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Corporate greed is repulsive, but companies that care about people are endearing. Studies show that millennials want to buy from companies that are interested in more than profit. They want to support brands that care.

Here’s a lineup of the newest and most beautiful social impact ads from companies, a band and a city that care.

1. Hyundai supports families

Stephanie, a girl living in Houston, misses her dad who isn’t living close by. In fact, he’s farther away than any dad on the planet … he’s on the International Space Station.

Hyundai asked Stephanie what message she’d like to send her dad, and then the company made it happen by using cars and a lot of dirt.

2. Fixodent has compassion for wildlife

A rare white lion named Aslan lost two of his canine teeth and is in pain … especially any time he tries to eat a hunk of meat. Fixodent tells the story to help people understand the emotional difficulty people experience when they lose their teeth. Fixodent repairs the lion’s teeth and gives him another chance to keep biting into life.

3. Spotify helps people hear

Spotify partnered with Starkey Hearing Foundation in the Philippines. Together they gave people who were deaf the gift of hearing.

4. Train encourages mental health

Music, dance and art “merge together to deliver a powerful message about loss, healing and letting go.” May is Mental Health Month. This music video is from the soft-rock band Train’s song, “Give It All,” and was created to help those who are struggling with mental illness.

5. Dove says men are strong when they care

Men often say that caring for people is strong and masculine. To acknowledge the caring side of men and celebrate their strength, Dove created this ad.

6. The city of Los Angeles applauds water conservation

California’s drought has been all over the news lately. Some estimate that the state only has one year of water left. The city of Los Angeles created this video to encourage residents to conserve water.

By Michael Tlusty

Technology is often seen as a path forward to achieve sustainability. This theme occurs throughout current-day blogs (for example see this discussion by Gabi Zedlmayer on TriplePundit).  However, this idea is not new. A quick search of Google Scholar finds multiple references, and, for example, in 1994 René Kemp stated: “Of the various options open to society to reduce the environmental burden, technology is widely considered as the most attractive option.” This sentiment still prevails, as evidenced by General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt who claimed that for achieving sustainability, “Technology is the only answer." But is it?

To fully understand the role of technology in achieving sustainability, we must first acknowledge the role that technology had in providing us the means to stray off the pathway to sustainability in the first place. The technological innovation of artificial nitrogen fixation via the Haber–Bosch process was the critical development that put us on the “Great Acceleration” pathway that led to our current sustainability-challenged landscape. The increase in synthetic nitrogen production allowed for greater food production and tracks closely to the global human population increase. This burgeoning population led to the sustainability challenges of today, including water and air pollution, disease and human health problems, reduced biodiversity, soil and ocean acidification, and climate change.

Instead of “leveraging technology for sustainability,” we are caught in the cycle of using technology to mitigate the problems we caused with our prior increase in technological knowledge. The innovation of nitrogen fixation occurred during World War I when there was a critical need for nitrogen for weapons. Post-war, the nitrogen was then used as fertilizer, leading to the increased food production.

A similar case of war-time technology being co-opted for food production, then leading to sustainability challenges, occurred post-World War II when battleship technology was used to create efficient fishing vessels that led to the overfishing of many species (see Paul Greenberg and Boris Worm's New York Times article).

This cyclical switching of technological innovation from solving to causing sustainability issues occurs beyond military technology. Comedian Stephen Fry eloquently discussed on the Infinite Monkey Cage Podcast the transition to oil-based fuels as being initially beneficial, as it replaced a product coming from sperm whales that were being hunted to extinction. Yet, as with most things technological, we have now become reliant on excessive oil usage, and are searching for technological solutions to remediate the innumerable problems associated with this energy source – including once again harming whales from the noise of ships transporting oil-based products across the oceans.

Ultimately, the interface of technology and sustainability was posed in Wayne Visser’s blog, quoting Ray Anderson (CEO of Interface), who questioned whether we could have technology reduce -- rather than increase -- our impact on the environment and society. It is the unintended consequences of an innovation, often brought about by success and overuse of the technology, that ultimately end up challenging the system’s sustainability. Without the technological innovation of synthetic nitrogen via Haber-Bosch, the earth’s population would be half what it is today. If this were the case, the multitude of impacts that followed the population increase would be greatly reduced. As a global society, our great acceleration has placed us on a path where we need technological innovation to combat the unintended consequences of our prior actions. At some point, we will counter the second law of thermodynamics and reverse our inevitable progression toward entropy. Advances in renewable and restorative systems will be mandatory. Until these truly sustainable developments occur, we will need to embrace the additional solutions outside of technology to help us meet our sustainability goals, if nothing more than to provide the time to develop the renewable and restorative innovations.

The good news is that simple behavioral changes are helping us reduce our consumptive patterns from what we desire to what we biologically need. This is important, as creating more does not ensure sustainability (as with our examples of more synthetic nitrogen, more fishing or more oil). Behavioral reductions can happen by simply reducing our calorie intake, our portion size, or by seeing the beauty of the imperfect world and reveling in eating all produce, not only those perfect unblemished ones (see the Twitter feed @UglyFruitAndVeg). We are also aware of the tremendous amount of food waste, and in eliminating this, would increase food by 40 percent.

However, solutions are not all-or-none phenomena. We do need restorative technologies to reduce our impacts on our planet, but we cannot wait for the single solution so we can take a technologically-aided large jump to be sustainable.  To more rapidly travel down the path toward sustainability, we need innovation, and more importantly, we need to couple that to simple, non-technological and immediate steps.

Image credit: Flickr/Brisbane City Council

Dr. Michael Tlusty is the Director of Ocean Sustainability Science at the New England Aquarium. His work focuses on aquatic protein production, and how it can be improved to achieve sustainability goals. 

Leading British retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) has joined RE100, the global initiative supporting major companies committing to 100% renewable power.

The retailer of food, clothing and home products with over 1,300 stores worldwide joins 18 other leading businesses, including Unilever and India's largest IT company, Infosys, who also signed up this week.

Since the launch of its ethical and environmental ‘Plan A’ in 2007, M&S has lowered its carbon emissions by 19% and has become carbon neutral across its worldwide operations. It has a target to improve its UK and ROI energy efficiency by 50% by 2020 and to source 50% of its gas from certified green bio-methane sources

Commenting on the decision to join RE100, Mike Barry, director of sustainable business Plan A at Marks & Spencer said: “Tackling climate change is critical for our business, and for all businesses. We developed Plan A with this in mind – which includes a commitment to sourcing 100 per cent of our directly procured UK and ROI electricity from renewable sources. Joining RE100 gives us an opportunity to share what we have learned and encourage other businesses to switch to renewable energy.”

 

Between 10 and 30 percent of all prescription and over-the-counter drugs sold are left unconsumed, according to a State of Washington report, and all those leftover medications pose significant risks to public health and the environment. Drugs that are flushed down the toilet or tossed in the trash can – rather than properly disposed of – can end up in oceans and waterways, threatening both marine life and human health. Meanwhile, many individuals don’t get rid of their unused medications at all; they simply store the drugs in their medicine cabinets – a practice that can lead to drug misuse and abuse.

CVS Health has decided it wants to do its part to stem the tide of prescription and over-the-counter medications filling up our medicine cabinets and clogging our waterways. In 2013, the retailer and health care company launched its CVS/pharmacy Medication Disposal for Safer Communities Program, a grant initiative in which the company distributes drug collection bins to police departments and municipalities, so they can set up environmentally responsible local drug disposal programs. These specialized drug disposal units meet federal requirements to collect and securely store prescription medications that are also considered “controlled substances” – drugs that have the potential for abuse or dependence and are highly regulated by law enforcement agencies.

Since the program began awarding grants last year, CVS/pharmacy has donated 275 of these drug collection bins to localities, and all these bins are currently being used for community drop-off programs, said Eileen Howard Boone, the company’s senior vice president of corporate social responsibility and philanthropy. The first 100 bins collected nearly 6,500 pounds of old medications in their first six months of use. The goal of the initiative, Boone said, is to award a total of 1,000 drug collection bins to local governments across the U.S.

CVS/pharmacy has also been an active participant in National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, a joint-program of the Justice Department and Drug Enforcement Administration to collect unwanted prescription medications across the country twice a year. Last year’s take-back days collected a total of 1.4 million pounds of medication, Boone said. CVS/pharmacy hosted more than 400 of these drug collection events, she said, allowing law enforcement agencies to take advantage of the retailer’s convenient location and traffic access – rather than sending the public out to remote hazardous waste facilities or inconvenient police stations to drop off medications.

A step toward producer responsibility

It is not uncommon for the private sector to be involved in collecting and properly disposing of medications in other countries. In Canada, Mexico and many European countries, the government requires pharmaceutical companies to finance and manage drug take-back – a policy approach called extended producer responsibility (EPR), in which the manufacturers or sellers of a product take responsibility for the environmental and social impacts of the product throughout its lifecycle – from sourcing the material and production to consumer use and disposal. EPR has many benefits, especially for toxic or difficult-to-recycle items: It relieves governments and taxpayers from the high costs of product disposal and can motivate manufacturers, now compelled to confront the externalities of their operations, to make their products in a more environmentally and socially responsible way.

With no such federal EPR law for medication in the U.S., cash-strapped municipalities and law enforcement agencies have struggled to come up with their own disposal programs for unused drugs. A handful of jurisdictions, like San Francisco and King County, Washington, have enacted local EPR ordinances against opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, but a bill introduced last year to require drug take-back in California died in committee.

Many EPR programs for medications include collecting unused drugs at pharmacies and hospitals – the same places where patients pick up their prescriptions and a much more convenient drop-off location than a faraway hazardous waste collection facility or landfill.

The DEA recently passed regulations that allow pharmacies to have disposal units on site.  The regulations, however, are complex and there is interplay with state environmental laws that make it difficult in some states to have such units, CVS Health said.  Soon, CVS/pharmacy will conduct tests of these units in its stores.  Given the current operational and regulatory hurdles, CVS/pharmacy’s Medication Disposal for Safer Communities Program is a step in the right direction and, frankly, more than most retailers and health care companies are doing to address pharmaceutical waste. However, Boone said that the company is exploring other ways to participate in drug take-back, including potentially collecting medications at stores.

Beyond the bottom line: The business benefits of take-back

But why would a company like CVS Health decide to participate in medication take-back, when it’s not the industry standard or required by law? Are there long-term business benefits to EPR programs for medications?

There are often financial and customer engagement benefits to product take-back programs, said Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the California Product Stewardship Council. In Canada, several pharmacies began collecting used syringes and needles voluntarily as a way to attract diabetic patients, who make up a large percentage of a pharmacy’s revenue with their prescriptions and other medical needs, Sanborn said. And the take-back program worked: When one pharmacy chain set up free needle disposal, other pharmacies lost customers -- which is why a large majority of the 6,000 non-regulated community pharmacies in Canada voluntarily accept sharps at their own expense: because it make good business sense, Sanborn said.

But collecting medications is a different animal and may not always lead to increased customers and sales, Sanborn said. During a pilot drug drop-off program at a pharmacy in Sacramento, California, the pharmacy was inundated with unwanted medications from Kaiser patients who continued to use their Kaiser – and not the pharmacy with the drug disposal program – to fill their prescriptions.

Because CVS Health only collects medications at some of its pharmacy locations on National Take-Back Days, it’s difficult to determine the benefit it sees from increased foot traffic – potential new customers coming into the store to drop off old medications who may end up making purchases while they’re in the store.

For CVS Health, its medication take-back initiative isn’t about helping its bottom line; it’s about a greater societal problem – preventing prescription drug abuse – and protecting the health of its customers and patients.

“Prescription drug abuse, especially in teens, has soared in recent years,” Boone said. “More than 70 percent of teenagers say it is easier to get prescription drugs from their parents’ medicine cabinets, according to a 2014 study conducted by our partner, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids.”

That’s why CVS Health made a commitment to prevent half a million teenagers from abusing prescription medication by 2017, she said.

“Prescription drug abuse is a national issue that requires the active involvement of stakeholders throughout the health care community, as well as law enforcement and regulatory agencies,” Boone went on. “CVS Health and CVS/pharmacy are committed to being part of the solution to this problem. We think we can have an impact by identifying and working with allies and partners to bring about lasting systemic changes. We also believe this is the right thing to do for our customers and patients.”

And “doing the right thing” by providing drug disposal options for its customers is a service that more and more consumers are willing to expect and desire from their local pharmacies. According to a 2014 study of residents conducted by the City of Roseville, California, 72 percent said medication take-back programs should be 100-percent or at least partially-funded by pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies and hospitals.

Image credit: Flickr/Dawn McIlvain Stahl

It was called the “paddle in Seattle” when hundreds of kayakers took to the waters of Elliott Bay to protest Royal Dutch Shell’s plan to drill for oil in the Arctic.

It’s unclear exactly who was paddled, or who will continue to be paddled, however, because despite the local activity in the Pacific Northwest, it looks like Shell will get its way, especially after the Obama administration’s recent conditional approval for Shell to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the North Slope of Alaska.

The occasion for the floating, but ultimately meaningless, protest was the arrival last week of the 400-foot-tall Polar Pioneer drill rig at the Port of Seattle’s Terminal 5. It’s the first of two giant rigs slated for oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea.

According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s conditional approval letter, Shell’s revised Exploration Plan proposes the drilling of up to six wells within the Burger Prospect, located in approximately 140 feet of water about 70 miles northwest of the village of Wainwright. “Shell will conduct its operations using the drillship M/V Noble Discoverer and the semi-submersible drilling unit Transocean Polar Pioneer, with each vessel providing relief-well capability for the other.”

The Arctic drilling vessels will be moored at Terminal 5 under a two-year lease between the Port of Seattle and Foss Maritime, before departing to the Arctic. The lease is the subject of a dispute between the Port of Seattle Commission, Mayor Ed Murray, the Seattle Department of Planning and Development, and the Seattle City Council. The city agencies want to block the port’s seasonal mooring lease with Foss on somewhat technical grounds. But that is likely a minor irritation for Shell at best, since the Polar Pioneer is comfortably residing at the terminal right now.

President Obama defended the administration’s decision in the wake of furious criticism and cries of betrayal from environmental groups, saying: “I believe that we are going to have to transition off of fossil fuels as a planet in order to prevent climate change … I think it is important to also recognize that this is going to be a transition process. In the meantime, we are going to continue to use fossil fuels, and when it can be done safely, and appropriately, U.S. production of oil and natural gas is important.”

Shell’s safety record in the Arctic is not exactly stellar. It ceased Arctic exploration more than two years ago after various problems, including an oil rig fire and safety failures. The company has spent about $6 billion for exploration in the Arctic, a region that’s estimated to have about 20 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas. Given all that, Shell is not likely to give up on its oily Arctic dreams.

Perhaps Bill McKibben, who teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, summed up the situation best in a scathing New York Times op-ed piece, entitled “Obama’s Catastrophic Climate-Change Denial.”

The decision to give Shell Oil the go-ahead to drill in the Arctic “shows why we may never win the fight against climate change,” he wrote. “Even in this most extreme circumstance, no one seems able to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry. No one ever says no.”

And that’s just the first paragraph.

Shell plans to drill in a place where there is “no hope” of cleaning up the inevitable oil spills, he continued. But what’s worse is the “irresponsibility of Shell, now abetted by the White House. A quarter century ago, scientists warned that if we kept burning fossil fuel at current rates we’d melt the Arctic. The fossil fuel industry (and most everyone else in power) ignored those warnings, and what do you know: The Arctic is melting, to the extent that people now are planning to race yachts through the Northwest Passage, which until very recently required an icebreaker to navigate.”

Despite the evidence, Shell applied to be “first in line to drill for yet more oil in the Chukchi Sea, between Alaska and Siberia. Wash, rinse, repeat. Talk about salting wounds and adding insult to injury: It’s as if the tobacco companies were applying for permission to put cigarette machines in cancer wards.”

And Obama is letting Arctic drilling happen! As McKibben concludes: “This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground.”

Image: 85245961 by Backbone Campaign via Flickr CC

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on Unreasonable.is. 

By Rebecca Calder

“The poor” are an artificial construct.

Impossible! I hear you say. I know poor people! We employ poor people in our value chains! Poor people buy our products! Not only that, but we have social impact investors who give us money because of our great track record in reaching and impacting the lives of the poor! And maybe, just maybe, some of you have the data to “prove” it.

But before we get too excited, hear me out. By saying that “the poor” is an artificial construct does not mean that people don’t experience poverty, or that poor people don’t exist. The idea that “the poor” are an artificial construct is not new. In fact, my friend Charles Knox-Vydmanov highlights this in his paper, Why ‘The Poor’ Don’t Exist (And What This Means For Social Protection Policy). This idea stuck with me, so I’ll explain why I think it has validity, then talk about what this means for reaching poor adolescent girls as a distinct group.

In order to understand what is meant by the poor being an artificial construct, I’ll talk about three things: poverty dynamics, problems with poverty measurement and multi-dimensional poverty. Think of this as a sort of “Poverty 101” class, which you can use to think about your own business models, how you think about and measure social impact, and how you communicate with funders.

Poverty dynamics: First, what do we know about identifying the poor? Well, we know that when it comes to identifying or targeting, the poor are a moving target. This is because of something called volatility, or poverty churning. While those in deep poverty often stay there for many years, or even generations, those closer to the poverty line often dip in and out of poverty depending on a range of shocks and stresses experienced by households. In Indonesia, while the poverty rate is estimated to be 13.3 percent, the World Bank suggests that at least 43 percent of the population falls under the poverty line at least once between 2008 and 2010.

Indeed, World Bank research from both Pakistan and Indonesia suggests that households at 1.5 times the Poverty Line should be regarded as being at risk of spending some time in poverty over a three to five year period. This recognizes the fact that poverty is dynamic: people move into and out of poverty, and poverty is experienced frequently by those we call the poor, the vulnerable, the near poor, and a plethora of other terms!

Problems with poverty measurement: So, how do we identify the poor? The poor, the near poor and the non-poor don’t look all that different from one another—the differences in incomes between these groups are pretty infinitesimal. This is called a “flat distribution curve” in poverty analysis speak, and it is really common. The flat curve is illustrated in the below figure.

So, in Bangladesh, for example, while 32 percent of the population fall below the official poverty line, 80 percent of the population falls below two times the poverty line. And, there is very little difference between those 32 percent at the bottom, and those 48 percent just above them. You, and I, would not be able to see the difference at all if we visited these households, except perhaps at the extreme left of the distribution, where you have a relatively small group called the extreme poor, and at the far right, where you have the rich).

You might be thinking, “Well, you and I might not be able to tell the difference between a person who earns $1.98 per day, so officially below the $2-a-day poverty line, and a person who earns $2.05 a day, but surely with the right measurement tools — more sophisticated and objective than our own assessments — one can tell this?” Well, sorry to disappoint, but no.

Even the most sophisticated poverty measurement approaches employed by poverty-analysis gurus in the World Bank cannot tell us this. The most sophisticated approach that the WB has for identifying the poor is called the proxy means test (like means tests in formal economies, but instead of measuring income — difficult if not impossible in largely informal economies—it uses proxies for wealth such as housing materials, education of household head, assets, etc.). It has been shown that the proxy means test has huge errors associated with it — identifying those who are not poor as poor (an inclusion error), and those who are poor as not poor (an exclusion error). And by “huge errors,” I mean that if you were trying to identify the ten percent of the population who are the poorest, the errors would be in the order of 70 percent. A failure by any measure. This is illustrated in the below scatter graph.

In this scatter graph, everyone below the horizontal red line is assessed as being poor. Everyone to left of vertical red line is below the poverty line. So, everyone to the right of the vertical line and below the horizontal line has been wrongly identified as poor. Everyone above the horizontal line has been identified as non-poor; this is correct for those to the right of the vertical line, but not for those to the left, who are indeed poor. Accurate identification of the poor would see all of the dots tightly clustered in the bottom left box (the poor who are rightly included) and the top right box (the non-poor who are rightly excluded). But you can see the magnitude of the errors by looking at the top left box, and the bottom right box.

And don’t forget, as I discussed above, this is measuring poverty at one moment in time and doesn’t take into account the “churning” that is constantly going on around the poverty line. Think about the above scatter graph, but with all the dots moving!

Multi-dimensional poverty: Finally, when we look at poverty multi-dimensionally (by which I mean looking at aspects of poverty not captured by income measures, such as health and education outcomes, or access to clean water or housing quality), we see that there is no one group we can refer to as “the poor.” A group of “poor” identified using one approach, are often distinct from another group of “poor” identified using another approach. In other words, those who experience income poverty don’t necessarily experience poverty in other aspects of their lives.

The below figure shows that, while deprivations in different areas—such as housing and water and sanitation—can be experienced by the same group of “poor” (especially by the extreme poor), this is not always, or even usually, the case. Some “poor” don’t experience these deprivations, and some “non-poor” do. The below graphic taken from data in Indonesia shows how, for example, income poverty and deprivations in housing and in water and sanitation do not correlate perfectly.

What does this mean for girl poverty and for working with “poor girls”?

What are the implications for the slipperiness of poverty as a concept and the inability to accurately identify the poor on how we understand girl poverty and work with “poor girls”?

First, as with the rest of “the poor” apart from the extremes, it is impossible to know which girls are living in poverty and which are not. Why is this? In summary:

• A girl living on $1.99 a day and one living on $2.01 a day might look exactly the same.


• A girl living on $1.75 a day might actually have higher well-being than a girl living on $2.25 a day.


• A girl who has $2.25 one day might have $1.25 the next.


• A girl in a better off household might have fewer own economic resources, and less access to household resources than a girl in a very poor household.


• Income poverty does not always correlate with other aspects of poverty—such as deprivations in education, health, and housing), so it is difficult to say unequivocally which girls are poor and which are not, as different groups of girls will be poor using different dimensions.

So, should we throw up our hands in despair, lose sleep, or worse, walk away? Absolutely not. And there are two main reasons we should not be overly concerned.

Firstly, the base of the pyramid in the most developing countries is so wide that reaching ANY girls outside of the most advantaged (the girls in that far right hand side of the distribution) will mean you are reaching girls on less than $4/day, and probably some on less than $2 a day. If we look at the graphics below, we see that 63 percent, 67 percent and 82 percent of households in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda are living on less than $2 a day. If you include households not officially “poor” but vulnerable to falling into poverty, say on $3 or $4 a day, practically the whole pyramid would be a base.

So, though we might not be talking about the very poorest and most vulnerable girls who are “last mile” (or the far left side of the distribution), we are talking about girls who are vulnerable, and who experience poverty.

Secondly, poverty is experienced multi-dimensionally, and is more than just a lack of access to financial resources. And this is as true for adolescent girls as for anyone else. When girls talk about their experiences of “poverty” or “vulnerability,” they do talk about inability to buy basic necessities such as food, school supplies, and sanitary pads, and inability to pay school fees and pay transport costs. But they also talk about safety concerns, about feeling isolated and not having friends or anyone to talk to, about being tired because they have so much household work to do, about feeling worthless and hopeless, about having no control over what happens to them and not being able to achieve their dreams. These much more multi-dimensional notions of poverty are not anything that we can measure monetarily, but they are just as meaningful, if not more so, to girls, and can be just as powerful areas of impact.

In closing, I want to restate that poverty is real and so are poor people, but also emphasize that “the poor” are not a static, identifiable group. Poverty is dynamic, and people experience different types of vulnerability and deprivation at different times. Measuring poverty is a difficult endeavor, and the outcomes inevitably inaccurate, so don’t to get too caught up in trying to accurately identify whether it is “the poor” or “poor girls” – defined by income or consumption measures – who are benefitting from your products and services. Impact on aspects of well-being beyond income and consumption are often much more meaningful and easier changes to measure. For example, measuring change for girls who are “off track” and therefore most as risk, such as girls out of school before or at the age of 15. We know that these girls are at the greatest risk of the worst possible outcomes, including early marriage, early pregnancy, HIV, and trafficking.

I intend to explore this and other girl impact metric issues in the next post, but please give me your questions and ideas below! In particular, what would you like me to talk about in relation to gender and poverty – and in particular adolescent girls – in future blogs?

Image credit: Flickr/Rod Waddington

Charts courtesy of Development Pathways

Rebecca is the technical director at Spring Accelerator—a business accelerator supporting products and services that could change the lives of adolescent girls. She has more than 20 years of experience as a gender and social development specialist and has produced a significant body of research that has informed policy for national governments and multilateral sponsors. She is also a Girl Metrics specialist, working with M&C Saatchi on the Girl Effect Accelerator.

A recently published Boston University Study shows that better public transit systems and more bicycle lanes in the urban cores of dense cities are no guarantee for lower carbon emissions. Due to population growth in suburbs, driving to work from the suburbs and back remains a preferred way of transportation.

The study, however, is the first to map CO2 emissions over a time-frame of more than 30 years, between 1980 and 2012. The decrease or increase of emissions depend on a variety of mechanisms. As such, insightful conclusions can be drawn to either implement new strategies, conduct and map more detailed research, or continue development of possible solutions.

We asked Anne M Krieg, AICP and director of planning, economy and community development in Bridgton, Cumberland County (Maine), for some comments on the issues presented in that study.

She and her husband Rob moved their family to Maine in 2002. They lived in Boston, Massachusetts, for many years, but wanted their children to grow up in a different and more healthy environment. Krieg applied for a job in the town of Bar Harbor, where she held the position of planning and developing director for nine years before moving on to a new challenge in Bridgton.

"Now what we see is people migrating back to the city to live and work, but they still drive; they don't use public transportation. I think we have a long way to go to convince people to use mass transit to get to work or to go shopping even. People drive into Boston, for example, to go shopping. They don't get on a train," Krieg explained. "So, it's not just commuters who drive in and out; it's people in general who still use their cars for errands and anything else they do in their daily lives to take them from one place to another."

Shopping as an increased leisure activity is one of the reasons why people still use their own cars. It's far less accommodating to get on a train with packages and bags. If people go out to buy small furniture, they can easily take it home in the trunk of their cars; they won't for a minute consider using public transportation.

The study shows that metropoles like New York, already densely populated 30 years ago, developed a quicker drop in CO2 emissions compared to cities that grew dense in recent years. Why? Because the public transport infrastructure in New York was there before the urban core grew in population and activity. The urban core was designed to suit convenient and walkable mobility rather than to embrace commuting via cars alone.

Krieg reflected on the fact that life in New York City is also expensive. It was rated the sixth most expensive city in the world on a website for expats. "If we take in account the market mechanism, this affects a lot of things. When more people migrate to the city, housing costs rise, prices go up. I've seen prices of US$1,800 rent in New York, for a space no bigger than a closet.

"Folks with middle and lower income can't afford to live in the city center, so they're being pushed out and forced to live not just in the suburbs, but in what we call an exurb: a suburb that's more than 30 miles away from work or from where it takes more than an hour to commute, even longer with mass transit. So, people naturally prefer to drive into work. Offices and jobs are still in the city, which is great for networking and business, but it's too expensive to be living in town."

How can urban planners influence behavior or positive change when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions?
"It is very complicated, because for the last decade, as planners, we were trying to push jobs back to the urban core and out of the suburban wings. Everybody still has to commute to the city to get to their job. We're kind of in a catch 22, because if we have jobs being created in the suburbs so folks have a shorter commute, we would be creating a sprawl situation as opposed to a dense, urban compact area.

"The answer is having better mass transit and having it made a priority.

"Also, there shouldn't be just transits in and out of the city, but around it, connecting suburbs and other areas. In the United States, mass transit is not a priority and is highly debated. People see it as wasteful spending, so we're constantly debating its value. In Europe, it's just part of your day. Over here, we have a different psyche, there's a big cultural difference. I noticed it when my family and I [visited] Spain last year. Everybody just gets up and walks out to wherever they have to go, or they take the train. There are cars, obviously, but traffic is not as congested as it is here in the States. Not even in Barcelona."

Incentives to why offices and businesses are built and stay in urban cores rather than in suburban areas may also differ. "If you have a law firm, you'd naturally want to be near the courthouse. which is usually in the city itself," said Krieg, "and obviously for a business, they've invested in their office buildings. They won't just pack it all up and go. A lot of times, those decisions are made by the CEO or president of a company for random reasons, or simply because they like to be in the city.

"In [Camden, Maine], we had a huge credit company that was there for a long time. It had nothing to do with economic incentive, but because they wanted to live there. Some of the suburban locations, like in the Boston area we talked about earlier, were chosen by the presidents of the companies. They didn't want to commute into Boston; they wanted to be closer to home. And land prices in the suburbs were a lot lower in the '60s and '70s, so they located there for that reason."

It would be a hard sell to try and get companies to move from the city to the suburbs in order to lower carbon dioxide emissions and cut on commuting. They would need other, more convincing reasons. Whereas the future is concerned, Krieg thinks it will be interesting to see how the market will deal with it.

"My prediction is: It will be somewhat of a boomerang effect. Prices will go higher in metropolitan cities causing for people and companies to relocate to second cities. Instead of Phoenix, it will be Santa Fé. Or instead of New York, not Philadelphia, but Pittsburgh. It still very much offers the urban life people want, but not as expensive. And we have seen a huge millennial push to those cities.

"Buffalo, New York is an example. It doesn't have a lot to offer, but you can get a beautiful period home from the twenties for a reasonable sum of money. I think that generation will probably be the ones to take a look at those second cities and create new terms and conditions."

Image credits: 1) Flickr - Boston Public Library 2) Brad Clinesmith 3) Anne Krieg and 4) Corey Templeton.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a student blogging series on The Business Of Sports & Sustainability. Students attend the Presidio Graduate School which offers the only MBA-level sustainability program focused exclusively on the sports industry. You can follow the series here.

By Vincent Ferro

Big-name sports teams in baseball, basketball, football and hockey are warming up to the idea of installing LED (light-emitting diode) technology in their stadiums to improve performance and save on electricity costs.

This winter, the Seattle Mariners became the first Major League Baseball team to illuminate its field of play with LED technology, replacing existing metal halide lamps at Safeco field with LED lamp fixtures that last 30 times longer and reduce lighting costs by at least 60 percent. These more efficient LED lights reduce power usage by 784,000 kilowatt-hours each year, saving more than $50,000 in energy costs. In addition, the reduction in energy use equates to greenhouse gas savings that will help advance the team’s environmental commitments.

Joe Garagiola, Jr., senior vice president of standards and on-field operations for Major League Baseball, gave his stamp of approval to the technology, saying: "Thus far, our experience has indicated that the Mariners’ new LED technology at Safeco Field will be better for our players, fans in the ballpark and viewers watching at home. We applaud the Mariners for an innovative step that promises to improve efficiency and the fan experience in numerous ways, all while serving as a welcome addition to our overall greening efforts."

Less than a year ago, sports teams were hesitant to adopt LED lighting for fear of negative reception to how colors would display on broadcast television and because of the larger upfront capital cost. However, more team managers and broadcasters have become convinced that LED tech provides superior lighting performance for players and spectators through more uniform field lighting, as well as reduced glare and shadows in-person and on television. Players prefer LED light, too, as it more closely imitates sunlight. On the color rendering index (CRI), sunlight scores 100; LED scores 81; and traditional metal halide scores 63. The upfront capital cost premium of LEDs can also be regularly offset by annual maintenance cost reductions, which can save up to $100,000 or more in large stadiums.

Safeco field is the latest sports facility to adopt LED tech, but it isn't the first. In fact, last year Super Bowl XLIX, hosted at the University of Phoenix Stadium, was illuminated by LED technology, a first for the Big Game. Other notable LED adopters in sports include:

Hockey

• PNC Arena in Raleigh, North Carolina: Carolina Hurricanes


• The Bell Centre in Montreal: Montreal Canadiens


• Staples Center in Los Angeles: Los Angeles Kings

Football

• NRG Stadium in Houston: Houston Texans


• University of Phoenix Stadium: Arizona Cardinals (and the 2015 Super Bowl)


• Ohio Stadium: Ohio State University Buckeyes

Soccer

• Stamford Bridge in London: Chelsea Football Club


• St. Mary’s Stadium in Southampton, England: Southampton Football Club

Basketball

• Staples Center: Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Sparks

Plenty of opportunity still exists for the thousands of sports facilities in the U.S. that have yet to upgrade to LEDs. Expect more stadiums and venues to switch to LED lights as the good news spreads.

Check out these must-reads for more information on the success of the LED lighting technology in sports.

Natural Resources Defense Council’s Sports Greening Advisor- Energy Efficiency

Safeco Field First MLB Park to Illuminate Field with LED Light

Department of Energy Solid State Lighting Program- Modest Investments, Extraordinary Impacts Report

Image credit: Flickr/David Sizer

Vincent is a resource conservation specialist in waste and energy. He previously worked as a recycling coordinator in Contra Costa County, CA and is a former Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps Fellow. Vincent is a MBA Candidate in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco.

By Giles Hutchins

We are witnessing an evolutionary step change in how we operate and organize: a shift from linear, mechanistic, control-based modes of operating toward living, emergent, self-organizing, life-affirming organizations. This shift is the greatest challenge facing leaders, managers and change agents today, according to Peter Senge; a shift in human consciousness, according to Ken Wilber.

A shift in consciousness can sound grandiose, but it is simply a shift in our awareness, in how we perceive life. The old lens of separation, scarcity and selfishness are giving way to the deeper eyes of ecological-awareness. Here, we perceive and embody the sacred reciprocity, synchronistic rhythms and soulful resonances life affords us. This challenges and transforms how we relate with our own sense of self, our relations with others and the wider world. It is a metamorphosis in our midst supported by ground-breaking discoveries in quantum physics, neurology, facilitation ecology and many other disciplines, while tapping into the depths of ancient wisdom traditions and shamanic cultures the world over. This ecological consciousness is the premeditation of regenerative, flourishing, soulful business; our future depends on it.

Leaders across the board are coming to terms with this seismic shift in strategic and operational intent.  Proactive business strategies based on life-affirming values are beginning to set a trend. Net-positive business strategies are a step beyond ‘doing less bad’ ushering in a new business sense quite beyond business-as-usual.

Kingfisher’s well publicized Net Positive strategy is just one of several emerging business strategies that drives decisions based on what is of lasting value to an inclusive stakeholder ecosystem. Positive and negative impacts of direct and indirect activities are quantized and qualified in a way that shapes the future direct of travel for the organization by informing stakeholders on where to improve towards a goal of being net-positive.

And there are the well-versed examples of global brands:

• Unilever is considering becoming a B-Corp in a move away from singular shareholder value towards wider stakeholder value and responsible business


• Natura is now a signed up B-Corp


• Novo Nordisk is shifting its sense of purpose to life-affirming net positive business


• Interface is going beyond ‘mission zero’ toward restorative initiatives such as the Networks project in the Philippines, which restores marine ecosystems by collecting discarded fishing nets and turning them into recycled carpets, and in the process local communities gain resilience. Also noteworthy is its biophilic workplace initiative helping develop soulful workspaces that attune with nature’s ways).


• Patagonia has long been pushing the envelope on what transforming towards sustainable and responsible business means in practice


• Weleda has a biodynamic anthroposophic sense of purpose permeating every corner of its global operations.

And we all know that there are a plethora of rich and inspiring cases of pioneering organizations in the social enterprise and nonprofit sectors. For instance, there are now over 1,250 B-Corp organizations in over 40 countries. This has rapidly risen over just the last few years and is indicative of an evolutionary shift in the way we create and deliver value.

This shift in business is what I refer to as a shift from ‘firms of the past’ to firms of the future – businesses inspired by nature, ones more akin to living ecosystems than machines, and resonating with a deeper ecological awareness birthing in us. And this is not simply a metaphoric shift from ‘machine’ to ‘living’, but a metamorphic shift at personal, organizational and societal levels, where organisms, organizations and societies are no longer perceived through the lens of separation and competition but understood as permeating within an emergent, fluid and connective stakeholder ecosystem immersed within a psychical and physical inter-relational matrix of Nature.

Firms of the future are self-managing and organic in nature, and are decentralized, distributed, diverse, locally attuned, purpose-drive, soulful, life-supporting organizations. They are flourishing enterprises in that they provide space for the stakeholders to realise their full potential in a thriving work environment. People manifest their sense of purpose through the organisation’s delivery capability and network of relations. Work is an enjoyable essentiality of realizing one’s journey of discovery. Locally attuned, self-organizing teams of empowered, diverse stakeholders form a blend of full-time and part-time employees, self-employed associates, contractors, suppliers, customers, partners and interested parties of volunteers involved in the project team’s scope. The organization’s boundaries are semi-permeable with a hive of open innovation, creative commons, open source, peer-to-peer working as well as synergistic partner relations both globally and locally with community groups, activists, specialists and charities.

Sounds a nightmare to manage and difficult to grasp for the mechanistic mind-set. But for the ecological mind-set of emergence, prototyping, feeling with our instinctual and intuitive awareness and using our shared sense of purpose to guide us, the work environment becomes uncluttered, open, expansive, creative, respectful and energizing. The organization becomes a living community to nurture and develop, with everyone empowered, locally attuned and soulfully engaged.  The importance here is ensuring inevitable tensions can be transcended into productive innovations or released through empathy. Time-honored practices such as deep listening, circles of trust,  and Way of Council can be applied to businesses with great effect, for instance, Thornton’s Bugden’s Heart-in-Business program.

This shift is not a faraway possibility but an imminent reality. There are already a growing number of organizations transforming towards a more participatory, self-organizing, emergent way of doing, as exemplified by the increasing uptake of approaches such as Holacracy and Sociocracy.

Not only are soulful organizations more enjoyable communities to work in, but there is emerging evidence that they are more successful, profitable and resilient than the firms of old. For instance, a study done by the LAMP Index a few years back showed that companies that mimic living systems outperform their peers on many levels. This study has recently been updated with more recent data showing impressive results for living organizations consistently outperforming mechanistic ones. Likewise, ex-Mckinsey consultant Frederic Laloux , in Reinventing Organizations, evidences how living, self-organizing, soulful, purpose-driven organizations time and again outperform their traditional counterparts due to the intrinsic motivations these organizations foster. Making money is not the key motivator here yet profit does flow for either reinvestment or redistribution.

New ways of doing without new ways of being underpinning them will not last long. Hence, how we embody this transformation through our new ways of being is vital for our personal and organizational success in the transformative years ahead.

Old ways of being                                                         New ways of being

Ego                                                                                                           Soul

Power over                                                                                     Power with

Competition                                                                                Collaboration

Control                                                                                         Co-creativity

Separation                                                                                 Synchronicity

Scarcity mentality                                                           Abundance mentality

Patriarchy                                                                                         Empathy

Fear                                                                                                        Love

It is one thing to intellectually understand this shift and quite another to actually embody it. Hence why Ashridge Business School is hosting a workshop on Steps Towards a Deeper Ecology of Business to explore and embody just this on July 1. For more information on this unique workshop, please email Victoria.brown@ashridge.org.uk 

Image credit: Flickr/Hartwig HKD

Giles Hutchins is author of "The Illusion of Separation" and "The Nature of Business" and blogs at thenatureofbusiness.org.

The World Environment Center (WEC) has awarded its 31st Annual Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development to household cleaning giant SC Johnson.

The company was recognized for its company-wide focus on sustainability and transparency, capped off by its rigorous Greenlist process to improve product ingredients. 

The SC Johnson Greenlist ingredient management process focuses on continuously improving ingredients and packaging in the company’s products. The company’s goal is to increase, year-on-year, the percentage of ingredients that has a lower impact on the environment and human health.

In conjunction with its Greenlist process, SC Johnson recently published its restricted use materials list, which is used by product formulators. It has also announced plans to expand its industry-leading ingredient disclosure program by providing product-specific fragrance ingredients and plans to launch the program in Europe later this year.

WEC president & ceo Terry F. Yosie commented: “SC Johnson has achieved a rare feat in that this is the second time it has earned our award, the first having occurred in 1994. These accolades are a testament to the continuity of the company’s leadership over time, and we wish them continued success.”

 

Picture: SC Johnson's headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin.