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By Big Cheese, Owner of BigCheeseKIT

When Norton Gaming reached out about participating in a Twitch charity stream, I knew it was something I wanted to do. I was very excited to be partnering with It’sHafu to support an incredible organization, Black Girls CODE. Honestly, it was a no-brainer. Even though Hafu had to tag out about halfway through our game of Halo: Combat Evolved with motion sickness, her husband DogDog and I finished up strong, and hit our goal of raising $2,500.

But wait! There is MORE! The news gets even better, because NortonLifeLock Cares matched individual donations 2:1, donating a total of $10,000 to the cause! That’s ten thousand dollars in three hours, all going to Black Girls CODE! WOO! LET’S GO! Here’s a quick clip of us hitting the donation goal!

Black Girls CODE (BGC) is a not-for-profit organization leading a global movement to establish equal representation in the tech sector. BGC empowers girls between the ages of 7-17 by introducing them to skills in computer programming and technology and is building pathways for young women of color to embrace the current tech marketplace.

These girls are the future of technology, and I was honored to use my platform to help them out, alongside Norton Gaming. We had over 277,000 live views, and I’m pretty sure every single one of them loved our acapella rendition of the Halo theme song. If not, I know for a fact they dug the freestyle I came up with!

All jokes aside, I treasure this partnership with Norton Gaming. I’m able to do what I love, and they gave me a great opportunity to help out the kids and organizations who need it the most. There will hopefully be many more in the future, so please keep a lookout for all things Norton Gaming and BigCheeseKIT.

If you missed out on the fun, and want to donate to Black Girls CODE, visit their website here. And check out Hafu, me, and NortonGaming on Twitch!

Previously published on NortonLifeLock blog and in the 3BL Media newsroom.

Image credit: NortonLifeLock

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contains alarming news: Since 1970, global surface temperatures have risen faster than in any other 50-year period over the past 2,000 years. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called the IPCC's findings a “code red for humanity.” But in the report are also seeds of hope that we’re not yet too far gone to enact some mitigating measures. Still, judging from most of the headlines, it’s time to panic, and that's an unfortunate message if you want people to take action.

Why headlines can hinder climate action

The majority of Americans now believe that climate change is real — 72 percent compared to 57 percent in 2010 — and even larger numbers support action on climate change. But less than half believe climate change will affect them personally. That gets to the problem of how climate change is communicated to people. The flood of negative news, especially in the wake of the latest report from the IPCC, and any lack of a personal connection may lead people not to act.

Despite years of talking about how we should better communicate the urgency of climate change, the overwhelming findings of the latest IPCC report seems to have thrown that out the window for a lot of folks. It’s not surprising — climate change is scary and getting scarier. But in order to ensure people do not check out and do nothing, the urgency needs to be communicated in a way that can settle into action.

The human brain is not designed to react immediately to perceived future threats. We have to balance future threats with the immediate demands on our lives. Traditionally, climate change has been presented as a single issue: an environmental issue. But it is not one thing. It is also an issue of public health, inequality, poverty, violence, trade and commerce, infrastructure, recreation, and national security. Most people’s immediate concerns center on job security, the quality of their local school, or the crime rate, but all those are inextricably linked with climate change. Treating them as separate issues means people have a harder time contextualizing the actual impacts of climate change.

The brain has two processing centers: one for analytical processing and one for experiential. An emotional appeal may work in the short run, but it could backfire long-term, leading to inaction. It’s what psychologists and scholars call emotional numbing. It’s seen in people who live in war zones, for example, or have survived multiple hurricanes in a relatively short period of time. Humans have what is referred to as a finite pool of worry, and a torrent of catastrophic headlines about climate change as an environmental issue will not break the surface of that pool.

To avoid emotional numbing, scientists and journalists communicating about climate change and its impacts need to balance the information that triggers an emotional response with more analytical information. That can help to settle into the brain’s two processing centers. A deluge of terrifying scientific predictions does not add much to the individual experience of climate change. That is where the messaging lacks staying power.

Communications in the wake of the IPCC report

Most people, regardless of where they live, are already experiencing some impacts from climate change. Yet even in places where the most dramatic instances occur — hurricanes, wildfires and droughts — people may not necessarily make the connection to climate change. They’re too busy dealing with the trauma of the impacts. And at this point, wondering whether climate change is exacerbating weather patterns is not necessarily helpful, because we already know that it is.

Like steroids for an athlete, climate change is a performance enhancer. Storms, droughts, wildfires, and other natural disasters are made more likely and more severe by climate change. Now, it’s time to bring that home to push for action rather than numb people with scary statistics.

There are ways to talk about climate change that localizes it. Some of it comes down to framing: Talk about risk, rather than uncertainty. Most people understand risk — we buy health and home insurance. Acting on climate change operates in much the same way. Frame uncertainty in a positive light. For example, if we take preventive action, the worse may not happen.

Communicating through human stories is more impactful than abstract ideas. An average person in Omaha, Nebraska, may not know what to do with information about keeping temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius. But they will understand information about increased flooding in their city. Same with a person living in a coastal city where sea-level rise is a risk. Localizing climate change shows people that the impacts are not limited to coastal regions or developing countries. It turns the distant, abstract idea into an immediate concern.

Businesses are becoming more proactive in making their companies net-zero carbon emissions. Part of that is likely due to external pressures from customers (and, in some countries, mandatory carbon regulations), but to a large extent, companies also act out of immediate concern. When water is an immediate risk to the production of your product, it’s in your best interest to take measures that both mitigate climate change — and thereby help reduce the risk of future droughts — and implement adaptive measures to reduce your demand for water.

Finding hope in the midst of a climate crisis

The hope may feel like the small print when reading the headlines about the IPCC report, but it’s there. In order to drive people to action, policymakers, businesses, scientists and journalists need to communicate the urgency of climate change in a way that nestles in the emotional and analytical parts of the brain. It needs to be framed in a way that does not look like the harbinger of doom. Rather, that it is an immediate concern that will affect everyone, albeit to different degrees, and there is still time to act to avoid the worst impacts.

On some level, people already understand that. A majority of Americans believe the U.S. should invest in more renewable energy, regulate carbon as a pollutant, and require fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax. All of those actions go directly to the heart of climate change mitigation. Individual action can also be taken, such as ensuring your savings, investments, and pensions are not going to support the fossil fuel industry as well as voting for policymakers who understand not only the importance of acting on climate change, but also all the ways it links to every facet of American life. It’s no longer enough to wins hearts. We also need to win minds.

Image credit: Raju Bhupatiraju/Unsplash

Tech giants have long relied on a relatively lean-staffed business model to make social media a profitable enterprise. That model has been undermined by significant user abuses, including hate speech, terroristic propaganda and child pornography. Now the war on COVID-19 vaccination poses a new threat with immediate, lethal consequences. Facebook and other platforms have taken steps to stem the tide of disinformation, so far with little impact. Nevertheless, Yelp believes it may have a more effective answer.

Social media is not winning the war on COVID-19 vaccines

The question of whether or not social media platforms ought to police their content is the core of the issue. After all, editors in traditional print media and electronic media, as well as radio and television, have the power to exercise pinpoint control over their content.

That power does not necessarily come down on the side of truth and justice, as amply demonstrated by organizations like Breitbart News and various television personalities, among others. Nevertheless, that power does exist. Conventional news organizations can and do select their content on a granular, human scale.

The sheer size and pace of social media platforms is an entirely different animal, one that makes it impossible to police content one post at a time.

Until recently, social media platforms have relied on the argument that they are merely technology tools and are not responsible for user content. However, signs of a significant crack in the armor began to emerge in 2016, when the boycott campaign fostered by the grassroots organization Sleeping Giants began. Instead of soliciting individual consumers to boycott media organizations, Sleeping Giants asks consumers to pressure advertisers and other stakeholders to withdraw their advertising dollars.

The vaccine disinformation problem festers

Despite some attention to the problem of vaccine disinformation in recent years, Facebook and other social media platforms have become a powerful weapon in the war against COVID-19 vaccines.

Last May the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) name-checked just 12 individuals it deemed responsible for circulating the majority of COVID-19 vaccine disinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.

The investigation highlighted the failure of social media platforms to detect even the most egregious abuse, despite all the resources at their command.

In particular, CCDH singled out Facebook for permitting “private and secret anti-vaccine Groups where dangerous anti-vaccine disinformation can be spread with impunity.”

That should have prompted action, but earlier this week the organization Media Matters drew attention to the "Dan Stock" vaccine misinformation video, which apparently spread from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter.

“In a little more than three days, a viral video pushing misleading claims about coronavirus vaccines and masks has earned more than 90 million Facebook engagements from uploads to streaming platforms, receiving millions of views. The video is spreading despite YouTube and Facebook’s rules against coronavirus misinformation, and its reach is significantly higher than the numbers for earlier coronavirus conspiracy theory videos,” Media Matters reported, chastising both platforms for failing to learn from earlier experiences.

Turning up the pressure on tech companies

The business-to-business boycott strategy of Sleeping Giants has motivated next-level action from at least one advertiser. In July 2020 Pernod Ricard introduced an app that appears to draw from the Sleeping Giants crowd sourcing model. The app enables the company to get alerts directly from consumers about abusive social media content.

The app provides Pernod Ricard with a pathway for proactively protecting its brand and communicating abuses to its advertising platforms, rather than waiting to be flagged by boycott campaigns.

By October 2020, the company was spearheading an industry-wide campaign to adopt the crowdsourcing alert model for hate speech.

As of this writing the initiative has not pivoted  to include vaccine misinformation, but industry observers have speculated that an “Internet Superfund” could help clean up abuses related to COVID-19 information.

The Yelp social media solution

As a tech company and social media platform, Yelp is also at risk of reputational loss due to vaccine disinformation. However, over the years Yelp has built a relatively effective system for identifying and punishing businesses that post or solicit fake reviews, deploying a combination of software and human moderation.

Yelp also earns good marks for removing reviews that consist of abusive rants and other off-topic content, a practice known as “review bombing.”

The company is already on the alert for review bombs related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and earlier this week it announced that it is ramping up its efforts to stem the tide.

In a blog post earlier this month, Yelp’s vice president of user operations Noorie Malik introduced a new filter that enables consumers to select businesses according to their COVID-19 vaccine policies for customers and staff. Malik also explained the steps that Yelp is taking to protect businesses against abuses by anti-vaccination reviewers.

The steps mirror Yelp’s efforts in support of Black-owned businesses and other identity attributes through its Consumer Alerts program.

“For businesses that activate ‘Proof of vaccination required’ and ‘All staff fully vaccinated’ on their Yelp page, we are putting protective measures in place to proactively safeguard them from reviews that primarily criticize the COVID health and safety measures they enforce,” Malik wrote, adding that the past several weeks have seen an increase in review bombing related to vaccine misinformation.

The Facebook social media solution

Yelp’s new vaccine policy filter could help provide businesses with much-needed community support in pushing back against local anti-vaccination agitators.

Meanwhile, in an interesting coincidence of contrasts, earlier this week Facebook announced that it has finally shut down a leading anti-vaccination network. Practically on the same day, Facebook also officially launched a new “prayer post” feature, which it has been testing since last year.

“In Facebook Groups employing the feature, members can use it to rally prayer power for upcoming job interviews, illnesses and other personal challenges big and small. After they create a post, other users can tap an ‘I prayed’ button, respond with a ‘like’ or other reaction, leave a comment or send a direct message,” reported the Associated Press.

Whether or not the new prayer feature can help prevent more people to stop posting, sharing, and absorbing vaccine misinformation on social media remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of boots-on-the-ground religious institutions are holding mass vaccination clinics in a desperate attempt to save their members’ lives.

As the Delta variant plows a bloodthirsty path through unvaccinated populations — including children and infants — the prayer post feature could become a real money-maker for Facebook. Perhaps the company could devote some of that revenue to stepping up its own efforts on vaccine misinformation.

Image credit: Martin Lopez/Pexels

The global community will have to find a way to feed 9.7 billion people by 2050 in a warming, resource-constrained world. It will require a rethink and collaboration from those across the value chain, as demand for animal protein is only set to rise. The challenge is that agriculture is already cited as a top greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter and user of natural resources, with livestock alone producing about 14.5 percent of global GHGs. The industry will require science-based, purposeful solutions in order to lessen its footprint and sustainably produce enough nutritious protein for the growing population. 

We all have a part to play to ensure our food supply is more nutritious, more sustainable and more efficient. New developments in animal nutrition are among the options that can help the food supply chain do its part to mitigate the risks of unchecked climate change such as GHG emissions. From novel, precision technologies to nutritional programs, a substantial difference can be made to the sustainability of the animal protein industry.

“For too long, sustainability has been someone else’s problem, a problem for tomorrow. But it is not an impossible challenge. We believe we can make animal farming sustainable. Our need is to be providing a decent living for farmers and affordable proteins to the world population, all while reducing the footprint of animal farming,” said Ivo Lansbergen, President, DSM Animal Nutrition and Health. 

To that end, Switzerland- and Netherlands-based DSM, a global, purpose-led, science-based company active in nutrition, health and sustainable living, is tackling the many challenges facing the global food sector through science-based innovative solutions. 

DSM is rooted in purpose, with a rich history in developing products to improve human and animal nutrition and health across the globe, and it has forged notable partnerships with global organizations and NGOs to improve sustainability in the food sector. Those relationships include work with the United Nations Food Program since 2007 to address hunger, involvement with the World Bank’s carbon pricing program to help advocate for a price on carbon and push investment in renewables, partnerships with industry experts such Blonk Consultants to create cutting-edge technology such as Sustell that enables farmers to measure and enhance the sustainability of their operations, and joint ventures like Veramaris that provides an alternative and more sustainable source of omega-3 EPA and DHA to the world’s growing aquaculture industry.

In August 2020, DSM’s animal nutrition and health business channeled that experience to launch a strategic initiative called We Make it Possible. At a high level, the initiative, which is aligned to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has set out to lead a worldwide transformation in sustainable animal protein production through tangible, actionable and measurable solutions that address the industry’s biggest challenges. The initiative is driven by six focus areas for improving the efficiency and sustainability of producing animal protein:

• Improving the lifetime performance of farm animals
• Improving the quality of food (i.e., meat, milk, fish, eggs), while reducing food loss and waste
• Reducing emissions from livestock
• Making efficient use of natural resources
• Reducing the reliance on marine resources
• Helping tackle anti-microbial resistance

Another approach to address a changing climate

One of the key points of DSM’s Animal Nutrition and Heath strategy is to tackle the interconnection of environmental footprints and animal nutrition and health, allowing farmers to better manage their environmental footprint and risk, while improving business performance and livelihoods. For example, globally growers lose 20 percent of their livestock annually to disease alone, at a cost of around $300 billion. Research from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) shows that climate change can exacerbate livestock’s susceptibility to diseases. Meanwhile, over 800 million people across the globe go hungry daily.

Improving the robustness of farm animals and thereby reducing the incidence and impact of production disorders and diseases is a key aspect, and this usually begins with ensuring optimized nutrition fitting to the animals’ life stage and farming conditions. Livestock production efficiency can decrease by as much as 33 percent without proper nutrition and health management, which is addressed through the initiative’s Improving lifetime performance of farm animals’ sustainability platform.

“Meeting the rising demand for nutritious, affordable animal protein while remaining within planetary boundaries is crucial. Our science-based nutrition solutions enable the industry to produce more animal protein with greater efficiency, while at the same time reducing the impact on the environment,” said David Nickell, VP Sustainability and Business Solutions at DSM.

A societal risk for which there is no shortage of research, is anti-microbial resistance (AMR). The use and misuse, of antibiotics worldwide over many years in both human and animal health has been linked to the spread of AMR, which has quickly become the world’s most rapidly emerging public health threats. If left unchecked AMR could cause the death of 10 million people annually by 2050. Although a significant amount of the world’s antibiotics are used in animal farming, regulators, investors and leading farming companies are implementing change to reduce their use. 

Over the last 15 years, DSM has been developing alternative solutions to reduce the use of antibiotics and to help tackle the issue of AMR. The company has become a leader in the field of eubiotics (feed additives) such as natural plant extracts, probiotics, prebiotics, organic acids and novel enzymes and continues to invest in new, next generation technologies to help the industry transition away from antibiotic use. The use of these nutritional ingredients has enabled change to happen across the industry, and has led to a decline in both the rate and use of antibiotics, thereby helping to reduce the incidence of AMR. 

In the coming months, 3p and DSM will together take a closer look at the company’s global strategy that is tackling issues like climate change and food waste in order to support the rapidly growing population. We’ll review additional challenges facing food producers and explore various solutions to address them. Be sure to follow along with this series here.

This article series is sponsored by DSM Animal Nutrition and Health.

Image credit: Mali Maeder via Pexels

There’s plenty of chatter over the latest report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and that should be no surprise: It’s a few thousand pages long, includes the work and contributions of about 750 authors, cites more than 14,000 studies, and has a smidge over 78,000 comments from governments and climate change experts. The IPCC report was also approved by the 195 nations within the United Nations.

Trying to summarize this IPCC report is like summarizing a dictionary. There certainly is a lot of text in there, but the key takeaways are plain: The consensus is that climate change is here, it’s undeniable, the outlook is bad, and while there is hope, some of the damage already or to be inflicted cannot be rolled back. Here are a few takeaways as there is no shortage of noise out there.

It’s ‘unequivocal’

Climate change is “widespread, rapid and intensifying,” the IPCC said firmly in announcing this report. This isn’t about theory or what might happen: The IPCC report describes what is occurring now and what will happen soon, and says so with statistical certainty. The numbers are overwhelming, and the effects, from flooding to extreme heat, will accelerate in the coming years unless there’s a strong worldwide plan in place to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. As summed up in the first three words opening the report, “It is unequivocal.”

The Guardian’s lead environment reporter, Damian Carrington, sums it up: “The scientific language of the report is cold and clear but cannot mask the heat and chaos that global heating is unleashing on the world, he writes. “In other words, we have blown 86 percent of our carbon budget already, though the report says the science is clear that if emissions are slashed then temperatures will stop rising in a decade or two and the increases in deadly extreme events will be strongly limited.”

The IPCC report doesn’t mince words: Climate change is happening, and the effects are unfolding quickly

Since “global warming” entered the lexicon in the late 1980s, much of the conversation made it come across as an abstract, amorphous term. Sure, climate change is happening, but we won’t feel the effects for quite some time, we told ourselves. We can continue to kick the can down the road.

The climate change tin can is in reality a massive lead anvil that won’t budge.

That “quite some time” is now. We’re certainly living it this summer, and that should move more people, companies and governments to action. “Yet in the past few years, global warming has moved from a statistical property to an ambient condition of modern life,” wrote Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic. “A mega-drought seems to grip the American West without end. A series of wildfires have passed, like a baton, from one part of the world to another, going from California to the Amazon to Australia to Greece to California again.”

The U.S. will have to take the lead

The U.S., with about 4 percent of the world’s population, has long consumed 25 percent of the world’s energy. Energy, of course, could be defined as fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have been a massive contributor to emissions. That figure may have shifted a bit over time, but U.S. citizens have long been defined as taking up a disproportionate use of the world’s resources.

The Joe Biden administration has introduced its share of plans that it says can help tackle the mounting crisis, but critics on the left say they don’t go far enough, while critics on the right have often made it clear any kind of climate action plan is a non-starter. Evidence does suggest, however, that bipartisanship is possible — energy storage is one example. Yet the history of U.S. politics doesn’t bode well: Biden, after all, is linked to a previous administration that tried, and whiffed, in getting a climate action legislation passed more than a decade ago. Washington, D.C. is even more polarized now.

Nevertheless, considering its wealth, population and impact on the global stage, the U.S. arguably has the most at stake when it comes to the climate crisis. Its companies are invested in supply chains, production sites and offices worldwide. Then there’s the national security angle: The Department of Defense alone has about 1,700 installations on coastlines alone worldwide. And as the IPCC report made clear, yes, sea level rise is a thing, and there’s no lowering of the sea level back.

Finance must have a role in mitigating climate risks

We often hear about “targeted investments,” and they can certainly have a role to play in the private sector working with governments to take on climate change.

For example, Forbes sustainability reporter Felicia Jackson recently interviewed experts about what the report's findings mean for business. By and large, they said aligning with the urgency of the crisis will require a massive transformation across the private sector, most notably in finance.

“The IPCC’s messages make sobering reading for all financial decision-makers," Kate Levick, associate director of sustainable finance at the think tank E3G, told Jackson. "Recent shifts towards net-zero, resilient investment by private sector firms and governments must now be rapidly accelerated, now that we have an updated understanding both of the risks involved and of the limited time window to address them. The financial system must support the economic transformation that we need.”

Corporate public relations efforts are hindering, not helping, the fight against climate change

Net-zero pledges have become all the rage in recent months as companies say they are upping the ante with ambitious goals to slash carbon emissions by 2040 and even by 2030. But recent research shows that many of these plans will achieve little or nothing for a bevy of reasons: Many plans rely on technologies that don’t even exist yet, plans such as tree-planting may never materialize, and ongoing lobbying activities encourage politicians to prevent the very things these companies say they’re committed to achieving, researchers warn. 

Plus, even if a 2030 net-zero plan is legitimate, there’s a race against time. As independent journalist Judd Legum pointed out this week, lofty corporate speak is only obfuscating the facts at hand. “By focusing on 'net-zero' emission reduction goals years or decades into the future, large companies obscure the present reality. Some companies that are making ambitious pledges in 2040 or 2030 are seeing their carbon emissions go up in the short term,” Legum wrote this week in his Popular Information newsletter. “The IPCC report also makes clear that climate change is not a problem that can be solved by a few companies making voluntary pledges. Rather, there needs to be immediate and systemic action to reduce emissions. This kind of action can only come from the government.”

Image credit: Ross Stone/Unsplash

There is a reason why we often use the term “sausage-making process” to describe rather unpleasant things, from passing legislation to deciding on yet another new corporate policy. But not all sausage-making is something to turn away from. That’s somewhat true of plant-based sausage, which by just about any measure has far less of an impact on water, energy and the climate than the meat-based options; and, of course, there’s the animal welfare argument.

One would think the proliferation of plant-based sausage, burgers, strips for stir-fry and fake ground meat would lead to a glut, but the evidence suggests there is still an untapped market. More restaurants and fast-food chains have included analog meat on their menus, and after the shortages that hit many retailers during the worst of the pandemic, more consumers tried, and actually liked, plant-based alternatives as an option.

To that end, Impossible Foods, which has sent multiple jolts across the food industry since it first rolled out its “bloody” animal product-free burger several years ago, said this week it will have two plant-based sausage products appear on retailers’ shelves across the U.S., from Albertsons to Wegmans.

The “savory” and “spicy” options from Impossible Foods will look like those sausage rolls that have long been in your local supermarket’s cold case — only instead of containing pork or other meats, the ingredients include soy, sunflower oil and coconut oil.

Considering all the concern over the latest IPCC report on the climate crisis, Impossible Foods’ plant-based sausage announcement is prescient. After all, there is no dispute that the global meat industry has its own huge impact on global greenhouse gas emissions. According to data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world is home to well over 1 billion pigs, with an average weight of about 250 pounds, and that total farmed pig biomass approaches 400 billion pounds. Accounting for almost 40 percent of meat production across the globe, pigs are the most widely eaten animal in the world. Each year, more than 121 million pigs are killed in the U.S. alone for the making of food products like sausage.

Even if math isn’t your bailiwick, it’s not hard to visualize the impact that this segment of the worldwide livestock industry alone has on the planet. Impossible Foods counters that its plant-based sausage requires almost 80 percent less water and about 40 percent less land than the raising of pigs. And as for those emissions, the plant-based alternatives emit a sliver of their meat-based competitors.

Impossible Foods has an online calculator that can give consumers an idea of how its plant-based sausage and burgers stack up compared to meat alternatives.

For fans of the plant-based sausage, which has already been a staple at Burger King and Starbucks, they’ll now be able to make their own breakfasts at home, with a product that also claims it has about half the fat and 30 percent less calories.

Image credits: Impossible Foods; Business Wire

Food and beverage companies need to buy agricultural commodities to make their products. Commodity sourcing can be very challenging. Agricultural productivity is affected by the increasingly erratic weather patterns that climate change brings, plus groundwater depletion and soil erosion. Illegal and questionable practices in supply chains are brought to light by campaign groups. As a result, there are certain financial materials risks that companies face, such as operational risks that reduce primary crop and livestock production.

It is key for food and beverage companies to develop climate resilient agricultural sourcing strategies that are free from environmental degradation and negative human impacts. A new interactive investor guide called Engage the Chain can help food and agribusiness companies address these risks. Launched by Ceres, it provides an overview of the environmental and social risks and impacts of eight agricultural commodities: beef, corn, dairy, fiber-based packaging, palm oil, soybeans, sugarcane and wheat. These commodities are commonly sourced and are some of the most prominent drivers of deforestation, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water depletion and pollution. The guide identifies the major food and beverage companies based in the U.S. that source the eight commodities, plus cites actions investors and companies can take.

Food and beverage companies are already leveraging their influence to help farmers adopt practices that will create healthy soils, conserve water supplies, respect the rights of workers and support biodiversity, as a report by Ceres highlights. Some companies offer technical assistance and incentives while others develop practice and policies to help farm communities, or work with multi-stakeholder initiatives like Consumer Goods Forum or Field to Market.

General Mills serves as an example of a company leveraging its influence with farmers. The company has a goal to reduce absolute greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 28 percent across its value chain by 2025. General Mills has committed to sustainably sourcing its 10 priority ingredients by 2020, which represent 50 percent of what it buys. Almost two-thirds of its value chain GHG emissions come from agriculture. As a result, the main focus of its climate strategy is using multi-stakeholder collaborations to advance sustainable agriculture practices. It works with farmers, NGOs, industry peers, and suppliers to address climate risks and opportunities both within its business and in the food industry.

Unilever has a goal of sustainably sourcing 100 percent of agricultural raw materials by 2020. The company works directly with 30,000 smallholder farmers improve their agricultural practices, which enables them to double or triple their yields. Increasing productivity not only improves the livelihoods of farmers, but the quality and security of Unilever’s key commodity supplies. And that ensures the company has sustainable supplies of the ingredients it needs to make its products.

As more companies engage with farmers and help them adopt sustainable practices, the food and beverage industry can reduce the risks and embrace the opportunities that climate change presents.

Photo: Ceres

Sources

https://engagethechain.org/ 

https://engagethechain.org/drivers-financial-risk 

https://www.generalmills.com/en/News/Issues/climate-policy 

https://www.unilever.com/sustainable-living/enhancing-livelihoods/inclusive-business/livelihoods-for-smallholder-farmers/ 

The latest IPCC report on climate change is a frightening one, but it also indicates there is still time for an all-hands-on-deck effort to manage the global climate crisis. That effort must include some of the very corporations that have contributed to the global carbon overload.

To be effective, corporations must also unlock all the talent and innovation at their command. Those who have taken the lead on LGBTQ+ rights in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields have a head start, but some need to adjust their political giving to push back against obstructive state and federal legislators.

Signs of improvement in STEM and LGBTQ+ rights

The long-buried scientific achievements of women and people of color have finally come to the fore in recent years, and leading corporations have begun to nurture a more diverse workforce by supporting inclusive STEM programs for young students.

Though much work remains to be done, the STEM diversity hiring movement has also touched the LGBTQ+ community, including transgender scientists.

One significant sign of change occurred last month, when all 17 national laboratories under the U.S. Department of Energy joined with other key scientific gatekeepers in a global reach in a commitment to honor name changes for research papers authored by transgender scientists.

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The effort was coordinated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which explained that “this agreement will allow researchers who wish to change their names to more easily claim work from all stages of their careers…it specifically addresses the administrative and emotional difficulties some transgender researchers have experienced when requesting name changes associated with past academic work.”

“We are supporting our colleagues on an important issue that is often taken for granted — allowing them to take full credit for their academic achievements with their name,” added Joerg Heber, Research Integrity Officer, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The first-of-its-kind publishing initiative lifts a significant burden from individual researchers, who previously had to approach their publishers on a piecemeal basis while facing the risk of reprisal in their professional life.

A global effort on transgender rights

Berkeley Lab also noted that several publishers have already begun to streamline their processes, including the U.K.’s Royal Society of Chemistry. The results indicate that a deep reservoir of transgender achievement has lain unrecognized for years.

“Since we updated our own author name change policy in December 2020 we have had requests for name changes on dozens of articles in our journals,” explained Nicola Nugent of the RSC. “It truly takes a collaborative effort to achieve positive change on inclusion and diversity in scholarly publishing – something we have seen through our work with 42 publishers in our Joint Commitment on Inclusion and Diversity in Publishing.”

In addition to the National Laboratories and the RSC, the transgender commitment includes the American Chemistry Society and several other leading U.S. scientific associations, as well as Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and other research publishers with a global footprint.

Diversity hiring claims the spotlight

The new initiative also ripples onto the reputation of corporations that sponsor scientific research. Toyota, for example, has an excellent record on transgender rights and other LGBTQ+ issues in the U.S., where it provides the financial muscle for the Toyota Research Institute at Berkeley Lab, which is the professional home of transgender scientist Amalie Trewartha.

Trewatha explains that transgender name obstacles in publishing serve to suppress innovation and prevent transgender scientists from advancing their professional reputation.

“As a trans scientist, having publications under my birth name causes me to have mixed feelings about past work of which I’m otherwise proud,” Trewartha explained. “I am faced with the dilemma of either hiding certain parts of it, or outing myself.”

Dow steps up on LGBTQ+ rights

Jim Fitterling, Chairman and CEO of Dow, (a spinoff from what was briefly DowDupont) underscored the impact of supporting LGBTQ+ rights in STEM fields last June, in an interview published by the nonprofit organization Catalyst.

Fitterling came out as gay in 2014 when he was Dow’s Vice Chairman of Business Operations. Surviving Stage 4 cancer provided him with a deep appreciation for obstacles that fear can place in professional and personal growth.

“That’s why, when I became CEO of Dow in 2018, we made our ambition to become the most innovative, customer-centric, inclusive, and sustainable materials science company in the world. A big part of delivering on a goal like that is believing you can do it - just like believing life will be better after coming out, or you can beat cancer. Fear isn’t going to help, and it may actually accelerate defeat,” he explained.

The time for next-level action is now

Internal corporate policy is a necessary, but far from sufficient, step for ensuring progress on LGBTQ+ rights.

For example, Toyota touched off a firestorm of criticism earlier this year, after investigative journalist Judd Legum turned the media spotlight on the company’s many donations to members of Congress who voted in support of former President Trump’s attempt to remain in office after losing his seat in the 2020 presidential election.

Those donations put Toyota on the side of a president who aggressively supported white supremacists and racists while promoting transphobia, and the impact of his tenure continues to ripple out in the form of a torrent of state-level anti-transgender legislation.

Dow also has some work to do in order to shake off the dust of the Trump administration. The company’s support for sustainable chemistry in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suffered a reputational blow after 2016, when former CEO Andrew Liveris took the seat of Chairman of Trump’s newly formed Manufacturing Council.

Aside from taking steps to dismantle EPA, Trump undercut Dow’s corporate diversity and inclusion efforts in 2017, when he lauded white supremacists after a deadly incident in Charlottesville, North Carolina.

Within days, Merck, Intel and Under Armour all withdrew from the Manufacturing Council. Dow and all the others followed shortly thereafter, having decided to disband the organization.

“Every member of the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative condemns racism and bigotry, and there cannot be moral ambiguity around the driving forces of the events in Charlottesville," Liveris explained. “However… in the current environment it was no longer possible to conduct productive discussions under the auspices of the Initiative."

Liveris retired in 2018, but the after-effects of the Trump administration still linger.

Earlier this year, Legum noted that Dow was among those pledging to suspend donations to members of Congress who failed to certify the 2020 Electoral College vote.

That stance is consistent with Dow’s solid reputation on LGBTQ+ rights. However, Trump’s influence continues to spin out across the country in the form of new voter suppression legislation as well as anti-transgender legislation, both of which intersect with political obstruction on climate action at both the state and federal level.

In the face of the looming climate crisis, companies like Toyota and Dow have all the more reason to recharge their corporate human rights policies with a concerted effort to leverage their financial muscle and push back against legislators who seek to turn back the clock on LGBTQ+ rights.

Image credit: Science in HD/Unsplash

(Image: Cupertino, California, home to the headquarters of the most celebrated companies in Big Tech.)

If you’ve recently visited Cupertino, or any of the nearby Silicon Valley towns in California’s Santa Clara County, you’d be hard pressed to believe that not long ago, much of it was blue-collar with far different demographics. Families of Portuguese, Italian, Mexican, and Japanese descent lived in subdivisions of ranch houses quickly built during the 1950s and 1960s, often separated by orchards. A few decades back, Big Tech meant the likes of Fairchild and HP, which provided good jobs, joined by the likes of defense contractors in entering the area. Nevertheless, hourly wage earners could also afford a middle-class lifestyle.

Fast forward to today, and the demographics and landscape of Cupertino are vastly different — most obviously in the cost of living, which has priced many longtime residents out. Whites now make up a slim majority across Santa Clara County, with Asians approaching 40 percent. Today, the area is slathered with prosperity. Judging by the storefronts seen in Cupertino, the preponderance of high-end Chinese eateries, boba tea shops and after-school tutoring centers — with Teslas carting locals back and forth between these locations — the town appears to be a post-racial, albeit very expensive, paradise.

Several months of reporting by Bloomberg, however, reveals a more complicated reality for Asians and Pacific Islanders working in Big Tech in Silicon Valley.

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Months of interviews reveal another side of what to many outsiders appears as a glamorous life in Big Tech of six-figure jobs performed in T-shirts and hoodies. To start, there are the microaggressions that Asians constantly deal with, particularly made toward women, which range from the annoying (as in astonishment over coding skills) to the outright creepy (comments that sexualize and fetishize Asian women).

When it comes to funding, entrepreneurs told Bloomberg reporters time and again that having an accent was a barrier to securing capital for startups or was used as an excuse to deny any opportunities for career development, as in the case of one young woman whose accent was actually more Canadian than Cantonese. 

What to some at first may appear to be little more than daily slights adds up to one of the largest failures of Big Tech: Companies in Silicon Valley have a promotion problem. Additional Bloomberg research has concluded that while Asians may have a huge presence at some of the region’s most celebrated companies, the percentage of Asians drops significantly at the director-level or above within these firms.

The result perpetuates what the author Jane Hyun wrote about in 2005: There’s a “bamboo ceiling” hovering above many Asian workers within Big Tech and other industries. Hyun found, and Bloomberg’s reporters have yet again confirmed, that while it may at first be easy for Asians to start their careers in tech, climbing the corporate ladder is rife with barriers. That’s especially true for women, as summed up by Ellen Pao, whose fight against sexism in the workplace, as it so turns out, was also very much about racial discrimination. “I look back, and there are so many things that happened to me because of my race that I didn’t process,” Pao told Bloomberg.

Whether any progress can be made through legal cases is unclear; so far, the results of some of the most publicized lawsuits taking on discrimination against Asians in the workplace is a mixed bag. The bottom line is that racism against Asians has long been entrenched within the workplace, and overall, companies aren’t addressing it. In one survey led by the IBM Institute for Business Value, for example, 8 in 10 Asian-American professionals said they’ve faced some form of discrimination. On top of that, 60 percent said they feel they must work harder than their colleagues due to their identity.

For companies that insist they want to show they are aware of this problem and want to take it on, a deeper understanding of this community is a start. Asians are hardly a monolith, as is the case with people who are Black, Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Writing for Politico, Jeff Le recently suggested that targeted investments for Asians and Pacific Islanders, especially for women, could help –—many women in this community have had to put their career plans on hold during the pandemic as they coped with child care, day care and elder care.

Further, the murder of several Asian women in the Atlanta area earlier this year is still very raw, not to mention the increased violence against this community during the pandemic. An acknowledgement of this tragedy and a clear policy of “confronting the trauma” can help, as Jennifer Liu wrote for CNBC earlier this year.

“…The external environment - from societal discrimination to hate crimes - adds additional pressure that restrains empowerment and limits potential achievement,” concluded IBM’s report as it suggested a plan on how to address this problem. “Debunking stereotypes in media, education, and anywhere else they appear will help establish a more equal footing across corporate functions and in the leadership pipeline.”

Image credit: Carles Rabada/Unsplash