BSR Blog

Can We Fast Forward the Sustainability Story?

2012-05-21

Next month, the global business and sustainability world will focus attention on Rio+20. At the same time, BSR is ramping up for our own “Plus 20” event—our 20^th BSR conference, from October 23-26 in New York.

BSR was founded the same year as the original Earth Summit. And what a difference two decades makes.

The World Wide Web was introduced in 1992, and today nearly 2.5 billion people have web access. Since 1992, China’s GDP per capita has grown 1,500 percent. The number of NGOs around the world has increased by an even greater rate. Hundreds of millions of people have moved out of poverty, with the Human Development Index improving by 19 percent and global life expectancy by six years. In 1992, very few companies had acknowledged the importance of sustainability, and those that did had only a cursory understanding of the topic.

But at the same time, the evidence today suggests that change is much too slow. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon have risen since 1992, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Eighty percent of global energy demand is met by petroleum, natural gas, or coal—up from 1992—with half of the increased energy demand over the past decade coming from coal. And despite significant progress, many of the Millennium Development Goals still remain far out of reach.

We have this reality in mind as we head into our 20^th BSR Conference. While we share a great sense of pride with many others in helping place sustainability squarely on the world’s agenda, we look ahead with an even greater sense of urgency. As our Conference theme indicates, it’s time to fast forward solutions for a sustainable future.

This year’s Conference will provide a compelling platform to define what comes next. Over the next 20 years, we’ll experience an ongoing technology revolution that will redefine the relationship between companies, individuals, and communities. The companies that develop innovative approaches to help an increasingly urban, connected, and global population thrive will win in the marketplace. To do that, every business will need to find creative new ways to make wiser use of natural resources. And there will be countless changes—as the internet introduced in 1992—that we can’t begin to understand today.

None of this will happen unless we make sustainability a core part of the story. Let’s start writing the history of the next twenty years. There’s no better place to do that than at the BSR Conference 2012 in New York. Hope to see you there.

Partners in Sustainable Procurement: Hilton Worldwide and BSR

2012-05-15

As hospitality procurement professionals, our primary function is to purchase and deliver all the goods and services a property will need to operate on a day-to-day basis, subject to the performance standards established by our corporate business partners. Historically, we have measured the efficacy of this process against a standard set of key performance indicators (KPIs), such as on-time and in-full delivery, product quality performance, and product cost.

For some time, we’ve been working to understand the sustainability impact of the goods and services Hilton Worldwide purchases on a yearly basis. Through our proprietary system called LightStay, we aggregated a considerable volume of Hilton Worldwide’s purchasing data for analysis and comparison in the hopes of integrating this information as part of our overall measured performance.

While we’ve made great progress, we were still left with the difficulty of factoring in this new sustainability data to enhance the procurement process and create an additional KPI measure. It seemed the more information we had, the more complex questions we needed to answer.

Leveraging BSR’s research, we partnered to create the Center for Sustainable Procurement, which we hope will answer the many questions this new level of data has created, as well as to engage others in dialog to develop further insights and elevate the conversation. By collaborating with other companies working in this space, procurement professionals will be able to benefit from individual lessons and make progress faster.

Sustainability is a journey; the more we learn, the more there is to learn. We remain hopeful that this initiative will catalyze our collective understanding, filter out the hype, and allow us to integrate data-driven product information to benefit the procurement process and help us live up to our global responsibilities as stewards of our planet’s limited natural resources.

Future Scenarios in Ecosystem Services

2012-05-02

Last week, I officially became an urban beekeeper. Hovering over my hive, I think a lot about pollination and how many more melons and nectarines I might get this year because of my bees. Pollination, fertile topsoil, a predictable climate—free services provided by the natural infrastructure all around us—are collectively known as “ecosystem services.”

Today, I’m not the only one tracking this concept. Believe it or not, business cares about bees, too.

BSR’s newest report chronicles the exploration of ecosystem services within government, business, and financial services, and takes a closer look at how businesses are engaging with the topic.

Rather than go into the details of the report, I thought it would be more interesting to look forward in time to think about what could happen if ecosystem services becomes ingrained into the way we think about the environment.

The financial services community gets serious about ecosystem services. In the short term, investors and other financial services firms integrate a few select ecosystem services indicators into due diligence models. In the middle and long term, the systemic use of ecosystem services information becomes part of mainstream investment processes, as reliable data are more available through online sources and models. Ecosystem services parameters are built into ESG data requirements, and managing ecosystem services risk becomes part of an integrated portfolio construction and management process.

Ecosystem goods and services “end states” go viral. Public agencies agree on the methodology for determining ideal ecosystem goods and services flows, and recast decision-making to optimize these flows for the benefit of the greater good. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Final Ecosystem Goods and Services defines the state to which lands have to be returned or maintained, which drives decisions on public lands. This research matures over time and forms the foundation for a robust analytical framework that is applied by global government agencies responsible for managing public lands.

Occupy Wall Street meets Earth First! Grassroots organizations focused on economic inequality, climate change, and environmental destruction coordinate to aggressively “name and shame” the businesses responsible for unintended, systems-level impacts. Adopting a systems-thinking lens that is animated by ecosystem services parameters, civil society organizations galvanize crowds around business decisions that affect the quality of clean air, water, productive soils, and the generation of food and fiber, holding companies accountable for their actions with real data and convincing computer maps that show impacts in bright red.

If any one of these scenarios plays out, the future looks fruitful for my bees.

Where BSR Will Be in May

2012-05-01

Here's a roundup of where BSR staff will be and the events we're hosting this May. We hope to see some of you there to join in on the conversation.

Where we'll be:

Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Peder Michael Pruzan-Jorgensen and Advisory Services Manager Cody Sisco will speak at the Pre-Fashion Summit and Copenhagen Fashion Summit on May 2 and 3 in Copenhagen.
Advisory Services Manager Adam Lane will speak at a roundtable for Social Innovation Week, which takes place from May 4-6 in Beijing.
Asia Managing Director Jeremy Prepscius, CiYuan Manager Brooke Avory, and Project Coordinator Cecilia Chu will run an exhibition booth at the Caring Company NGO Partnership Day on May 3 in Hong Kong.
President and CEO Aron Cramer will attend a meeting of the Vale-Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment on May 9 in New York City and will speak at a Novozymes meeting on May 10 in Copenhagen.
Advisory Services Manager Angie Farrag will attend the E.U. Hitachi Science and Technology Forum on May 10 in London.
Health Care Director Mark Little will attend the GBC Health Conference from May 14-15 in New York City.
Advisory Services Managing Director Laura Gitman will speak at the Gibbs & Soell Sense and Sustainability Breakfast Conference on May 22 in New York City.
Advisory Services Manager Julia Nelson will attend the IFC Sustainability Exchange from May 22-24 in Washington, D.C.
Advisory Services Manager Alison Colwell will present on the "Human Rights Impact Assessments" panel at the IAIA Annual Conference on May 30 in Porto, Portugal.

What BSR is hosting:

BSR's CiYuan initiative will host two roundtable discussions on equal employment on May 15 in Beijing.

What Actions are Needed to Achieve Sustainable Fashion Consumption?

2012-04-26

Over the past several months, BSR and the Danish Fashion Institute have been working toward a “NICE Consumer” framework to drive collaboration on sustainable fashion consumption. To gather ideas, we’ve conducted research, held three webinars, and organized three in-person workshops in Stockholm, London, and Copenhagen.

We have used this input to draft the work-in-progress “Framework for Achieving Sustainable Fashion Consumption.” On May 2 and 3, more than 100 and 1,000 representatives, respectively, from industry, government, and civil society, will gather at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit and pre-summit workshop to discuss and agree on actions to breathe life into the framework.

In advance of that meeting, we want your feedback on the following areas of our framework:

Will the changes in consumer behavior we envision lead to sustainable consumption? Are they sufficient?
What specific actions would you like to see industry, government, or civil society take?
What targets or measurable goals should be used to track progress?
How do you want to be involved going forward?

The framework document is available here.

Please send your input by email to niceconsumer@bsr.org. We will consider your input during the discussion and formulation of the recommendations that will result from the summit.