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In This Issue
Editor's Note
Transportation, Women’s Health, and the Future of Well-Being
Reducing the impacts of global goods transportation. Educating women in developing countries on health issues. Defining the role of business in supporting people’s well-being. Today, we highlight a diverse array of issues in the realm of sustainable business.
First, BSR Senior Vice President Eric Olson examines the complexities of improving environmental performance in transportation and logistics—a system that has few established standards, and in which shipments commonly change hands several times, on vessels and in vehicles containing products owned by many other players. He shares how BSR’s Clean Cargo Working Group is making progress and describes what’s needed to shrink the transportation footprint even more.
Next, we hear from Linda Hwang, who attended a recent conference by Institute for the Future on how cities can serve as living laboratories where we can examine the “resource constraints and global imbalances threatening the well-being of people and the planet.”
And finally, Elissa Goldenberg reports from Jakarta on the launch of a new BSR tool that will help companies in our HERproject network more effectively educate women in developing countries on important health issues.
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In Depth
Breaking Through Complexity to Take Action on Global Goods Transportation
By Eric Olson, Senior Vice President, Advisory Services, BSR
Addressing supply chain sustainability is no small feat, and perhaps the most complicated aspect is transportation and logistics. After eight years, BSR’s Clean Cargo Working Group is poised to create a powerful ripple effect by improving the environmental performance of the shipping industry.
Read more →
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Spotlight
The Future of Well-Being: Cities as Living Laboratories
By
“Urban wilderness is increasingly at the forefront of change.” These opening remarks at the Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) annual Health Horizons conference last week captured the notion that cities are living laboratories where ideas, imagination, and people gather to find solutions to resource constraints and global imbalances threatening the well-being of people and the planet.
IFTF presented its “Map of the Decade: Ecosystems of Well-Being,” a tool that describes the forces shaping the future of well-being not as individual experiences, but as “interconnected ecosystems.” These forces, which IFTF believes will shape health and health care in the next decade, are:
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Optimizing: maximizing quality, not just length, of life
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Participatory: co-creating conditions that produce well-being
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Anticipatory: previewing future states to inform well-being
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Adaptive: generating flexible responses that reshape well-being
Business leaders can engage with this idea by imagining how these issues will unfold where their organization operates, and identifying how their industries and markets can create new practices for well-being.
Toolbox
New BSR Tool Educates Women in Developing Countries on Health Issues
By Elissa Goldenberg, Associate, Advisory Services, BSR
BSR’s new HERproject Toolbuilder allows public health educators to create accurate and culturally relevant tools to educate women working in factories and farms in developing countries about health issues. BSR’s HERproject has demonstrated that investments in women’s health deliver business benefits such as reduced absenteeism and turnover and increased productivity.
The Toolbuilder is available for members of the public to try; however, only HERproject partners can export and use the tools they create. Eventually, BSR hopes to make the Toolbuilder available to companies globally to provide health trainings for their female workers.
The HERproject Toolbuilder:
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Contains a collection of approximately 200 hand-drawn illustrations on topics such as general, reproductive, maternal, and mental health; nutrition; family planning; and harassment.
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Provides two tool formats: posters or flip charts.
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Allows users to save and share files within the HERproject partner network.
For more information, contact HERproject Manager Racheal Yeager.
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