of its mammoth US Open event, it turned out to be nearly impossible to find a vendor to supply enough recycled paper napkins, greener plates, cups and flatware. Niche suppliers existed, to be sure, but few were big enough to handle the two-week long event’s 700,000 guests.
In the world of greener sports events, those take-what-you-can-get early days are long gone. At the Green Sports Alliance’s third annual summit in Brooklyn this week, visitors could sample a dizzying array of recycled, recyclable, carbon neutral or compostable alternatives from vendors on hand, including bamboo plates, plant starch utensils, sugar-cane clamshells and even bioplastic sushi containers.
After holding its previous two summits in the green-friendly Pacific Northwest, the GSA shifted its summit to New York City this year.
“This is where the big leagues are,” Darby Hoover, NRDC senior resource specialist, told me. She meant that literally. The four largest pro leagues are headquartered within a few blocks of each other in midtown Manhattan: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL) and the National Hockey League (NHL).
From 11 teams and venues in 2011, when it debuted nationally, the alliance now boasts 180 from 16 pro and college leagues, along with concert-promoter and venue-giant AEG.“Competition absolutely raises the bar,” said Bob Nutting, Pittsburgh Pirates‘ chairman of the board. “There are a lot of competitive personalities in sports. Say you’re No. 3 in [recycling] diversion rates in the Major League. You can be sure we want to move to No. 2 or No. 1.”
The growing cadre of green-focused teams means that it’s rare these days to run into shortages of eco-supplies or services. Venue-focused efforts are de rigueur. Building LEED certified facilities, deploying aggressive recycling and food waste composting, installing low water bathrooms and high-efficiency lighting retrofits, along with renewable energy commitments and on-site installations, have all become standard operating procedure.
Job done? Hardly. That’s the easy stuff. It saves money by cutting waste, energy and resource use, said a senior sustainability executive who oversees scores of sporting venues and asked not to be named. But deep skepticism persists. There’s still an assumption that these are costly steps, although the industry has overcome the assumption that such options are impossible.
That’s mirrored in the share of teams that haven’t yet come on board. In baseball, for instance, 17 of 30 teams are GSA members. Just 12 of 32 NFL teams and a mere seven of 32 NBA teams are on board. Penetration into college level sports remains even thinner.
Click for full image (Credit: EPA)
To help the eco-laggards get with the game, here are seven tips from team owners and sustainability gurus.
Play the long game. “Everyone loves sustainability when it goes perfectly,” said Nutting. “In Pittsburgh, when I took over the team, it was in a losing cycle. So I got some unpleasant letters saying that we were valuing green priorities more than on-field experience.” The team fixed that in two ways. First, by winning: the Pirates are neck-and-neck with the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first divisional title in 21 years. And second, “by sticking to the priority through thick and thin.”
Moderate the message. Now in its sixth year of promoting green programs, the USTA is finding that less messaging can be more effective. “In the first year, we used the PA system with constant announcements and signage everywhere to remind visitors to recycle,” said Lauren Kittelstad Tracy, USTA’s senior manager of strategic initiatives. A survey revealed that it was too much. “Our guests know that recycling is important,” she said. “It’s more important to make it easy for them to do so than to remind them to do it.”
Tap into “jewel” events. Playoffs, championships and all-star games are emerging as high-visibility stages that leagues can use to extend the visibility of their green efforts into communities, the media and other franchises. Baseball has made its All-Star Games a prime focus for these efforts in recent years. At the 2013 game, the MLB deployed green teams to roam up and down the stadium, like vendors, to collect cups, cans and plastic. The effort helped achieve record rates of waste diverted from land fills, said Paul Hanlon, director of facility operations, MLB. To cut food waste, the event pushed beyond composting, by donating unsold foods to a charity.
Localize efforts, geographically and digitally. Asked if a fear of offending conservative voters might slow green initiatives in conservative areas, panels agreed hesitatingly. “If we put those messages [about carbon reduction] on Chevy’s Facebook [page], we get a ton of negative messages from deniers,” said David Tulauskas, director of sustainability at General Motors, which sponsors IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro. “On Twitter, there’s not so much of a problem, though.” Meanwhile, at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) racetrack near Austin, Tex., Formula One and other race events must be conducted under strict carbon emission and other eco rules set out as city law, explained Edgar Farrera, COTA’s director of sustainability.
Do more with sponsorship. Progress is slow in linking sponsorships to sustainability goals, said Justin Zeulner, senior director of sustainability and public affairs for the Portland Trail Blazers. Globally, some $14 billion in sponsorship funding is poured into sports deals, ranging from players’ shoe contracts to venue-naming rights. Yet while venues are working hard to green their operations, the link with sponsors is weak at best. There’s a disconnect between the strategic decision to sponsor a venue which is made at a very high level, GM’s Tulauskas explained, based on a given market age, gender mix, ethnicity, geography and other demographic factors. But the sustainability messaging happens locally, only once the agreement has been set, he added.
Put an (athlete’s) face on green goals. As yet, there is no Michael Jordan of sports sustainability. This is a problem, said Greg Busch, executive vice president of GMR Marketing, an event promotional agency, because as successful as any team may be in pushing greener practices, a celebrity athlete can reach a broader audience. “The athletes give you a face and a voice. That allows you to really communicate with kids, moms, fans in general,” he explained. Athletes remain apprehensive because green is such a broad platform, unlike many products or charities they commonly back.
Resources. As part of the event, the EPA announced its Green Sports Resource Directory, thick with advice on greening efforts, as well as a scorecard of leading efforts. NRDC debuted a guide focused on college efforts. The report, “Collegiate Game Changer,” complements the NRDC’s reference work for pro teams, “Game Changer,” published in November.
Image of astroturf by narokzaad via Shutterstock. Photo of solar panels atop the St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium via Microgrid Solar.
~
Check out the original story at:
http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/08/29/pro-sports-sustainability-gurus-share-their-all-star-plays
Are bottom-up sustainability initiatives filling gap left by Rio+20? | The Guardian
Small, grassroots sustainability efforts have proliferated since Rio+20, but a status report signals some challenges and limitations
In the absence of a meaningful global agreement at the Rio+20 Earth summit last summer, expectations collapsed – but didn’t disappear. They shifted from big to small, from global to local.
In response, sustainability leaders recalibrated their attention to the potential for local and regional initiatives to fill this leadership vacuum. After all, while climate change remains an immutably global problem, many of the most immediate environmental and developmental challenges – toxic pollution, education and public health and water and land degradation, to name a few – must be dealt with at a local or regional level.
A year or so on, the question remains: is this bottom-up, smaller-scale approach working? With more than 1,000 sustainability leaders from businesses, NGOs and their allies set to converge in New York next month for a leaders’ summit of the UN’s Global Compact – the world’s largest corporate sustainability membership organisation – it’s a good time to take stock.
It’s premature to come to any sweeping conclusions, to be sure. Too little time has passed to expect even the best executed of the blizzard of plans to have achieved major gains. Yet a recent special report, surveying the portfolio of UN bottoms-up initiatives, makes for decidedly mixed reading.
Grand scale
On one hand, the tally of efforts – totalling 1,382 – offers impressive quantitative evidence of a wide and deep groundswell of initiatives across the globe. On the other hand, the survey shows a worrying fuzziness and lack of progress in key areas.
Though still faint, these signals beg critical questions. Is it possible to distribute a clear sense of direction across thousands of initiatives? Has progress been stymied by the lack an over-arching development goal?
For a sense of the scope and scale of the proliferation of initiatives following Rio+20, flip through the July 2013 special report, Sustainable Development in Action, prepared by the United Nations’ sustainable development division. Synthesizing listings across a handful of databases, the report surveys the accretion of voluntary initiatives that support the goals of Rio+20.
The sheer scale of efforts is encouraging. Out of the 1,382 efforts, more than 700 commitments were announced as part of Rio+20. UN programmes have seeded hundreds more in recent years, including Sustainable Energy for All, United Nations Global Compact, Every Woman Every Child and others.
A closer look
Read a bit more closely, though, and fractures appear. Take, for example, one of the eight high-priority areas examined by the special report, higher education sustainability initiatives (HESI), While 272 organisations in 47 countries had made commitments related to higher-education sustainability as of June, a lack of centralised coordination is impeding progress (emphasis added):
Since HESI was established as an ad hoc initiative by several UN organizations and external stakeholders, this action network relies on a more informal organizational structure, typical of a network of stakeholders rather than a top-bottom organization. Therefore, although the organizational capacity to implement the network goals is rather limited and thus a bit challenging, it can also be seen as strength. (p. 20)
Improved energy efficiency and renewables are widely supported. Yet under the “Sustainable energy for all” category, the special report finds that scaling remains a barrier:
Ensuring adequate support to facilitate action across the many partner countries and thematically driven high impact opportunities, while at the same time collaborating with thousands of stakeholders over the course of the next 17 years, remain a key challenge for the initiative. Without proper follow-up and engagement, many commitment makers may not be fully engaged, which means that they would be left with little direction on how to contribute to the initiative in a tangible way. (p. 26)
To be fair, the problems highlighted in the special report extend far beyond the business-focused mandate of the Global Compact. However, the fuzzy goals and lack of guidance that UN programs face mirror some of the obstacles dogging private sustainability efforts as well.
The sheer number of different sustainability initiatives is a rising source of confusion for individuals, companies, consortia and even entire sectors. Even the most pro-sustainability business leaders can find themselves overwhelmed by well-intentioned, often overlapping agendas, collaborations and standards. The Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings has uncovered more than 1,500 sustainability indicators spanning almost 600 issues.
And small, uncoordinated efforts come with added costs and missed opportunities. In a recent conversation with GSB’s Jo Confino, Mars Inc. CSO Barry Parkin estimated that 125 cocoa sustainability programs exist, each with high startup costs and affecting hundreds – at most, thousands – of farmers. “If we were to align behind programmes, it would be much more efficient,” he said, “and we could really scale up our impacts.”
Signs of success
That said, there are certainly some promising signs, too. Cities of varying sizes, with varying resources, are proving that a common set of interests, abilities and incentives can yield real gains.
Some 4,700 projects have been registered with C40 Cities, which links the mitigation efforts of scores of megacities together with many smaller innovative burgs. The group is on track to cut more than 1bn tonnes of emissions by 2030. In another city-focused program, the carbonn Climate Cities Registry, 302 cities from 42 countries, together responsible for some 1.5 gigatonnes of carbon-dioxide annually, have filed more than 3,600 commitments, inventories or mitigation plans.
What’s behind these metro-successful stories? Municipal climate efforts can yield self-sustaining benefits, such as boosting energy savings, health and the economy, according to a 2013 survey of 110 cities conducted by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), C40 and the sustainability-engineering firm AECOM.
The gains are especially encouraging given that cities are the battleground for a growing share of the climate challenge. Urban centres account for a bit more than half of the world’s population today, but generate 75% of the globe’s greenhouse-gas emissions – and they’re expected to grow to contain 70% of the population by 2050.
What’s next?
Whether they take the form of rules requiring big buildings to track and publicize their resource use or water-savings standards on plumbing fixtures, successful city-scale efforts share some attributes: they benefit stakeholders, they’re clearly defined – with timelines – and are pushed from the top down.
When sustainability leaders meet in New York next month, they should realize they have a rare opportunity to give helpful structure and greater urgency to business’s role in the post-2015 world. Without clearer marching orders and deeper institutional support, though, the risk is that the post Rio+20 bottom-up approach will simply bottom out.
~
Check out the original story here:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/post-2015-bottom-up-approach
How recovering water from fresh potatoes helps a PepsiCo chips factory turn off the taps | Corporate Knights
For PepsiCo, one of the world’s biggest makers of potato chips, the key to producing the crispiest chips possible is all about driving moisture out of raw potatoes. Paradoxically, though, potatoes are made up mostly of water.
At a Walkers Crisps factory in Leicester, England, PepsiCo is turning this soggy challenge into a water-saving innovation. The goal: to extract so much water from inbound spuds that the factory can go “off grid,” drawing little or no water from public taps. Doing so, PepsiCo hopes, will help save the plant roughly $1 million a year in avoided water costs.
“The idea for taking factories off the water grid came from a simple observation by our front-line teams that potatoes are 80 per cent water,” says Martyn Seal, PepsiCo’s European director of sustainability.
PepsiCo’s efforts to turn off the taps at its Walkers plant in the U.K. is one sliver of a bigger batch of initiatives to make its global operations run with less water. In 2010, the food-and-drink giant, which turned over $66.5 billion (U.S.) in sales last year, released its first comprehensive water report. The effort, similar to initiatives out of rival Coca-Cola, set out details of its water consumption alongside plans on how to use that water more productively.
One of its headline goals is to improve the efficiency of water use – measured by water consumed per unit of production – by 20 per cent by 2015, using 2006 as a baseline. PepsiCo hit this target last year, four years ahead of schedule. Another goal is to strive for “positive water balance” in water-distressed areas. This means for every unit of water PepsiCo uses, it strives to restore, replenish or prevent loss of the same amount or more in the same region. It also aims to provide access to safe water for three million people in developing countries before 2016.
Early on, potato-chip plants emerged as a juicy target for these goals. Making chips is surprisingly water intensive. In a normal year, some 350,000 metric tons of fresh tubers is shipped to the Leicester factory – the equivalent of some 13,000 tractor-trailer loads.
In the plant, potatoes are washed, peeled and sliced. A steady flow of H2O is used at each of these steps. In Leicester, this process demands roughly 700 million litres of water annually, the equivalent of roughly 280 Olympic-sized pools. Yet as crucial as water is while preparing the raw spuds, it’s an unwanted troublemaker thereafter. The thin slices are plunged for a few minutes into oversized fryers filled with oil boiling at 190°C (375°F). Water trapped in the potato slices vapourizes instantly, turning the otherwise inedible starch into an addictively crunchy treat.
In a conventional set-up, the cloud of steam that rises from these vats is vented out into the air. PepsiCo engineers recognized that the vapour represents a huge waste of both water and energy. To recover these wisps of moisture, PepsiCo fit a contraption onto the plant’s exhaust towers. Inside, the hot steam passes over a network of thin, cooled tubes. Moisture from the potato vapour condenses on the cooler tubes for easy collection. The process also recaptures traces of cooking oil from the exhaust. Both the oil and water can be reused. About four-fifths of the moisture that is normally lost is recovered.
Together with systems that recycle about two-thirds of the plant’s wastewater, the steam-recapture project is on track to supply enough water to hit PepsiCo’s goal of drawing zero freshwater in Leicester. The company is already testing the technology at similar sites in Holland and Belgium, part of a plan to extend these practices to other large European operations and, later, worldwide.
A successful pilot in the Leicester plant “will provide us with a technology suite that we will be able to reapply at other PepsiCo plants, particularly in areas of severe water scarcity,” Seal says. “This is an opportunity to realize meaningful cost savings while reducing our impact on the environment.”
Combined with other projects across PepsiCo’s operations, the steam-recapture efforts contributed to savings of $45 million in water and related energy costs last year, compared with the 2006 base when the company began these efforts. By volume, in 2011 it used 16 billion fewer litres of water, compared with 2006.
As much as PepsiCo execs crow about the bottom-line impact of these efforts, they point to strategic benefits too: The company must plan for operating risks that droughts pose to future operations. By 2030, global demand for freshwater could exceed supplies by 40 per cent, explains Dan Bena, PepsiCo’s senior director of sustainable development.
“If this gap is not closed, there will be no business as we know it today,” he says.
~
See the original story here: http://www.corporateknights.com/article/tech-savvy-pepsico