A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
Here’s my latest slide deck, this time on campaigning NGOs. I am using these in my teaching at Birkbeck, University of London and at King’s College London. This year I have 160 students, from undergraduates to mature business students / working executives, who are studying for a variety of Master’s degrees. This is probably my…
(The below is from Innovation Forum’s first weekly business brief e-newsletter. Similar devastating insight will be published each week on a Friday. Sign up for it here. No deforestation commitments are welcome, but the hard work is still to do There have been some significant wins in recent months in the battle against deforestation. In…
Keynote speech delivered by Lord Mandelson, Chairman, Global Counsel, at the Innovation Forum conference,”How business can tackle deforestation”, 28th-29th October, 2014, London From Birmingham to New York Lord Mandelson “As Brendan May said, you might ask what I am doing here with you this morning. The last time I spoke at an event similar to…
As some readers will recall, we held a conference on deforestation last week in London. Here’s a few thoughts that came out of it as a result. Thanks to Richard Donovan from the Rainforest Alliance for nuancing some of this. An incredible amount of progress has been made since 2010. There are three kinds of…
Dominique Gangneux is the sustainable markets vice president at the Rainforest Alliance, where he is working on forestry, food & agriculture and tourism. I sent him a few questions recently. Here’s what he had to say. Dominique Gangneux What does Rainforest Alliance do today? What’s your elevator pitch? It is easy for people to assume…
Growing economies while avoiding deforestation Stephen Donofrio, Principal & Founder of Greenpoint Innovations, examines the important role that avoiding deforestation and degradation plays in mitigating climate change, and describes the benefits to businesses from tackling forest risk. First published on the Corporate Citizenship blog here. Thanks for permission to reproduce. I usually only publish original…
Grant Rosoman offers an update on what’s happening in this complex and highly important area for businesses concerned about deforestation and sustainable land use Market transformation is happening: a growing number of companies involved in palm oil and pulp and paper have adopted No Deforestation policies, and have declared they will implement these commitments through…
Here’s a link to the Guardian story/picture gallery about the new WWF and the Zoological Society of London report on wildlife decline. You really ought to take a look at it. It makes for pretty sad reading. Chart below. We’re obsessed with carbon, we should be more obsessed with plants and animals (sorry, ‘natural capital’, see…
There’s a good video here and below from Asia Pulp and Paper about their progress to date on sustainability. I’ve covered the company for years, more recently with good news, rather than bad, which is nice. Here’s a link to read some past and recent posts and see a captioned set of photos on their…
Here’s our new management briefing on what companies can do to minimise their deforestation footprints, work with NGOs and manage legal and reputational risk. It features contributions from Greenpeace, TFT, Marks & Spencer, Neste Oil, Canopy, Robertsbridge and many others. There’s some really useful insight in there into how to deal with risk, manage transparency,…
The world lost 2.3 million square kilometers (230 million hectares) of tree cover from 2000 to 2012, equivalent to 50 soccer fields every minute of every day for 12 years. So now Unilever and the World Resources Institute (WRI) have announced a new partnership that will increase transparency in agricultural commodity supply chains with the…
In this Q&A, I asked the Institute for Human Rights and Business’s John Morrison, author of The Social License, how far human rights issues are now being tackled properly by international business John has this new book out on social license and what it means for business. John Morrison, biz/human rights pioneer TW: What is…
Scott Poynton gives a personal view on why the deforestation debate should focus on action now and not targets for future improvement Poynton: Has ‘sustainability’ become meaningless? I have seen many bad things, close up and personal, over the last 20+ years working on deforestation issues. I believe that our path to survival lies through…
Social drivers to protect - or cut down forest - are vital to grasp (photo taken by the author, January 2014, Sumatra, Indonesia) Traditionally, in the CSR field, social and environmental issues were handled by different sets of executives. One group of more science-based folk worked on environment, whilst another, more community and philanthropy-oriented executives…
Rhett Butler, founder, Mongabay.com. And yes, he does give a damn If you don’t read Mongabay.com then you should. It’s an excellent, independent site on rainforests and has covered the deforestation debate for many years. I was in Indonesia with Rhett Butler, its founder, a few months back, looking at APP concessions (slideshow here). I found…
I'm Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum, a sustainability focused research, publishing and events business. I'm also a lecturer on Corporate Responsibility at Kings College London and at Birkbeck, University of London. Tobias DOT Webb AT innovation-forum.co.uk
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