Food Industry Leaders Acknowledge Need to Step Up to Transform Their Sector
The global food system is under scrutiny for environmental impacts including habitat degradation, greenhouse gas emissions and freshwater use. Half the world’s farmers go hungry, while around a billion people are clinically obese. Demand for food is growing and yields are falling. Radical and rapid systemic change is required.
Today SustainAbility publishes a new report, Appetite for Change, that identifies precisely what change is needed, and the role the corporate sector must play in making it happen. Based on interviews with a wide range of corporate leaders, the report reveals that while there is conensus on the need for change, there is still no clear path forward. In response, Appetite for Change seeks to energize the debate by proposing a new agenda for helping food companies and non-corporate actors chart a collaborative course toward a sustainable food system.
Learn more by downloading the full report and watching the video briefing in our Library. To speak about how your company can lead and/or prepare for this shift, contact biringer@sustainability.com.
Watch, read and join the debate
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Engaging Stakeholders Network Dives into Investor Engagement and Open Data
Earlier in June, SustainAbility’s Engaging Stakeholders network held a candid conversation – with Jami Rubin, a senior health care analyst at Goldman Sachs, and John Schaetzl, SustainAbility’s Lead Non-Executive Director and a former health care investor – about how to communicate with mainstream investors. The dialogue confirmed for us that a considerable gap exists between the headlines we see about mainstream adoption of sustainability (e.g. UNPRI assets under management at $25 trillion) and what is happening on the ground. We heard from Jami and John on how investors and analysts are cynical by nature and therefore discount much of what they read in sustainability reports. A key to connecting with these investors is to directly link sustainability efforts to the main value drivers of a given company.
On July 20, Engaging Stakeholders will convene a webinar on “open data,” or the move to make often-inaccessible datasets freely available for public use and review. Governments and multilaterals have led the charge on open data (e.g. the World Bank and the US Government’s www.data.gov), and we are starting to see signs of corporations testing the space (e.g. Nike). The webinar will explore what open data means for companies, sustainability reporting and stakeholder engagement.
To learn more about mainstream investor engagement or to join the open data webinar, please contact ayars@sustainability.com.
Visit Engaging Stakeholders webpage
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Sustainability Experts Share Views on the Future of Energy
The crises at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and subsequent public debates over the safety and future of nuclear power have given the world pause this spring; case in point: Japan is now rethinking its nuclear position and Germany has announced plans to close all of its nuclear facilities by 2022.
In this context, GlobeScan and SustainAbility asked sustainability experts and practitioners from 67 countries worldwide to reconsider what a sustainable, low-carbon energy future looks like, what types of energy investments are necessary, whether there’s a place for nuclear power, and what role corporations can play in shaping our energy future. Survey results and expert commentary from Jeff Erikson of Sustainability are now available in our Library. And stay tuned for our next survey which will be available in coming weeks.
See highlights on the future of energy
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Green Marketing Is... Evolving!
Sustainability blogs have been buzzing lately with questions of how effective green marketing has been, whether it's time has passed or is just getting started, and what the term even means (or ought to mean going forward). With several of our team just back from this year's Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey, CA, and as we dig further into our new research project,
Signed, Sealed... Delivered?, we've had a lot to say on this subject ourselves.
Here's a selection of our recent thinking both framing the relevant issues and exploring how the branding and marketing of sustainability is currently evolving:
- Green Marketing Is... Contested – Understanding the evolving debate around the value of green marketing. | Read more
- On Brand, Transformation and Sustainability – Reflections on our evolving thinking on sustainable brands and consumption. | Read more
- Long Live (Green) Marketing – Marketers must begin to better understand how sustainability sits alongside and/or interacts with (rather than trumps) traditional value drivers. | Read more
- Clean As a Whistle – How Method's unique approach and success underscore emerging insights on the evolution of green marketing and ecolabels. | Read more
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More on Sustainability vs. Creating Shared Value
The last few months have seen vigrous debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses, as concepts, of CSR, sustainability and the newest entrant, creating shared value (CSV). SustainAbility's Michael Sadowski weighed in with a blog on the subject back in April, and this month contributed a guest post
to FSG (the firm that CSV creators Michael Porter and Mark Kramer co-founded to popularize the idea).
While some believe the debate is merely semantic – that CSV is just sustainability or corporate responsibility in a new coat – the differences are more profound. As Michael writes in his latest piece, CSV is appealing due to its apparent simplicity (“society wins when we win”), yet this may lure us into believing that companies won’t have to make value judgments in addressing thorny issues. And, CSV does not pose the critical question: is the company’s fundamental business model or activity in the best interest of the planet and society?
Tell us what you think about sustainability versus CSV
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