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A major medical centre in India will soon be receiving a significant amount of its energy from the sun courtesy of Californian technology from Sunpreme Solar Systems.

A 150 kilowatt rooftop solar system has been commissioned at the Guru Nanak Dev Super Speciality (GNDSS) Hospital and will be the largest commercial rooftop installation in Punjab, as well as the first in India to use the technology.

The system will generate 225,000 kilowatt hours of clean electricity annually and will be a centerpiece to the hospital’s holistic approach to environmental stewardship. The system generates enough solar electricity to power 200+ Indian households, and offset 316,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions - the equivalent of planting 53 acres of trees, in just single year of production, says the company. Over 25 years, the system is expected to generate energy savings of over Rs.9 Crores (US $1.7M).

Currently, women in Europe have to work 59 extra days to get to the same salary as their male counterparts, but the ‘Proposal on increasing Gender Equality in the Boardrooms of Listed Companies’ aims to change that by boosting women’s representation on corporate boards of administration. Patricia Mansfield-Devine reports  

This is set to be an important year for working women in Europe. Legislation tabled by Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, is aiming to crack the ‘glass ceiling’ that keeps women across Europe in lower-level roles at work, where they wield less influence and command smaller salaries.

Currently, women in Europe have to work 59 extra days to get to the same salary as their male counterparts, but the ‘Proposal on increasing Gender Equality in the Boardrooms of Listed Companies’ aims to change that by boosting women’s representation on corporate boards of administration.

Currently, across Europe, more than 96 out of 100 company presidents are men. Some 85 per cent of non-executive board members and 91.1 per cent of executive board members are also men, while women make up only 15 per cent and 8.9 per cent respectively. Voluntary initiatives have failed to improve this figure and the EC believes that legislation is now required Europe-wide, especially as two thirds of member states have introduced no legislation at all, and there the situation has generally not improved or actually worsened.

However, EU legislation, which aims to increase the percentage of women non-executive directors to 40 per cent, will only apply to firms listed on the stock exchange, so self-regulatory measures are also required, and here the Norwegian model is being used as a paradigm.

Norway increased the proportion of women in boardrooms from 8.5 per cent in 2003 to 44.2 per cent by 2008 and the EC believes the country’s experience holds important lessons, key among which is that success in promoting women depends on a mixture of regulatory and self-regulatory measures such as women’s leadership programmes.

The Norwegian business confederation’s ‘female future’ programme helps companies to recruit and train women leaders, and the EC believes that companies across the EU could follow that example to prepare and train women in management positions for board-level positions.

“Recruiting and developing women isn’t only a moral imperative,” says Regina Eckert of the Center for Creative Leadership, a non-profit organisation dedicated to leadership education and research. “For the kind of goals that companies want to attain, they need women. Particularly if your buyers or consumers are female, then you need a certain representation of women who are similar to the buyers, because you get more customer-focused services and products that way.”

Four essential steps
At a company level, the CCL  believes there are four steps to take to increase the number of women in senior positions. The first is to promote women’s networks. The firm’s research shows that effective leaders are those who can build and leverage high-quality relationships and networks. Good leaders understand others at work and have a good sense of what is going on around them, says the CCL and they use their influence to obtain the resources they and their teams need to function effectively.

But women leaders often don’t have the same strength or reach of networks as their male counterparts do. This is where development can help: building women’s networks across functions and levels can help women become effective leaders and support organisational goals.

 “As a starting point, women can set up career advisory boards featuring a diversity of relationships inside and outside the company, with people that can give them advice, or challenges, or support for their own career,” says Eckert. “They can provide access to information, hand-holding, role-modelling or affirmation, so that women can expand their capabilities and capacities.”

The CCL’s advice is to make career advisory boards as diverse as possible and to include on them not only typically powerful men but also powerful women and people from very different backgrounds.

“It’s not easy for junior women to simply network with men who are more senior,” continues Eckert, “because there are some group dynamics that militate against women networking with those in more powerful positions. For instance, often men and women’s life circumstances are very different, so the things that make you bond informally with someone who’s junior - that you have something in common, or that you see something of yourself in them, for instance - are less likely to take place.

“The most striking difference, however, is primary childcare responsibilities. Most childcare in Europe still devolves to women and having roles that are gender-specific actually makes it more difficult for women to network than it is even for someone of a different ethnicity or a different religion.”

Mentorship programmes
The second step recommended by the CCL is to set up a formal mentorship programme. Pairing women who have leadership potential with mentors, both male and female, who work in other areas of the company, can help them raise their visibility, build networks and refine their leadership skills. Research by CCL and other organisations has shown that learning from other people, especially role models and mentors, is the second most powerful source of development and learning.

However, because senior women in the workplace are in a minority, they often lack role models and mentors, and are sometimes hesitant to actively seek them out. Including male mentors in the scheme has the added benefit of promoting awareness among male leaders, who can open doors they did not realise were closed to female colleagues.

Mentee relationships
Companies can go about setting up mentoring programmes in various ways, says Eckert. “If they are set up well they need a lot of support,” she says, “because you need somebody who monitors the quality of each relationship and helps the mentor as well as the mentee if things aren’t working out. Simply setting up the programme isn’t enough - it needs ongoing support from a trusted confidant inside the company.”

CCL trains both mentors and mentees in what needs to be discussed in the relationship, and works on getting the contracting right, outlining the responsibilities on both sides and sensitising people to what kind of learning can be gained from a mentoring relationship.

“Mentees often don’t ask for help,” says Eckert. “It’s not in our societal stereotype. We’re educated to be self-sufficient and to take help when it’s offered, but not to ask for it. And for mentees in general, there’s a certain amount of insecurity about what might be allowed in a mentoring relationship, and about how to deal with sensitive issues. Our training often liberates them to say: ‘I’ll ask my mentor about that’.”

Better work-life balance
The third step that companies can take is to develop a career management structure that promotes women’s self-awareness and confidence, based on constructive feedback. Women’s exclusion from the ‘inner circle’ of influence in the workplace is often reinforced by a lack of self-confidence and the perceived need to prove themselves first, rather than believing in their own potential.

“Most women don’t talk about it but it is totally common to think we’re insufficient and to strive for a lot of external recognition,” says Eckert.

“We train women to understand that what they’re doing is good and to have self-belief and self-confidence, and that not everything you’re doing needs to be recognised from the outside. Very often women are our own hardest critics.”

The fourth step that can aid women at work is to promote a better work-life balance. For instance, women remain overwhelmingly the primary caregivers for children and their  role within the family is often seen both by companies and women themselves as an obstacle to their career development. However, CCL research shows - perhaps somewhat surprisingly - that managers who are committed to their parenting responsibilities are seen as better leaders by their bosses.

“The crucial thing is that it’s not leaders who have children, it’s leaders who are committed to that role, who take it seriously that they have children,” says Eckert.

“If you’re committed to your parenting, there’s a positive spillover. Family life is about constant negotiation and finding a balance between your own goals and the goals of the people around you; it’s about sensing and reading other people in your environment and very often you have to negotiate in a non-verbal way, especially with kids; you are constantly in a situation where you have to manage potential conflicts in a way in which the family overall is preserved. These skills are directly relevant to effective performance as a senior workplace manager.”

Trust your employees
Organisations that are serious about retaining women and getting the most from them need to take steps to counter the prejudice that family and career cannot be combined, says the CCL, and the long hours culture is particularly detrimental. “We tell organisations that asking people to pull a 10 or 12 hour day isn’t a smart move,” says Eckert. “We know from physiological data and stress management data that you’re not more efficient if you work 10-12 hours than if you work 7-8 hours in a concentrated fashion.”

Not only is it not useful or sustainable for companies to ask people do to that, she says, when they do so, they lose the talent that won’t comply with that kind of pace.

“We link it back to trust,” she says. “If you trust your employees to do their job well, you need to allow them autonomy over how they achieve their results. If you can create a culture where people are held accountable for the results they achieve and not the time they spend doing so, you’re going to have much happier and more productive people.”

A new guide from the IHRB will help investors work with companies to ensure they have the systems and know-how to deal with human rights risks, Margaret Wachenfeld, director of legal affairs at the think tank, tells Liz Jones

Human rights risks now go well beyond the issue of child labour in supply chains these days. According to Margaret Wachenfeld, pictured right, director of legal affairs at the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) and lead author of a new investors guide, investors need to be aware that risk profiles are changing very rapidly and that risk issues change over time.

“There’s been a real pick up in the scope and depth of human rights issues in business and much wider issues being discussed,” Wachenfeld told Ethical Performance. “New kinds of companies and sectors are involved too. ICT, for example, where the issue of privacy and data protection are new on the radar.”

“Traditionally human rights risks involved sectors which engaged lots of labour or where there was an obvious impact on the environment – so manufacturing and mining for example. But these days you’d be hard pressed to find a sector that’s not affected.”

“The Guide can help investors work with companies to ensure they have the systems and know-how to deal with human rights risks,” Wachenfeld maintains.

Indeed, working within UN Guiding Principles, investors these days have a responsibility to evaluate human-rights-related risk across their portfolios. To help facilitate greater take up of this best practice requirement, the IHRB - in collaboration with Calvert Investments and the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility – has produced a guide that shows investors how to effectively integrate human rights into investment decision-making and corporate engagement.

Investing the Rights Way: A Guide for Investors on Business and Human Rights provides practical insights into how the globally accepted framework of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights can help investors assess and address human rights risks in their portfolios and more effectively benchmark and engage the companies they hold.

The guide addresses mainstream investors across all asset classes and provides an overview of key developments, standards and resources.

Professor John Ruggie, former UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights and Chair of the Institute for Human Rights and Business commented: “The UN Guiding Principles affirm that all companies have a responsibility to respect human rights in their operations and their business relationships. ‘Investing the Rights Way’ highlights strategies investors can use to help them prevent and remediate negative impacts.”

Wachenfeld says that one of the main messages of the report is that ‘the train is leaving the station’: “That’s meant to convey that after a 6 year process, the UN Guiding Principles are accepted and that investors and companies will be increasingly asked how they are applying those principles. What the report hopes is that at some point, those principles become a reflective part of every day business.”

Wachenfeld admits that human rights is not yet as high up the ESG agenda as it should be – “it’s not even where S or G are” - but believes it is only a matter of time: “It took a while for environmental issues to get recognition. There was a time when you’d look out over the city of London or New York at night and it would be ablaze with light. Then the realization of what a waste of energy that was got through and now flicking the switch at the end of the day is normal.”

Investors, managers and service providers can use the guide in a number of ways to engage with companies on human rights and screen companies in or out of a fund. It can also help benchmark or rank companies on their human rights performance against their peers and explore what lies behind a company’s public reporting statements. The guide can also help investors establish whether a fund, investor or company should invest in a particular region, country or sector.

Wachenfeld is keen to point out that the report is not just about raising the issue, but “gives investors a tool to help them ensure they are asking the right questions”. She admits that the report is basic but believes it can work on a number of levels: “It can help improve practices of more mainstream investors and make human rights part of the ‘S’ agenda for them. In the longer term, it can help in different asset classes such as equity infrastructure funds and human rights impact. It may also prove a way of providing more Key Performance Indicators to their portfolios.”

Ed Potter, Director, Global Workplace Rights with The Coca-Cola Company believes the guide has a wider audience: “Although this guide is written for investors, it also provides a succinct and clear roadmap for all companies on implementing respect for human rights and engaging with the investor community on human rights policies, human rights due diligence, and mitigation of human rights impacts.”

Daniel Jones, sustainability consultant at Radley Yeldar, shares some of the insight gained through the company’s How Does It Stack Up?  publication, exploring best practice reporting across Europe

With a number of corporate scandals hitting the headlines in 2012, the function of the sustainability report is increasingly being put to the test. As critics point towards a disconnect between rhetoric and action, how can we avoid sustainability reporting being discredited as greenwash in the wake of public scrutiny?

Whether involved in a breach of ethics, tax avoidance, or a lack of transparency surrounding business operations, corporate malpractice dominated the news in 2012. As a result, large organisations are increasingly being treated with suspicion by the public.

As corporate scepticism grows, so does the demand for greater transparency and accountability – a function historically performed by a company’s reporting suite. However, with sustainability reports failing to discuss information relating to controversial practices later unveiled by the press, its credibility has taken a knock.

The real challenge lies in sensitively describing performance openly and honestly, in a way that enhances (rather than damages) credibility.

To avoid criticism, reports need to move from a defensive stance to present a truly transparent overview of performance. This means presenting an accurate reflection a company’s culture, behaviour and genuine efforts at becoming a more responsible organisation. Here’s how:

•    Show the good, the bad and the ugly
•    Take on your leadership and legal teams to produce a report that’s as open as possible. Discussing challenges, exposing cultural failings and recording lessons learned is vital in rebuilding trust.
•    Tell it like it is
•    If you don’t back claims with evidence you’re asking to be scrutinised. Make sure the numbers tell as clear a story as the narrative.
•    Let others have their say
•    Featuring third-party commentary is an approach we like. Often reports can be corporate monologue, when a more credible picture could be painted by those outside your business.
•    Tell a clear story
•    Even with the most comprehensive data disclosures, transparency will be overlooked if data isn’t presented in a way that’s easy to understand. Pull it all together by uniting content with a clear over arching message
•    Aim for the spirit, not the letter
•    With standards like GRI becoming more commonplace, the shape and structure of reporting is looking more familiar. Don’t let a dogmatic approach to meeting requirements get in the way of producing a report that shows your uniqueness.

To request a copy of the full research or to find out about Radley Yeldar’s report benchmarking service, visit: www.ry.com

Airbnb is the de-facto archetype of the sharing economy - an easy-to-use service that lets you rent your home, or a spare bedroom, to weary travelers.  No sharing economy company has generated quite as much press or controversy over the years. Airbnb has enabled millions of travelers to find comfortable lodging for a bargain - with the interesting customization and neighborhood connections only a personal host could provide.  In fact, Airbnb claims they pump millions into local economies that would otherwise go to national chains.

However, with Airbnb's tremendous popularity have come accusations that it worsens apartment scarcity in places like San Francisco and New York because landlords may be keen to turn an apartment into a revolving hotel rather than rent it out long term. Are such claims against Airbnb merely coming from folks with chips on their shoulders who don't really understand the sharing economy?  Or is there truth to the claim that Airbnb is making a tight market worse?

It would be impossible to argue that Airbnb has zero effect on available rental properties. The question is just how much of an effect is it?  San Francisco has always been a very difficult place to find an apartment and its current economic boom is certainly keeping it that way.  The issue becomes a bit clearer when you look at some data and break Airbnb hosts into three different categories:

The data I'm using comes from surveys conducted by Airbnb and HR&A as part of their economic impact study in San Francisco.  You can download the whole PDF here. Airbnb does not publish the number of hosts in the city, but a search today showed about 3000 active listings in San Francisco of all types.

1) Type 1: The person who rents out their flat when they're out of town.

The largest group (46 percent) of Airbnb hosts are folks who rent out their entire home when they're out of town. I'd argue these people are the most classic embodiment of the sharing economy because they are putting to use a resource that would otherwise go wasted - an empty home. It's not possible to suggest that these people have any impact on apartment space in San Francisco because their homes wouldn't be available to renters anyway.

So that knocks off about half of Airbnb's potential impact on the rental market.

2) Type 2: The person with a spare room in their flat who rents it out from time to time.

A nearly equal number (44 percent) of Airbnb hosts rent only a portion of their home, typically a spare room, while they continue to live there. This type of arrangement is where things start to get interesting - see the infamous case of Nigel Warren who regularly rented a spare bedroom in his apartment until he was charged with a litany of fines and got into deep legal trouble. This group is even more complex because some are owners of the spare room and some (like Nigel) are renters themselves. Airbnb doesn't yet have the data on how this breaks down (though a new report is forthcoming).

An owner of an apartment has no obligation (legal or otherwise) to rent out her spare bedrooms to anyone, and if they do it on Airbnb, it's arguably creating space, not taking it away. So it's not likely this type of host is hurting the market much. However, a renter who choses to rent a spare room on Airbnb instead of to another full time roommate might conceivably begin to impact the market - not to mention they might be violating their lease. But even then, we have no idea whether this is something someone chooses to do once in a while or on a constant rotating basis - I'd love to see the numbers.

3) Type 3: The person who doesn't occupy the flat at all and runs it as a full-time Airbnb property. 

Accounting for about 10 percent of Airbnb hosts, this group is really the only group that gets far enough into the "gray zone" that they might impact the availability of apartments in San Francisco. These hosts, some of whom own multiple units, are also likely the hosts for whom a hotel tax might be appropriate, among other possible legal ramifications (but that's another story I'll get into later).

So where does that leave us?

San Francisco has never been an easy place to find an apartment. I remember having friends "live" on my couch for months in the late 1990s, unable to find something affordable while the dot-com boom raged on. There was no Airbnb then. Today, with San Francisco booming as much as ever, with cranes constructing new units as far as the eye can see, the apartment search is still a quagmire for would-be new residents, monied and otherwise.

Does Airbnb make it worse?  Perhaps a little.  But probably about 90 percent less than the naysayers claim.

Image credit: Unsplash

By Jeff and Liz Helfrich

By now, you’ve probably heard about crowdfunding and some of its more wild successes such as the Veronica Mars Movie (which has raised $4.1 million and counting), The Pebble ($10.2 million), or the OUYA Video Game Console ($8.5 million).  It is clear from these and many others that certain types of projects including games, tech gizmos (especially iPod accessories), and movies can do amazingly well on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms.  We believe some of the success in these groups stems from the fact that there are already large communities familiar with crowdfunding that get behind these particular types of projects.  Our question is: How do we build equally fervent communities supporting triple bottom line ventures?

There have been a number of notable successes for sustainable ventures on various crowdfunding platforms.  Excellent examples include the NanoLight (since renamed the NanoLeaf) ($273,000), the Home Aquaponics Kit by Back to the Roots ($248,000), and most recently the Beez Kneez Bee House ($36,000 and counting).  So sustainable ventures can and do succeed on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.  However, as a couple running a Kickstarter campaign to launch a sustainable venture, we have found that many people interested in sustainable ventures don’t know about crowdfunding the way gamers, movie fans, and early tech adopters do.  Basically, as a sustainable project on Kickstarter, you often have to educate your base of potential backers about both your project and crowdfunding.  So how do we change this dynamic?

One approach is to build separate crowdfunding platforms for sustainable ventures.  Some examples of this already exist, including Green Unite and Start Some Good.  These platforms definitely had some appeal as potential crowdfunding venues for our triple bottom line venture because their audiences should be receptive to a project like ours.  However, the question for us was, “Do they have a big enough community to fully fund our project?”  The most successful project on Start Some Good, the Do Good Bus, raised just over $100,000 from 680 backers.  As we need to raise $75,000 for our project, and anticipate that means gaining support from more than 3,000 backers, we would have to be one of the most successful projects in the history of these platforms to succeed. Would it be easier to succeed with a very large pool of users who needed to be educated about sustainability, or a small pool of users already committed to green projects?   In the end, because we knew we needed such a large number of backers we decided that going with the largest pool of users was the best bet.  So we settled on Kickstarter.

So if many sustainable entrepreneurs decide they want to go on the “mainstream” crowdfunding platforms, the question remains:  how to we unite the triple bottom line community and get the word out about worthy projects?  GOOD may be showing us the way on this.  They have begun publishing “Push for Good,” a weekly guide to crowdfunding creative progress.  Every Saturday morning they highlight projects from Kickstarter and Indiegogo that do well by doing good.  They also run a GOOD curated Kickstarter page to highlight projects worth funding.  If other triple bottom line focused blogs and magazines do the same perhaps we can unite our community this way.  Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo certainly have enough sway to make sure that projects they favor get funded and they aren’t shy about promoting them.  Why not Triple Pundit, Treehugger, Inhabitat, and numerous other bloggers who support triple bottom line ventures?  If we all work together to spread the word about worthy ventures, we can makes sure more of them get funded.  There is nothing wrong with that bottom line.

Jeff and Liz Helfrich are the developers of the Solecan an eco-friendly trash/recycle bin.  Their project is currently funding on Kickstarter.  They need your support by Earth Day (April 22, 2013) to succeed.

Submitted by Guest Contributor

By Kye Gbangbola, Founder, Total Eco Management

Recently, the U.K. government pronounced that the British public should prepare for higher energy bills, and breaks in energy supply as seven power stations -- 10 percent of current grid capacity --will be switched off next month.

This places a different complexion on U.K. energy generation for the future, as gas is now set to account for about 60 percent of U.K. power station needs instead of 30 percent today. Consumers are expected to see energy cost increases of 400 percent by 2020. Fuel poverty and child poverty will increase at the same time as welfare state benefits are being cut. Multinationals and their supply chains foresee interruptions in production – of which 70 percent are already experiencing through climatic change droughts and floods.

The Greenest Government Ever?

When elected in 2010, the government claimed to be the greenest government ever. Nearly three years on, most of its policies have failed to deliver. Industry has called for clear, consistent, predictable and strategic policy initiatives that galvanize the resources of government and industry to drive change and tackle our energy problems.

So what has happened to place the U.K. in such a perilous position for its population?

Essentially it is the story of failing policy. There is a concern that the 2007 warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are no longer guiding the hands of our policy makers.  In recent times, Decarbonisation Targets were deferred to 2016 and feed-in tariff levels were slashed to a fraction of their original figure (households and business were paid a tariff to generate renewable energy), which resulted in law suits against the government, unemployment, and insolvent companies with shattered projects that were no longer deliverable.

Carbon Reduction Commitments Watered Down

In addition, carbon trading through the Carbon Reduction Commitment has been watered down, resulting in reduced incentives to lower emissions. 

There have been delays in implementing energy efficiency of buildings legislation for both Green Deal and Energy Company Obligation. These provide for property energy efficiency improvements at no up-front cost to the occupier, the result being large scale withdrawal of support from industry and institutions.  

There has also been a nearly three year delay for a definition of Zero Carbon, which drives U.K. Building Regulations, a failure to deliver on Carbon Capture and Storage, and the removal and reduction of subsidies for large scale renewables especially wind.

U.K. Business Loses Confidence In The Green Economy

The result is that business has lost confidence in the green economy to invest, innovate, create jobs, and develop new technologies. However, funding for fossil fuels, including shale gas exploration, has never had it so good. Ironically, U.K. emissions might go down as people are unable to afford heat and light.

But there are better ways of reducing emissions.

In contrast, across the globe the green economy is worth $3.4 billion a year and is growing at 4.3 percent whilst the U.K. is slipping down the league table of green investors. In the meantime, President Obama is delivering rapid growth in the green economy, as are China, Rwanda, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and many more.

Short-term thinking has resulted in the country being left exposed to insufficient power. It is not difficult to see how this can even lead to the loss of lives, given the poverty that will be generated.  The emerging problems in the U.K. have been evident for the last two years, professionals have been talking of their frustrations with a government that says one thing and does another. To respond to our 21st century problems, government must galvanize industry and society to drive change. 

No Conflict Between Resource Conservation And Profit

The U.K. government argues that renewables cannot fill the grid energy gap now or in the future.  This is true if there is no commitment to sustainable development. There needs to be greater balance to avoid the shift towards shale and nuclear, which is now being argued as the way forward.

To fill the gap and achieve energy security, the government has had to go shopping at a time when demand and gas prices are high. Serving to emphasize the fuel security problem; an expected gas supply agreement from the Russian Shtokman field was withdrawn. U.K. energy reserves are projected to fall to 5 percent from the current 15 percent, further endangering the country's energy supply.

Ironically Paul Golby, CEO of power generator Eon, said last month “the wasting of energy should be made a crime.” This may be what the future holds because we did not invest soon enough and now are at an energy cliff. 

According to CDP’s recent annual supply chain survey, 73 percent of multinationals cutting emissions reported associated cost savings. They have learned there is no conflict between resource conservation and profit.

Downgrades, Reporting and the Triple Bottom Line

Globally when governments fail to align with the global imperative to tackle climate change, complex and unforeseen problems can ensue. How we power our economies can serve to heighten, or reduce social tensions. Local and national economies, business confidence, and international credit rating agency downgrades can also suggest to observers that a country’s economy is losing power. 

Stakeholders Betrayed

When the new government was elected in the U.K. in 2010, they inherited many green policies, Climate Change Committees and associated Low Carbon Action Plans.  The hard part -- the structures -- had been set and agreed.  As such anybody could deliver the project design.  

But if the structures for delivery are removed, it should not be a surprise that decline will follow.  In the last year, the claim of being the Greenest Government ever has died and is rarely mentioned. 

Stakeholder engagement has been a key failure. Stakeholders in industry, society and politics that are consulted are largely ignored. Such attitudes to stakeholders erode trust and credibility with decision makers concerned that they have their own agenda and matters of materiality risk and priority are predetermined. 

It is evident that the opportunity to build long-term sustainable value needs to be revived in the U.K.  Only those presiding over the failure know the reasons behind it; the methods of monitoring should be disclosed so the full extent of the challenge can be understood and responded to by those not willing to sleepwalk into a disaster and give up on the potential of what this planet could be. 

About Kye Gbangbola

Kye Gbangbola is the founder of Total Eco Management (TEM) a company determined to be a leading light in the movement to reduce the environmental impacts. Kye is responsible for Development, Asset Management, Corporate Sustainability, and CSR. He is a recognised expert in sustainability reporting and governance, a CIOB Ambassador with interests in leadership, and a representative of the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group and the International Integrated Reporting Committee [IIRC] Pilot consisting of 70 of the world's leading organisations.

Submitted by Guest Contributor

Dr. Adam Corner

Increasingly, companies are realising that sustainability means more than implementing a few more rules, regulations and benchmarks – it means engaging directly with the question of human behaviour.

Whether it is the actions of their customers – playing more and more of a role in whether particular products can achieve their sustainability potential – or employees themselves, many businesses are starting to ask how they can influence behaviour in a sustainable direction.    

Awareness & Facts: Not Enough in Sustainability

At first, it was assumed that once people knew how environmentally damaging their actions were, they'd soon start making changes. Unfortunately, sustainable behaviour campaigns require more than just a clever campaign slogan and clear facts to succeed. Many sustainability initiatives over the past 20 years have targeted low-hanging fruit – so-called "simple and painless" behaviour changes like unplugging phone chargers, switching to energy-saving light-bulbs, or re-using plastic bags.

But there is only limited evidence that starting with simple and painless changes is the best way of catalysing further changes – and there is a risk that people will feel they have already done their bit.

So what should we be doing instead?

Developing a Sense of Environmental Identity

First and foremost, individuals – and individual behaviours – cannot be separated from their social context. We act according to our personal values and priorities and in line with the social norms of our peer group. The key to promoting meaningful changes in sustainable behaviour – that do more than just pay lip service to tackling climate change – is to nurture and develop a sense of environmental identity or citizenship.

When a person acts in his/her self-interest, that person will perceive themselves as someone who does things for their own benefit. They will only engage in further sustainable behaviours if there is something in it for them – so as soon as the 'sweeteners' dry up, so will their interest in sustainability.

But if people begin to think of themselves as someone who does things for the environment, the chance that they will engage in other sustainable behaviours is much higher.

It may not always be the quickest way of promoting a specific sustainable behaviour, but ultimately people can figure out for themselves whether something is in their own interest or not. The job of a sustainable behavior practitioner is to help them see the bigger picture, and make the arguments about sustainability that an appeal to their wallet cannot do.

Looking for Leadership: Building on the Power of Social

A huge amount of everyday energy use is embedded in habitual behaviors. The problem is that something seemingly straightforward like getting the bus to work is actually made up of lots of smaller (habitual) decisions, for example, leaving home earlier or showering the night before to save time, all of which can derail even the best intentions. Research on how habits form (and how they change), shows that breaking habitual behaviours down into detailed "if/then" style plans is one way to break bad habits and create more sustainable ones.

Editor's Note: Want to win one of the DoShorts titles? Have a look around the series and tweet your idea for a new @DoShorts topic using hashtag #suggestadoshort to @CSRwire!

But even the best-designed campaign to promote sustainable behaviour is limited in its scope if it fails to link everyday behaviours to the wider challenges of sustainability. Most people do not have a social network with sustainability at its core, but working to develop a group – rather than individual – sense of environmental responsibility and identity should be at the heart of any sustainability campaign.

Similarly, for those who are trying to promote sustainable behaviour in the workplace, there is an obvious place that most employees would look to for leadership: their employer. Changes in personal behaviours among workers can catalyse further changes from an employer because the argument that "we've done our bit – now you do yours" is a powerful one.

The Politics of Sustainability

Cultivating reciprocal links like these – between staff and employer, or between members of a social network – is one of the ways to ensure that promoting sustainable behaviour isn't detached from the politics of sustainability. How people act says something about their underlying values, the priorities they hold, and the type of world they want to live in.

So although engaging with employee and customer behaviour is a messier, more complex and more time-intensive way of thinking about sustainability, it is ultimately the only way that substantial progress in CSR is likely to be achieved.

It would be nice if it were possible to wave a magic low-carbon wand, and create zero carbon buses, energy efficient building and a power supply that came from clean renewables rather than dirty fossil fuels. But even if this wand did exist, it would be waved by a person as susceptible to the quirks, biases, and pitfalls of human judgement as the rest of us.

The reality is that human behaviour underpins it all. And this means that promoting sustainable behaviour in the most effective way is an absolutely critical part of society's response to climate change.

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About the Author:

Dr Adam Corner (@AJcorner) is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on the psychology of communicating climate change. He leads the Talking Climate programme for the Climate Outreach and Information Network, and is a Research Associate in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University.

This article draws on Adam Corner's book Promoting Sustainable Behaviour: A Practical Guide to What Works -- part of Dō Sustainability's new DōShort series of concise, sustainable business books for professionals. These practical books support professionals in the vanguard of sustainable business -- who are often forging new paths in their organizations -- by giving them the confidence, information and tactics they need at every stage of their career.

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Submitted by Aman Singh

By Aman Singh

Using Integrated Reporting as a catalyst for integrated thinking.

That's how Peter Graf, SAP's Chief Sustainability Officer expressed the firm's decision to replace two reports – the annual report mandated by the law and submitted to the SEC indicating the company's financial performance and the sustainability report , voluntary in nature and showing its non-financial performance– by one Integrated Report for 2012.

While Integrated Reporting is a fairly new trend – The International Integrated Reporting Committee [IIRC] website hosts a total of 41 Integrated Reports since 2011 – it's not surprising.

As the trend of CSR and sustainability reporting grows – due to multiple factors including a recessionary economy, dwindling resources, emerging conflicts in supply chains and a better connected world – logically, Integrated Reporting is the next step for any organization truly attempting to be as transparent as possible about its financial and non-financial challenges and performance. 

Shift in Engagement: From Sustainability to Integrated

At SAP, the impetus for the shift was the realization that "we needed to engage within our organization on a different level" according to Graf. "We have been reporting on our sustainability performance since 2008. The report has grown in sophistication over the years and we even won several awards in the last two years for our report's interactive nature, etc. So technically, we could have continued on that road," he added. 

Last year, CSRwire collaborated with Graf and his team on a webinar to launch SAP's new interactive report. Complete with social media buttons, comment sections and multimedia options, the report could be customized and perused in multiple ways depending on your agenda. The report was well received – and in a span of an hour we received over 30 questions from a very engaged audience. [Join us for a webinar with Peter Graf, IIRC CEO Paul Druckman and others today at 11am ET]

SAP set a trend last year, so why the shift again?

Connecting the Dots: The Bigger Picture

"We have been measuring key performance indicators [KPI] on the financial and non-financial side for quite a while. But one day, we started to put them all on a white board trying to draw connection lines between them. Before we knew it, the chart was pretty full. We started to do research both internally and externally , to better understand and compute those relationships. Suddenly it became clear, just how interconnected non-financial and financial performance indicators really are," he explained.

"When I heard about Integrated Reporting for the first time, I got excited. But then I thought: It’s going to be a very long process to achieve the integrated thinking that must be portrayed in the report. I viewed the Integrated Report as an outcome. However, over time our team reached the conclusion that instead of waiting for the right engagement at SAP to happen, we should use the process of producing an integrated report as the forcing function to drive the necessary engagement," Graf added.

"In its integrated report, SAP lays out the interdependencies between financial and non-financial indicators," said Graf. Proof points like: an increase or decrease of one percentage of SAP's retention rate saves/costs the company 62 million euros. And since 2007, a peak year for energy consumption at the company, SAP has avoided 220 million euros ($285 million) through energy conservation efforts.

"When these kinds of relations appear between financial and non-financial indicators, they do more than make the business case for sustainability. They serve as the catalysts for an integrated corporate strategy." said Graf.

While the entire report is available online, a parsed version – "we kept out customer stories but retained all other ESG data and metrics" – is submitted to the Securities & Exchange Commission.

SAP's 2012 Performance: Key Highlights

So what will you find in the integrated Report this year? 

For one, retention was up [94 percent in 2012] as was diversity, i.e., the number of women in management [an increase of one percent from 2011 to 19.4 percent].

The goal: to reach 25 percent by 2017.

Total energy consumed stayed stable at 2011 numbers while revenue increased by 17 percent and emissions per Euro in revenue and per employee were reduced for the sixth year in a row. Overall emissions were slightly reduced, in spite of the company  adding 9,000 new employees in 2012. Finally, the use of renewable energy increased from 47 percent in 2011 to 60 percent in 2012.

Also intriguing to me was a section, which detailed SAP's People Strategy. 

I asked Graf what the strategy involved – and how did they measure the outcomes besides retention and diversity?

"Having a sound strategy around people is essential in a company that solely relies on its employees to create value. Thus our ability to compete is highly dependent on our human resources and it’s impossible to separate that from our financial performance," he said.

"First, we want to hire more diverse people. We believe more diverse groups innovate better. Second, we want to nurture our talent through clear development plans, challenging assignments, social media, e-learnings, etc. And finally, we want to leverage employee engagement as a decisive factor. So we measure retention and diversity but also engagement, which is a core and central KPI in driving our overall performance in the future," Graf added.

Measuring Employee Engagement: Critical to Business Performance

So what contributed to a drop in employee engagement in 2006-2009?

"I believe there are various reasons that led to a decrease in engagement during that time. Most important, however, is how we made it back to the high engagement scores of today: When economic growth came back after the recession, the leadership of the company changed, a compelling innovation strategy for growth was established, the company was given the purpose of helping the world run better to improve people’s lives and overall we enjoyed strong and continuous revenue growth as a result. So, a combination of issues got us into low engagement scores and a combination of things got us back on track."

SAP also measures a Business Health Culture Index. Does that measure the company's engagement quotient and connect it with business performance? 

"We use this index to measure the health of our employees. There are four times as many stress-related illnesses in the intellectual property industry as compared to other industries. So we use data from eight questions [purpose, leadership, recognition, empowerment, rewards, stress levels, compared to people my age I feel more/less healthy] to understand where we stand and what we need to do to take care of our employees."

In 2012, SAP's Health Index stood at 66 percent, a one percent increase since 2011 and significant growth since 2008-2009.

Integrated Reporting: Check. What's Next for SAP?

With all the data and metrics dancing around in my brain, the only question left to ask was, what's next?

"On the one side, we recognize that integrated reporting is an early trend and that we certainly have to continue to improve and learn. On the other side, we have the ambition to lead, even if this means that we may make a mistake that followers might be able to avoid," said Graf.

"The next steps clearly are to continue to move away from just having a sustainability strategy to making our corporate strategy more sustainable. This requires an engagement with leaders across SAP that we have not achieved before moving to integrated reporting," he added.

His recommendations for companies who might be complacent with limited voluntary disclosure or perhaps hesitant to mix the voluntary with the mandatory?

"As soon as people recognize that  integrated reporting helps companies understand and grow the way how they create value at their core, , it will pick up. More and more people know this intuitively today but when someone connects all the financial and non-financial numbers with each other, then the big picture emerges," he said.

SAP’s Integrated Report 2012 is available at www.SAPIntegratedReport.com.

Poverty solutions of various approaches have been underway for decades, many of which have shown only mixed results. While the global middle class is still growing and many developing countries have made impressive gains, clearly more work can be done. Government and NGOs are unable to solve poverty on their own; and therefore the past few years have witnessed a trend of businesses partnering with non-profits to take on the globe’s most pressing challenges. Market-based solutions are starting to show results as the world’s poor have always proven they want a stake, not handouts, in their local water sources, environment and economy.

So how can business work with NGOs, local governments and directly with the world’s poorest citizens on finding poverty solutions? Here are three ways businesses can start:

Help build expertise and capacity

Instead of writing checks to charities, an effective poverty solutions strategy a company can launch is to lend their employees to non-profits on a part- or full-time basis. In India, the telecom giant Vodafone partners with the NGO Dasra and assigns 25 employees to work within NGOs of their choice across India for several weeks. The World of Difference program allows these employees to share their insights and experience on a variety of functions, including information technology, communications, human resources and communications. The German enterprise software company SAP operates a similar program in which employees participating in a four-week sabbatical program work with social enterprises in remote areas of India, South Africa and Brazil. Building organization capacity and NGOs while inspiring employees? A win-win for Vodafone and SAP.

Invest in Women

Women often bear the brunt of poverty’s ravages in both the developed and developing world. But there is hope: if 10 percent more of a country’s girls attend school, the rising tide lifts more boats. That same country’s economy in turn can grow 3 percent. Women also tend to invest in their families and communities at a rate more double than that of men.

Funding and staffing investment and training programs for women in countries in which a company does business is one way that an organization can become an engaged and effective stakeholder. For example, the retailer Anthropologie has trained artisans in Rwanda to make scarves sold in the company’s stores. ExxonMobil through its foundation invested in programs that taught women how to use mobile telephone and other technologies. Avon has launched a variety of projects, including no-interest, low-capital program training women to sell its products.

Earlier this year Avon took a courageous and political approach: its foundation helped rally its sales representatives in Hungary to mobilize and push their country’s parliament to pass a law declaring domestic violence a crime. To Avon, domestic violence was not just a moral issue, but a business and economic problem.

Partner on water and sanitation projects

Without water nothing else is possible, so I mention a few inspiring projects to highlight World Water Month. In emerging economies, the old days of digging a well or building a public latrine are over. More companies are partnering with non-profits to arrive at market-driven solutions to tackle the programs of water scarcity and unsafe sanitation. Beverage companies and breweries find themselves at the forefront of projects that tackle microfinance, tap into water mains and the build safe and clean private toilets. SABMiller works with WWF to build groundwater recharge structures giving farmers a more reliable source of irrigation water. PepsiCo and Water.org collaborate to provide microloans so citizens can pay for rainwater harvesting systems and gain access to municipal water supplies.

Training, water and women’s empowerment are just a few of the low-hanging pieces of fruit a company can take on to join the quest to find more poverty solutions. If your organization has found success tackling global poverty, we welcome you to share your ideas.

Image credit: Pexels