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The Coca-Cola Company says it's on track to meet its 2020 water replenishment goal by the end of 2015.

Based on the Coca-Cola system’s - its bottling partners - global water replenishment projects to date, the system is balancing the equivalent of an estimated 94% of the water used in its finished beverages based on 2014 sales volume.

Since 2004, Coca-Cola has replenished an estimated 153.6bn litres of water back to communities and nature through 209 community water projects in 61 countries.

Bottling partners have returned approximately 126.7bn litres of water used in its manufacturing processes back to communities and nature through treated wastewater in 2014. These combined efforts put Coca-Cola on track to be the first global food and beverage company to replenish all the water it uses back to communities and nature.

“There is no resource more precious to human life and the health of our global ecosystems and economies than water. As a consumer of water, the Coca-Cola system has a special responsibility to protect this shared resource. This is why we set an aspirational goal of being water neutral by 2020,” said Muhtar Kent, chairman and ceo, The Coca-Cola Company.

“While we have made significant progress toward making that goal a reality, we are more intent than ever to give back the equivalent of all the water that we use to communities and nature. And we will continue to do so after we meet the 100% goal.”
 

Costco is America's third largest retailer, with more than 71 million members. That consumer support translates into considerable purchasing clout when it comes to the retail market's most popular items. The store that first began in San Diego in the auspices of an abandoned airplane hangar in 1976 now has a footing in eight countries, and claims a yearly revenue in excess of $1 billion. It is also well respected for many of its business initiatives, which include higher-than-average hourly pay rates and benefits for its retail and warehouse staff.

But that mega-purchasing power has placed the company in a number of sticky situations lately. On August 19, three law firms filed for an injunction against Costco to stop it from selling seafood purchased from Thailand.

The firms -- Howard Law Firm, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, and Jenkins, Mulligan & Gabriel -- represent plaintiff Monica Sud, who asserts that the prawns were harvested using slave labor.

In June of last year, the Guardian revealed the circuitous route that Thai seafood often takes to reach supermarket shelves in the U.S. That process, according to the Guardian's six-month investigation, includes a well-established and often violent slave-trade industry that sells workers from point to point and uses torture and summary executions to force workers into submission.

The class-action suit that was launched last week alleges that Costco knowingly sold products from Thai distributors that source seafood from ships staffed with slave labor -- and in fact, has been doing so for several years.

Its Maryland-based CP Foods shrimp provider is a subsidiary of Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL. The parent company stated last July that it was working with the Thai government to rid the use of slave labor from its suppliers. It also signed a declaration as part of the Thai Fishery Producers Coalition to stop illegal labor practices in the Thai fishing industry. Environmental and human rights groups such as the Environmental Justice Foundation state the company not only is not doing enough, but is benefiting from the slave labor trade.

For its part, Costco has acknowledged the existence of slave labor in Thailand's fishing industry and said that it "has been working with, and will continue to work with various stakeholders" concerning this issue. It has also offered to take back any products if customers are unhappy with their purchases.

This is far from the first time that the popular retail giant has been sued, although it may be the first time it has been sued for allegedly benefiting from slave labor. Still, Costco has had a rocky time recently with companies, staff and customers that have found an intriguing range of reasons to take it to court.

In January of this year the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in favor of Costco, after Swiss watch maker Omega sued Costco under the first-sale doctrine. Omega alleged that the company did not have authority to sell its watches in the U.S., which Costco apparently purchased legally through a second vendor.

Costco has also been sued a number of times for labor practices (including two class-actions) for alleged gender, religion and wage discrimination, and the warehouse store has been the subject of a bevy of petitions asking it to change its purchasing and consumer-relations practices. The online petitions have focused on issues ranging from the dearth of cage-free eggs in the cooler section, to the lack of infant changing tables in men's washrooms.

The latter was initiated by Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, who observed: “[It’s] 2015, families are diverse, and it is an injustice to assume it’s only a woman’s job to handle changing [a] diaper.” Some 100,000 signatures later, Costco has yet to commit to the upgrade.

While it does seem like consumers do a pretty good job of staying on top of their favorite retail giant to ensure that it keeps to its ethical word, it's interesting that the suit that Sud and the three legal firms launched against Costco and CP Foods didn't name the slavery victims as plaintiffs. The suit also didn't name the victims as the singular, intended benefactors of the award. Instead, it is Sud and other U.S. consumers who may have unwittingly purchased and eaten seafood tainted by slave labor and alleged execution practices that will reap any benefits from the suit. Oh, and the three legal firms -- which, under U.S. class-action laws, stand to benefit for the time and labor they invest in the action. That oftentimes runs into the millions.

The story will likely be different for the captives, some of whom have not had a paycheck for years. Many will be without jobs, homes or social support once freed. And they will be left to wrestle with memories far worse than the realization of having eaten a shrimp sullied by today's global slave trade.

Image credits: 1) Mike Mozart; 2) Mirko Tobias Schafer

Fast fashion rightfully receives criticism for being hard on the environment. But some fast fashion can be environmentally friendly, as H&M is keen to prove with a new product roll-out.

Next month, the clothing retailer will introduce new denim pieces made using recycled cotton. The company will introduce a total of 16 new denim styles that incorporate recycled cotton from textiles collected in through its in-store Garment Collecting Initiative. The denim pieces include men's, women's and child's styles, and they will be available in stores worldwide and online.

There is a very good reason why H&M incorporates recycled cotton into its styles. It's seeking to create a closed loop for the textiles it manufactures. Currently, H&M blends in about 20 percent recycled fibers into its clothes. The goal is to eventually get as close to 100 percent as possible.

H&M’s approach to closing the loop is simple and engages the customer. In every store, the company has a Garment Collecting program. It is the first fashion company to launch a global garment collection initiative. The way it works is that any customer can bring unwanted clothes in, and H&M will recycle them. In other words, you can give new life to that old pair of jeans you considered chucking in the garbage. Remember the old adage your grandparents would say? Well, it’s true: Waste not, want not.

“Creating a closed loop for textiles, in which unwanted clothes can be recycled into new ones, will not only minimize textile waste, but also significantly reduce the need for virgin resources as well as other impacts fashion has on our planet,“ said Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of H&M, in a statement.

H&M estimates that up to 95 percent of the thousands of tons of textiles thrown away every year could be either re-worked or recycled. In the U.S. alone about 12.4 million tons of non-durable textiles were generated in 2013, making up 4.9 percent of total municipal solid waste (MSW), according to the EPA. The recovery rate in 2013 for all non-durable textiles was only 14.8 percent.

In a recent report from the Rainforest Action Network on the impact of the fashion industry on the environment, namely deforestation, H&M received recognition. The report mentioned that a number of brands have taken action and have public commitments to protect forests. H&M is one of those brands.

In April 2014, H&M announced its commitment to stop sourcing fabrics derived from endangered forests and promote the use of fabrics from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified plantations, or FSC-certified forest found outside endangered and ancient forests.

Image credit: H&M

Water is the stuff of life. We need it to live. But California doesn't have as much of that stuff to go around, as the state is in its fourth year of drought. There’s no doubt that water crises are a major risk. Earlier this year, the World Economic Forum rated water crisis among the top five global risks facing society.

Food and beverage manufacturing requires a significant amount of water, which means businesses have an opportunity for water use reduction.

To that end, more than 60 North American and European investors, managing $2.6 trillion in collective assets, sent letters to 15 food and beverage companies this month, calling on them to manage water risk. Some big-name companies received the letters, including Archer Daniels Midland Co., Dean Foods, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, Monster Beverage and Kraft Heinz Co.

In one of the letters, addressed to Dean Foods, the investors state that they believe “global water risk management is a critical aspect of financial risk oversight in the food and beverage sector.” The letter goes on to point out that Dean Foods may be exposed to risks that “could substantively jeopardize the sector’s short- and long-­term ability to operate.”

Ceres released a report a few months ago on how the food sector is managing water risks. Titled Feeding Ourselves Thirsty, the report found that only 30 percent of the 37 major food companies surveyed even considered water risks to be a part of major business-planning activities and investment decisions. The companies that were sent letters by investors all scored poorly in Ceres’ report. Take Archer-Daniels Midland, which scored a 10 out of 100, while Monster Beverage scored a mere one point. Here are the scores for the other companies:

• Dean Foods: 13


• Dr. Pepper Snapple Group: 15


• Kraft Heinz Co.: 6

Why are some companies just not realizing that water risk management should be a priority? Earlier this summer, I interviewed Eliza Roberts, manager of the water program at Ceres, for an article about the report. Roberts told me that since water is viewed as cheap “it’s seen as limitless.”

She added, “When something is cheap and seen as limitless, it’s just not going to be valued.”

There is a bit of good news. The severity of California's drought is starting to change how water is perceived. “It’s becoming clear to all with the drought in California that water is not limitless and that water scarcity can have a real impact on business operations and bottom line,” Roberts told me. “So, additionally, as supply goes down and demand increases, it’s becoming clear that water may be cheap for now, but this is likely to change.”

There’s more good news: The pressure that investors are putting on major food and beverage companies may also serve to change perceptions of water. That's something those of us in drought-stricken California will cheer.

Image credit: Flickr/docentjoyce

Brad Edmondson

The story on the relationship between Unilever and Ben & Jerry's that ran in Thursday's New York Times isn’t really hard news. It’s the Mister Softee version of what really happened.

What the story leaves out is what Unilever does not want you to know. To save money, Unilever executives ordered the recipes for Cherry Garcia and other popular flavors changed shortly after it acquired Ben & Jerry’s in 2000. The company did it without telling the independent board of Ben & Jerry’s, even though going behind the board’s back was prohibited by the legally-binding Sales Agreements. The cherries in Cherry Garcia “tasted like rubber” for several years, according to board member Pierre Ferrari; chunks got smaller, and there was more air in the mix. Scoop-shop owners noticed the differences immediately and protested, without effect.  The shop owners started filing lawsuits.

In 2008, after years of stonewalling by Unilever and frustration in Vermont, the independent board told Unilever it had breached the agreements and was required to change the ingredients back. In other words, the Vermonters threatened to take action against the company that owned them. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield almost went on a publicity tour to promote a protest flavor called “Unilever Squash,” because Unilever was squashing the company they founded.

If the dispute had gone public, it could have destroyed the brand's image.  But at the last minute, Unilever came to the table, started taking the Sales Agreements seriously, named Jostein Solheim CEO of Ben & Jerry’s, and gave him the authority and the money to pursue the social mission for real.  The entire story is told in the last third of my 2014 book about the social mission of Ben & Jerry's, "Ice Cream Social."

Now, don’t get me wrong — Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever since 2009, has been working hard to push the world’s second-largest food company toward sustainable and ethical business practices.  The main point of the Times story is correct.  The social mission of Ben & Jerry’s is going strong.  Also, Mister Softee is great New York City ice cream.  But it’s soft ice cream. Don't forget the hard story.

Image credit: Flickr/Alison Fayre

Based in Ithaca, New York, Brad Edmondson is the author of "Ice Cream Social: The Struggle for the Soul of Ben & Jerry's." He is also an award-winning journalist and business consultant who helps his clients understand and benefit from social change. His writing appears regularly in national magazines, including AARP and The American Scholar.

By Jerry Nelson

For decades, sushi fanatics could relax in knowing that their carp was mercury-free and fresh. Now, the "fruits of the sea" are not what they appear.

Seafood fraud is flourishing and ranges from mislabeling traditional menu items to overcharging customers.

The stakes have become so significant that a fundamental piece of the Trans-Pacific Partnership is seeking a mutual commitment to stop illicit fishing and damaging supports.

In June, the Obama administration published a new fleet of actions intended at restricting black-marketing fishing and other sorts of seafood fraud.

Types of fraud

Seafood fraud is yet another type of fraud that consists of several forms but boils down to one idea: the sticker on the wrapper does not correctly represent the product within. Even something as seemingly benign as swapping native fish with farm-raised fish is fraud.

Species swapping is another example. For example: Some restaurants sell "white tuna" but substitutes it with escolar, also called the "Ex-Lax Fish."

One fraudulent activity is common but legal and simple: name the fish with something other than a fishy sounding name.  The FDA keeps a list of agreeable names, and some of the original names may shock you. "Orange" was first called "slimehead," as just one example.

Mislabeling makes up the largest percentage of fraud being fought inside the industry.

Mislabeling

In 18 years, Trey Knotts, a forensic scientist, has seen over 2,000 catfish filets in disguise.

Recently he's seen a growing number of mislabeled species coming in at a weight of up to a half-million pounds per shipment.

"There are companies importing millions of pounds of fish under fraudulent labeling," Knotts says.

Less than 1 percent of imported seafood is inspected for mislabeling. Knotts points out that the NOAA has less than 100 inspectors. "If you consider the coastline of America, it's a massive amount of territory to be covered," he says.

What is being done with the leaky seafood system? Research conducted by Kimberly Warner of Oceana exposed the size of the problem. One of the loftiest undertakings so far will be for federal agencies such as the NOAA and FDA to coordinate investigations into seafood fraud. With new tools — such as Grouperchek — the government and private industry seem to be close to joint-fighting mislabeled seafood.

Foreign fisheries in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Canada, China, Ecuador and Vietnam are unanimously blamed for seafood fraud. Seafood from these countries come mislabeled from unregulated fish farms. The biggest offenders are Thailand and Vietnam with endless supplies of Asian catfish available for export and labeled as grouper or other in-demand fish.

With the majority of fraud originating overseas, American regulators are focusing their attention on those imports. In December 2014, a presidential task force started began to recommend how the government could best fight seafood fraud. Recommendations included increased international collaboration on labeling and highlighted an urgent need for improved seafood tracking.

A 1976 law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, regulates fisheries and controls overfished species such as speckled hind, an endangered fish often labeled as grouper. The law also protects the overfished Atlantic halibut, often sold as Pacific halibut.

The daily contact with mislabeled fish has made Knotts wary about seafood fraud even when he's not at work. He rarely brings his dinner into the lab for testing, but his work has increased his suspicions.

"Each time you see grouper on the list of options, you go, 'hmmmm ... ,'" he says.

Leaders fighting seafood fraud

Oceana has been the leader in exposing seafood fraud globally. In America, Oceana led a several studies to determine the size of the problem. The Oceana seafood fraud report collected 1,200 seafood samples from over 650 retail outlets in 20 states to determine the validity of their labeling. DNA testing found that 33 percent of the samples analyzed were mislabeled.

Oceana's campaign moved President Obama to establish the task force that has started making recommendations to stop seafood fraud.

Tampa-based PureMolecular has developed fist-sized machines that can help retailers determine the actual species of fish being purchased or sold.

John Paul, PureMolecular's CEO, said the technology produces results within 45 minutes. Genetically, only 0.02 percent of imported fish is analyzed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration tests take up to a week to produce results

How consumers can protect themselves

While the fishing trade persists in being something of an untamed Wild West, consumers can guard themselves against eating contaminated or mislabeled fish. Activists are starting to lead a demand for seafood transparency that is reminiscent of the change in dairy that demanded milk without added steroids be available.

Consumers can demand to know where and how their seafood is caught. Asking lawmakers to require stricter penalties for mislabeling and showing support for the seafood fraud elements of the Trans-Pacific Partnership are two more actions that will go a long way to promoting sustainable fisheries.

In the meantime, consumers should be careful what goes on their plate.

Don't fall for the "bait and switch."

Jerry Nelson is an American freelance writer and photographer covering social justice issues globally. When not traveling, he lives in Buenos Aires with his wife Alejandra and their cat, Tommy. Follow him on Twitter.

China's carbon emissions have been substantially over estimated by international agencies for more than 10 years, according to research co-led by the University of East Anglia.

The revised estimates of China's carbon emissions were produced by an international team of researchers, led by Harvard University, UEA, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University, in collaboration with 15 other international research institutions.

The team re-evaluated emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and cement production from 1950-2013. They used independently assessed activity data on the amounts of fuels burned and new measurements of emissions factors - the amount of carbon oxidised per unit of fuel consumed - for Chinese coal.

Lead UK researcher Prof Dabo Guan, of UEA's School of International Development, said the key contributor to the new estimates was fuel quality, which for the first time was taken into consideration in establishing emission inventories - something the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and most international data sources had not.

“China is the largest coal consumer in the world, but it burns much lower quality coal, such as brown coal, which has a lower heat value and carbon content compared to the coal burned in the US and Europe,” said Prof Guan.

“China is one of the first countries to conduct a comprehensive survey for its coal qualities and a global effort is required to help other major coal users, such as India and Indonesia, understand their physical coal consumptions as well as the quality of their coal types.

"Our results suggest that Chinese CO2 emissions have been substantially over estimated in recent years. Evaluating progress towards countries' commitments to reduce CO2 emissions depends upon improving the accuracy of annual emissions estimates and reducing related uncertainties. These findings represent progress towards improving estimates of annual global carbon emissions."
 

'Reduced carbon emission estimates from fossil fuel combustion and cement production in China' was published in Nature last week.

By Max Bloom

Driven by technological innovation and economies of scale, the installed price of solar photovoltaics has plummeted in recent years. Combined with federal and state incentives, and creative financing models, these low prices have ushered affordable solar power into the mainstream. In 2014, 6.2 gigawatts of solar PV were installed in the U.S. alone, 20 times the amount installed in 2008.

Meanwhile, residential battery storage, a mainstay in the early days of solar PV, has largely been relegated to the fringe as an expensive, rarely-used backup. Most end-users now connect to the electric grid, relying on utilities to provide power when their PV systems don’t. These users employ the grid as a robust, always-available “battery” to which they enjoy free access, obviating the need to pay for their own storage solutions.

But that paradigm may be about to change. Anticipating fundamental revisions to residential rate structures, Enphase, the PV microinverter market leader, is preparing to launch a new AC-battery residential storage solution in 2016. Should projected rate changes come to pass, the Enphase AC Battery system, combined with solar PV, could present homeowners with a compelling economic proposition. With over 8 million microinverters deployed worldwide, Enphase may be in a unique position to bring residential battery storage to the masses.

While the residential energy storage market has yet to blossom, the utility-scale market is booming. U.S. energy storage capacity grew by 40 percent from 2013 to 2014, with 90 percent of that new capacity deployed in front of the meter (i.e., utility-scale). Storage in all markets combined is expected to grow another 300 percent in 2015.

Residential and commercial and industrial (C&I) storage may represent just 10 percent of the overall market today, but a recent GTM research report predicts behind-the-meter storage (residential, commercial, education, military or nonprofit) will account for 45 percent of the market by 2019.

Because of differences in rate structures between the C&I and residential markets, and what’s known as “demand charges,” the C&I storage market currently makes up the lion’s share of non-utility-scale energy storage. In addition to paying for the quantity of energy they use, just as residential customers do, C&I customers also pay demand charges that are based on the 15-minute period in which the customer uses the most power in a given month. Demand charges can make up 30, 50 or even 70 percent of a company’s electricity bill and run into many thousands of dollars per month.

“Peak shaving,” i.e. charging a battery storage system when energy is cheap (or free with solar PV) and then discharging the battery when demand is at its peak in order to minimize steep demand charges, is a key economic driver for C&I energy storage.

San Francisco-based GELI (Growing Energy Labs, Inc.) has developed software that enables companies to optimize the economics of their energy storage systems. “Our software uses predictive analytics to follow a building’s load, and when it hits a certain threshold we use the battery to negate additional use and lower demand charges,” says Andrew Krulewitz, GELI’s director of marketing and product. “Our bread-and-butter market right now is demand charge management for commercial and industrial customers with load from 50 kW all the way up to a megawatt.”

Time-of-use (TOU) pricing structures, common for C&I customers and increasingly available to residential customers, provide another economic incentive for storage systems. Demand Energy, a turnkey provider of behind-the-meter energy storage solutions in the commercial and industrial space, helps companies arbitrage their energy production and consumption through “time-shifting.” “With time-of-use, you can store and shift solar power,” notes Erick Peterson, Demand Energy’s vic president of marketing and business development. “Any excess solar production that you don’t need in the building you just store and time-shift it out to a later period in the day [when rates are higher].”

The value proposition for residential energy storage today is where solar PV was six or seven years ago, and the factors that led PV to mass affordability will likely have a similar effect on storage. Battery costs have declined by 80 percent in the past decade, and dozens of startup companies are now competing to develop safer, more efficient and less expensive battery chemistries.

The economies of scale introduced by Tesla’s Powerwall battery system and its Gigafactory battery manufacturing plant in Nevada will place additional downward pressure on residential energy storage costs. Incentives like the federal ITC (at least through 2016) and California’s SGIP program (at least through 2019) will further sweeten the deal for potential purchasers of home-based energy storage.

But the key drivers that will make the economic case for residential energy storage are higher energy prices and changes to residential rate structures. “Everything is signaled through pricing,” notes Greg Wolfson, director of storage products at Enphase. “At the end of the day, customers don’t want a storage system. They want to manage their bill.” High energy prices incentivize the purchase of both solar PV and energy storage systems. When prices are high, homeowners save money when they use either direct PV power or stored excess PV power instead of expensive utility-generated power.

While net energy metering (NEM) has helped to build the economic case for PV, the opposite is true for storage. It is the demise of NEM that will encourage the adoption of residential energy storage.

NEM enables solar PV system owners to sell their excess power back to the utilities at retail rates, increasing the economic return of their PV systems. Some utilities propose paying lower wholesale rates for excess power sent to the grid or even eliminating NEM altogether (Hawaii’s HECO utility). The less utilities pay for excess generation sent back to the grid, the more sense it makes for PV system owners to store that excess and use it themselves. “Without net metering, solar over-generation is useless to you because you’re not being compensated for what you generate,” notes GELI’s Krulewitz. “With a battery, you can capture [and later use] all that over-generation.”

Some utilities are starting to propose TOU rate structures (Southern California Edison) and even demand charges (Arizona’s SRP utility) for their residential customers. All of these changes in rate policy – a weakening of NEM, adoption of TOU rates or the institution of residential demand charges – bolster the economic case for residential storage.

Although the Enphase AC battery system will only operate when connected to the grid, the company is looking ahead to a time when revised rate structures support an economic case beyond backup. “The big driver at this instant in time in the United States, in the main, is for emergency power backup,” acknowledges Enphase’s Wolfson. “That’s not where we’re focused. Our focus is on the economics – not energy independence, but energy economics.”

Energy prices and rate structures that already exist in other countries portend the economic viability of home energy storage sooner rather than later. “If you live in Australia, or Hawaii, or Germany, or Japan or the Netherlands or the UK … or potentially in Arizona, where demand charges are being proposed or implemented, then [residential energy storage] does make economic sense today,” notes Wolfson.

Enphase plans to rollout its first AC battery systems next year in Australia, where rate structures are already favorable for storage. “In Australia, they don’t have a lot of incentives,” says Wolfson. “They slashed marginal rates to almost wholesale rates, so there’s very little economic value in exporting what you generate.”

Other companies smell blood in the water and are introducing their own residential energy storage solutions. JuiceBox Energy installed its first 8.6 kW Lithium-ion, AC coupled system in a California home earlier this year. Next year, SolarEdge will offer a DC coupled solution that combines a Tesla Powerwall battery with a SolarEdge inverter.

Both the JuiceBox and SolarEdge systems enable islanding, allowing the PV and storage systems to power the home even when the grid goes down. The Enphase system must be connected to the grid, and cannot be used as a grid backup.

Neither Enphase nor SolarEdge has released pricing information for their storage offerings, but the $3,000 cost of the 7 kW Tesla Powerwall battery (around $7,250 installed with an inverter) might offer a clue. Tesla’s Elon Musk suggests he will be able to produce Powerwall batteries at scale for $250 per kilowatt, putting further downward pressure on new storage system prices. Software like GELI’s, used to optimize the economics of storage systems, will be available in the residential market and may add a bit to system cost.

The typical homeowner’s relationship to electricity has been to flip the switch and pay the monthly bill. In the near future, the consumer’s relationship to electricity – where it comes from, what it costs and why – will become much more intimate. When customers realize they can save money by generating and storing their own renewable energy, and use software to determine when it is most advantageous to use it, then the market for residential energy storage will truly come alive.

Image credits: 1) Enphase 2) Tesla 3) Juice Box

Max Bloom is a Renewable Energy Marketing Communications Director based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The seafood industry is truly a global business. More than 150 million tons of seafood hit the markets each year across the globe. According to the Marine Stewardship Council, a full half of that seafood was traded by developing nations. And although the U.S. and Canada are major purveyors of the world's seafood market, their laws governing sustainable fishing methods don't control how seafood is harvested by companies and contractors in those developing countries.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, 85 percent of the world's fisheries are already at the brink of overfishing. "Pollution, poorly planned development and the effects of climate change have also contributed to the degradation of the underwater environment," says the WWF, which like the MSC has been sounding the alarm for more oversight, better fishing methods and increased habitat conservation in an effort to protect endangered and threatened species and fish stocks

There have been various strategies developed over the years to this end. Last year we reported on the efforts of Monterey Bay's Seafood Watch Program to give consumers a more informative tool for selecting sustainably-fished products. Its products guide and downloadable app serve as one answer for consumers who want a better peek into the industry's impact on the world's oceans.

The MSC is also working on that concept -- only from a different angle.

"Over the past two years we have been piloting a new traceability tool, the MSC Online Transaction Solution (MOTS)." The tool will be the first of its kind, designed to "securely handle and verify information about seafood supply chain transactions on a global scale." Its job will be to cross-check seafood transactions within the supply chain, adding more accountability into the fishing and sale of the world's ocean stocks.

Last week the MSC reached out to industry stakeholders asking for feedback on the new tool so it can determine whether the tool would be applicable for the entire program. The tool has already been piloted with 22 companies in China and the European Union, and the MSC invites a final round of industry members’ feedback before the broader roll-out. If successful, some 3,000 supply companies in 60 countries that handle ecolabel-certified products will employ the new tool in 34,000 locations around the world.

The organization targeted 2017 for a voluntary roll-out date for the MOTS and a potential mandatory roll-out of 2018. It is also focused on raising the number of fisheries and farms signed up on its certification program.  Currently 250 fisheries are signed up; the organization hopes to raise that number to 1,000 by the end of the decade. According to MSC, DNA testing of samples show that "99 percent of MSC-labeled products are correctly labeled, demonstrating the integrity of the current system." The new MOTS tool is being designed to work in concert with MSC's ongoing chain-of-custody program.

The MOTS tool is open for public consultation until Sept. 2. You can review information on the project and anticipated roll-out schedule on the MOTS program page.

Images: Maritime Stewardship Council Benelux

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the August issue of Green Money Journal.

By Rebecca Adamson

Extractive industry projects may not be created to victimize women, but violence against women has become a major by-product of these project operations. Rampant exploitation of women happens when thousands of mostly male workers are housed in makeshift “man camps” located at the sites of company operations.

For example, North Dakota’s Bakken oil field has boomed: Over the past five years, it has increased daily oil production from 200,000 barrels to 1.1 million barrels, becoming the second largest oil-producing state in the country. Thousands of highly paid workers have flocked to the region. Within two years, the combined influx of cash and oil workers has tripled the rate of murders, aggravated assaults and robberies. Sex crimes, rape, prostitution and human trafficking have increased by 20.2 percent. Business Insider summarized the region thusly: “[L]aw enforcement says Bakken is a made-to-order market for sex."

Violence against women is widespread across extractive industry site operations. It is social pollution as toxic as any chemical released into the environment. Yet in the socially responsible investing (SRI) community, of the three principal criteria — environment, social and governance — metrics are proceeding the slowest in terms of measuring impact, corporate accountability and investor risk. Currently, the Securities and Exchange Commission does not require corporate securities reporting on community relations or human rights due to their perceived lack of material relevance. However, just last year, EY (formerly Ernst and Young) elevated the “social license to operate” to the third place on its list of the greatest business risks to the mining industry.

John Ruggie, author of the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the Guiding Principles), told Business Ethics that “for a world-class mining operation … there’s a cost somewhere between $20 million to $30 million a week for operational disruptions by communities” and that the time it takes to bring oil and gas projects online has “doubled over the course of the past ten years, creating substantial cost inflation”. Additionally, “analysis by Environmental Resources Management of delays associated with a sample of 190 of the world’s largest oil and gas projects (as ranked by Goldman Sachs) found that 73 percent of project delays were due to “above-ground” or non-technical risk, including stakeholder resistance."

The problem is that current efforts to engage the private sector on human rights are largely driven by the Guiding Principles, which offer a rigidly “top down” framework that does not account for local dynamics such as the cumulative impacts of multiple companies operating in close proximity to a community, or the spikes in violence against women. Furthermore, the Guiding Principles mention women, along with indigenous peoples, only in passing, thereby largely excluding them from the corporate social responsibility conversation. The resulting lack of guidance and metrics enables companies to disclose minimal information about their social impacts—especially on vulnerable groups — which limits investors’ ability to measure social risks and keeps nefarious social costs invisible and running rampant.

Published in November 2014, First Peoples Worldwide’s Indigenous Rights Risk Report (IR3) offers a case study for measuring one of the most pressing social risks to the extractive industries — indigenous peoples’ rights — from the bottom up.

Designed over a two-year process with input from indigenous leaders and activists, financial analysts, and industry experts, IR3 assessed 52 U.S. oil, gas and mining companies to identify where their projects overlap with or impact indigenous peoples, and rated each project’s risk exposure for failing to obtain free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC). FPIC is recognized in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as indigenous peoples’ right to give or withhold support to corporate activities that affect them. Eighty-nine percent of the 330 projects assessed had medium- to high-risk exposure (a searchable database of the scorecards is available on First Peoples’ website). By assigning quantitative risk scores at the project level using a methodology designed to capture the complex undercurrents within both communities and companies, IR3 provides a framework — and three key lessons — for designing social metrics that can be applied beyond just indigenous peoples.

The first lesson is that the results of preliminary back testing indicate a possible correlation between the companies’ average project risk scores and their market growth between 2010 and 2014. Companies with lower average project risk scores outperformed companies with higher average project risk scores by 4.21 percent. There are some caveats to this figure resulting from our small sample size, but it’s an important step in demonstrating the connection between corporate social and financial performance.

The second lesson is that most companies operate with no governance structure whatsoever for addressing social risks. One of IR3’s risk indicators is risk management, which rates a company’s capacity to identify, manage and mitigate social risks at the board level. Forty-eight of the 52 companies have virtually nothing in this regard. They have no board committees with community relations or human rights in their mandate, or board members with community relations or human rights expertise. Without the governance structure or company capacity to identify, manage, and mitigate social risks, investors are left with a Management by Headlines approach, and virtually all communities that host or are proximate to extractive projects are in danger—as we’ve seen in case after case of violence against women.

Reports of Native American women and girls being trafficked to the Bakken has put the Fort Berthold Reservation on high alert, but how are the companies operating in the region responding? They’re not. Companies including Apache, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Hess and others have taken zero responsibility for their workers’ collusion in the growing sex trade, increased drug violence, and general crime wave in Fort Berthold, North Dakota, over the past two years -- let alone the rest of the region.

While some companies in the region are making efforts to reduce flaring and improve transparency, no substantive dialogue is taking place about social impacts. This trend of neglecting social risks has permeated corporate interactions with communities across the globe.

Read the full article from the August 2015 issue of GreenMoney Journal here.

Article by Rebecca Adamson, an Indigenous economist, is Founder and President of First Peoples Worldwide (www.firstpeoples.org), the first U.S.-based global Indigenous Peoples NGO, which makes grants and provides technical assistance and advocacy directly to Indigenous-led development projects. Ms. Adamson has worked directly with grassroots tribal communities, both domestically and internationally, as an advocate of local tribal issues since 1970.

She established the premiere US development institute, First Nations Development Institute in 1980 and in 1997 she founded First Peoples Worldwide. Ms. Adamson’s work established the first microenterprise loan fund in the United States, the first tribal investment model, and, a national movement for reservation land reform.