A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
The Chain Reaction Research newsletter, published by Climate Advisors, recently highlighted deforestation as a financial risk. Their recent note makes for interesting and useful reading: The Chain: Deforestation as a Climate Risk for Investors Here’s a few choice excerpts which include some helpful framing numbers: “Approximately 70 percent of deforestation is connected to agricultural commodity…
The New York Times reports that: Citrus Farmers Facing Deadly Bacteria Turn to Antibiotics, Alarming Health Officials In its decision to approve two drugs for orange and grapefruit trees, the E.P.A. largely ignored objections from the C.D.C. and the F.D.A., which fear that expanding their use in cash crops could fuel antibiotic resistance in humans….
We’ve shifted over to our new website at Innovation Forum. It’s much easier to find your way around now. Check it out here. Now, you can browse and listen/read by a number of categories. For example: If you want to delve into some business innovation analysis, go here. But if its brand and other expert…
This is a key question for the future of food, some materials and even some fuels. According to at least one academic journal, the term is ill-defined, and lacks accepted guidelines. The recent Sainsbury’s funded report, on the future of food, quoted in the Guardian, claims that: “Jellyfish suppers washed down with algae milk and…
After our recent modern slavery conference in London, I and the team decamped to Amsterdam last week for our sustainable apparel and textiles conference at the Planetarium. It’s a lovely venue. It’s not often you speak on a conference session and a heron flies past the window, as Alison Ward from Cotton Connect, who sponsored the…
Innovation Forum would like to invite you to take part in our discussion-based webinar: Are biofuels a sustainable - and scalable - solution? Join us for an hour of interactive discussion with United Airlines, SkyNRG, WBCSD and IINAS on how businesses are taking steps to mitigate their carbon footprint using biofuels. Sign up here: https://bit.ly/2TOyJFo…
I know I know, it’s the festive season, so who wants to get bogged down with serious sustainability stuff? But I know many of you, like me, get bored of less important things after a few days rest, and want to read more about our favourite subject, how to make the world (more) sustainable. So…
The respected Institute for Human Rights and Business has put together what it sees as the top ten business and human rights issues as we head into 2019. Here’s the list, and their website, with a series of guest posts from credible writers, explains the issues one by one. Eliminating Discrimination Within Workplace and Across Wider…
A couple of weeks ago we held our first sustainable landscapes conference in London. It was a combination of conferences and a culmination of four years work in some ways. We merged our smallholders, deforestation and elements of our agriculture conferences together and somehow it worked. Huge thanks to our many sponsors and supporters of…
A few months back, I facilitated a session with Goetz in Accra, Ghana, at the TFA 2020 conference, on rural sustainability initiatives that will scale. It was a fascinating 45 minutes or so, and his company, *Golden-Agri Resources, seems to me to be leading the way, with a few others, in this area. The evolution in…
Following my previous posts: “The ten most important issues in…business and plastic pollution/innovation“ and “The 13 most important issues in…business, modern slavery, forced labour and human rights” let’s move on to the topic of sustainable commodities sourcing and landscape approaches to sustainability. So here’s what our research came up with as some of the key issues…
I haven’t posted on here for a while. We’ve been busy publishing on the main Innovation Forum site, which has hugely increased traffic in the last few months. We think this is due to our audio content, which is proving extremely popular, we think because a) its pretty good and b) its a flexible format…
Trade “wars” (actually skirmishes) are all over the news at the moment. Alongside the political posturing of Trump and his economically-unhinged cohorts, there may be, as mentioned before on this blog, a sustainability-related one brewing too. I’m referring, of course to palm oil, the EU and deforestation. This headline from the Asia Times gives you…
It’s not often I sit down to write a post that could well annoy almost everyone I know. This is one of those. But it’s a risk worth taking. Someone needs to say, I think, what I am going to say here. Scott Poynton blogged about this area recently, and I had the same conversation…
Chris Meyer from the Environmental Defense Fund has put together an insightful blog post on the above topic, which is particularly timely, given this week is the TFA 2020 AGM in Accra, Ghana, where I am moderating a panel session on scaling up zero deforestation initiates, with speakers from Golden Agri Resources and Mondelez. I’ve…
I'm Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum, a sustainability focused research, publishing and events business. I've also been a lecturer on Corporate Responsibility at Kings College London and at Birkbeck, University of London for eight years. I work with large companies all over the world and sit on the sustainability advisory board for Walgreens Boots Alliance. From 2006-9 I lead the development of UK CSR policy, resulting in the Responsibility Deals framework. I can be contacted at Tobias DOT Webb AT innovation-forum.co.uk
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