Sustainability Professionals Need to Be Weird to Grow Revenues. On this Earth Day, I want to recognize and challenge the dedicated community of sustainability professionals. What these talented people have achieved over the last 10 years is historic. From Apple to Walmart, from San Diego to New York, sustainability has become a core best practice of business and community success. My economic research points to the achievement of a multi-trillion dollar global annual revenue economy that is growing profits, reducing environmental impacts and creating jobs.
With success comes some frustration within the sustainability professional community. The central theme of this frustration is often over the scale or intensity of CEO engagement. Sustainability professional challenge One reason for frustration over CEO access and empowerment is that CEOs are strategic while much of the success achieved by sustainability professionals is often tactical.
Of course, making a strategic revenue-growing business case is easier said than done. 6 reasons your company should report to CDP. CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) is one of the world’s oldest and most well-regarded sustainability reporting frameworks. Backed by more than $92 trillion in institutional investor dollars, CDP has proven its value to the most sophisticated and influential decision-makers.
As a result, CDP holds the world’s largest collection of self-reported environmental information and authors a world-class methodology that enables organizations of all types to measure, disclose, manage and share environmental performance data. If you’ve never reported to CDP before, here are six reasons why you should: 1. Your investors want you to A few years ago, Goldman Sachs released a study (PDF) documenting how the publicly traded stocks of sustainability reporters outperformed that of non-reporters. This watershed moment marked a tipping point in the “green is gold” movement — the belief that strategic sustainability enhanced profits. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
For first-timers, CDP reporting can be daunting. Exxon Mobil's commitment to carbon asset risk is just the beginning | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. There is a big shift afoot in energy markets and it is not just funds flowing out of fossil fuel stocks courtesy of Bill McKibben and his climate movement 350.org. While many investors across the globe say no to Big Oil through divestment, others are looking to change the energy giants from the inside.
Climate change is an immense risk to the oil and gas industry as we know it; the biggest risk, of course, is the fate of fossil fuel reserves. If catastrophic warming is to be avoided, only one third of current reserves can be burned. Which makes us question why oil and gas companies spent over $650bn (about £400bn) last year looking for more?
Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth manager, and the non-profit As You Sow filed a first-time shareholder proposal with Exxon Mobil on this very topic. Exxon's commitment did not come overnight and is the result of months of dialogue and legal process. And we're not the only ones worried about overspending. CSR Strategies Reap Financial Rewards. Companies that introduce a sustainability strategy throughout their supply chain generally see a boost in their financial performance — but those that don’t fully commit to the strategy generally see a decline in revenue, according to a study by Clark University researchers. Investigating the Relationship of Sustainable Supply Chain Management with Corporate Financial Performance, by Zhihong Wang and Joseph Sarkis, tracked 411 companies from Newsweek’s green ranking of the top 500 companies.
The study found that those firms that integrated sustainable supply chain management, jointly including social and environmental supply chain management, generally saw “marked upgrades” in their fiscal returns, particularly through 2011, reports Strategy and Business. However, to see the improvements companies must be patient as the positive effects can have a time lag of at least two years, the study said. Photo Credit: plants in CSR shape vis Shutterstock.
GRI Digitizes G4, Uses Open-Source Tagging Language. The Global Reporting Initiative says the first draft of the GRI G4 Taxonomy will be available for public comment on Sept. 9. The GRI released G4, the latest version of its sustainability reporting guidelines that place more emphasis on materiality, in May. The GRI developed the GRI Taxonomy — which is available for free — in collaboration with Deloitte Netherlands. The two organizations launched the original version is 2012 and are now continuing their collaboration to add the new G4 Guidelines to the Taxonomy. It’s one of the first XBRL taxonomies for sustainability reporting, the GRI and Deloitte say, intended to help investors, auditors and analysts to access information in sustainability reports faster, and more simply. XBRL stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. It’s an open-source tagging language similar to XML used worldwide for tagging data in financial reports.
Other benefits of XBRL include: On Oct. 4, the GRI will host a webinar about the draft taxonomy. Toxic 100 Names Top Corporate Air Polluters. Precision Castparts, DuPont, Bayer Group, Dow Chemicals and ExxonMobil are the top five corporate air polluters in the US, say researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. BASF ranks No. 6, with LyondellBasell Industries, Renco Group, General Electric and Ineos Group rounding out the top 10 in the fifth edition of the Toxic 100 Air Polluters. The list assess how many pounds of pollutants big firms release as well as the toxicity of chemicals, transport factors such as prevailing winds and height of smokestacks, and the number of people exposed.
For example, the No. 1 firm, Precision Castparts, has a toxic score — pounds released multiplied by toxicity multiplied by population exposure) of 16.6 million and releases .11 millions of pounds of toxic pollutants (see chart). No. 2 DuPont, meanwhile, has a toxic score of 7.1 million with 10.94 millions of pounds of toxic air releases, according to the index. Drop the denial, embrace reality and accelerate sustainability | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional.
"Damn! We're in a tight spot! " exclaimed George Clooney's character Ulysses Everett McGill in the Coen Brothers movie O Brother Where Art Thou? He and his bumbling convict compatriots were holed up in a barn hayloft surrounded by an armed bounty-hunting posse, who then set fire to the dry wooden building.
When it comes to sustainability in business we are also in a tight spot. Swap the posse and the flames licking at our feet for mushrooming consumer demand and climate change, to name but two side dishes from the groaning smorgasbord of un-sustainability at which we dine, and you can see why we're in denial. The scale of this tight spot forces us to retreat to a "too big, too ugly, too scary, too late" type of fatalistic mindset. The enormity of change required intimidates us or generates a massive psychological bystander effect – in which we assume the pointed nature of the task in hand means that someone else must be doing something about it.
And that's the key word: "got". Why companies need to be held to account over their environmental debt | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. We all know about the two sides of the financial ledger – profit and loss corresponding to cost and expense. But there is a basic piece of the financial picture that is not yet on the books – cause and effect.
Every financial transaction affects the environment, and the environment is embedded in every financial transaction. Every transaction. Our financial and environmental crises are inextricably connected – both in the causes and solutions. Much too often, one corporation's actions and assets become liabilities for other parties – taxpayers, businesses, families and natural ecosystems.
I call this "environmental debt", and it is as risky for financial security as subprime mortgages wrapped in credit default swaps. For example, in 2011, floods in Thailand effectively shut down the country. Logging in 20th century Thailand caused financial havoc around the world in 2011 – a good 20 years after much of it occurred.
I propose a new framework to guide 21st century commerce. The coal industry’s desperate PR efforts: old, lame, and ineffective. Among the highlights of President Obama’s climate change speech was an explicit recognition that polluting industries and the members of Congress who do their bidding will oppose climate action with the same talking points they have used for decades to try and block clean air standards. Now, what you will hear from the special interests and their allies in Congress is that this will kill jobs and crush the economy and basically end free enterprise as we know it. And the reason I know you’ll hear those things is because that’s what they’ve said every time America sets clear rules and better standards for our air and our water and our children’s health.
These dishonest industry attacks on clean air rules over the decades have taken many forms, from lobbying to public relations efforts. But a primary tactic for these efforts has been, and remains, well funded advertising campaigns. Anyway, ‘war on coal’ never resonated with much conviction among ordinary Americans. Cash Doesn’t Follow Sustainability Commitments. June 12, 2013 Large US corporations’ spending on energy, environmental and sustainability initiatives will grow at just 5 percent per year until 2017, from $34.6 billion in 2012 to $43.6 billion in 2017, according to a Verdantix study. Companies have no financial incentive to increase their sustainability investments beyond 5 percent annually, says Verdantix analyst Patty Satkiewicz, who authored the report.
Satkiewicz blames this on US policies on energy, GHG reporting and environmental compliance, which she says will not change over the forecast period. Additionally, low natural gas prices will keep electricity prices down, which means CFOs won’t have any incentive to invest in energy management. Corporate energy and environment market suppliers such as ABB, Eaton and SAIC should “plan for mid single digit organic growth” for the next four years, Satkiewicz says. Other report findings include: Three industries dominate spending. Successful Sustainability Strategy Leans on Innovation, ‘Gamification’
To survive and prosper in a rapidly shifting business landscape, companies must constantly evolve. One example of this evolution is seen when forward thinking leaders incorporate sustainability into their business strategy. A successful sustainability strategy depends upon embracing a fundamental shift in an organization’s way of doing business, an eagerness to find new ways of identifying challenges and seizing opportunities. Effective leaders recognize that their organizations will thrive through creativity and innovation. But it’s one thing to decide to be innovative; it’s another entirely to make innovation an integral part of your corporate culture.
Gamification of innovation By 2015, more than 50% of organizations that manage innovation processes will ‘gamify’ those processes (Gartner Inc., 2011). Both physical and digital suggestion boxes exist in many workplaces. The power of the crowd Innovation management software ‘gamifies’ the process of idea generation and assessment. The Google-backed clean energy projects around the world [map] Over the past at least six years Google has poured more than $1 billion into a Hoover’s Dam worth (2 GW) of clean energy projects, as well as funded a few early stage cleantech startups (and even acquired one recently).
Earlier today, as part of its first clean power investment in Africa, Google announced that it has invested $12 million into a solar panel farm in South Africa. We mapped out Google-backed clean power projects, with links to our coverage to see how much the company is investing, in what and where. [googlemaps. Adopt CSR or Risk a Consumer Boycott. P-plus. SAP Argues Business Case of Integrated Reporting. Software firm SAP is using its combined sustainability and annual report to promote more deeply embedded sustainability in its business operations, according to Dr. Peter Graf, the company’s chief sustainability officer and executive vice president sustainability.
The core of the company’s integrated report is how SAP’s non-financial performance, including its carbon footprint and energy consumption, affects its financial performance, Graf told SiliconAngle. For example SAP‘s report shows how much money has been spent on each energy unit or how much has been saved by each percentage reduction in energy use. Highlighting such connections makes “sustainability relevant for the business,” Graf says. Keeping an eye on sustainability can also keep consumers buying your products, Graf says.
SAP launched its first Integrated Annual Report in March. Do you use integrated reporting at your firm? Avoiding tax may be legal, but can it ever be ethical? | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. Protesters marching down Regent Street in London protesting against Starbucks' corporate tax policies. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer As part of good governance, companies will seek to minimise their tax liability through "tax planning", making the most of the tools and mechanisms which the government makes available to them specifically for this purpose: allowances, deductions, rebates, exemptions, and so on. Tax planning is tax compliant behaviour but there is a grey area between this and "tax avoidance". Tax avoidance, while legitimate, can be seen as aggressive when it involves using financial instruments and arrangements not intended as, or anticipated by, governments as a vehicle for tax advantage.
For example, the use of overseas tax havens. Avoiding tax and bending the rules of the tax system is not illegal unlike tax evasion; it is operating within the letter, but perhaps not the spirit, of the law. Tax as a social responsibility Paying a fair share Need for certainty. Michael Porter unveils new health and happiness index | Guardian Sustainable Business | Guardian Professional. Can Harvard professor Michael Porter do for wellbeing and happiness what others have so far failed to achieve? The creator of the shared value concept, who has the ear of both big business and governments, has unveiled a "rigorous" new Social Progress Index (SPI) that hopes to put social and environmental considerations at the top of the policy and corporate agenda.
He believes that a strong foundation of knowledge and analysis is essential if government, business and civil society are going to be able to collaborate to create new measures that look beyond gross domestic product (GDP), which has dominated the post-war global economy. Porter hopes that the SPI will become as prominent as the World Economic Forum's global competitiveness report in driving best practice and a race for the top. A new organisation, the Social Progress Imperative, has been created to support the development of the SPI and help to integrate it into corporate and governmental thinking.
How companies avoid tax – a quick summary in 8,000 words. Tech's Over-Sharing Economy. Corporate Climate Change Rankings Show Which Companies Are Lowering Their Emissions. The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility. Companies Use Sustainability Reporting to Help Formulate Strategy. Sustainability should not be consigned to history by Shared Value | Guardian Sustainable Business. Freemium Medical Care? Indian Hospital Shows That A Charitable Hospital Can Still Make A Profit. Unilever's CEO on Making Responsible Business Work - HBR IdeaCast. MIT Study Shows That Sustainability Is Profitable.
P-plus. Ben & Jerry's competition encourages sustainability. US Firms Put CSR Communication Before Performance, KPMG Says. Factoring sustainability in IPO planning. Sustainability Reporting Methods ‘Outdated’ Why The Future of Greentech Needs to Sound Awesome: Cleantech News and Analysis « It's Time to Standardize Integrated Reporting of Financial and Sustainability Performance - Robert G. Eccles - HBS Faculty. ‘Radical Greening’ Seen As Top 10 Business Risk · Environmental Leader · Green Business, Sustainable Business, and Green Strategy News for Corporate Sustainability Executives. Green.view: The green suits.
Échte welvaart : welkom. Big Business Says Addressing Climate Change �. Is Corporate Citizenship Measuring Up: The Latest Data | Fast Co. iPhone 4 and Apple's silence on pollution in China | Environment.