January 27th, 2012 by Mark Line
The word on the street was that the auto industry was dead on its feet not so long ago, but I am not so sure that this is true. My brother has worked with the big automakers most of his career – he returned from Detroit last week saying that the old buzz is back. In the short term at least, the health of the auto industry has always been linked to the health of the economy and this should be good news. But increasing car sales is not always received as positive by the sustainability community.
If you stand back from Big Auto’s marketing messages over recent years, it’s clear how the world has changed. Before the financial crisis, it was business as usual and above-the-line advertising was focused on pushing high performance vehicles and heavy SUVs. Before 2009, respecting the environment remained the preserve of the tree huggers in San Francisco, flaunting their Toyota Prius in a ‘cloud of smug’ (for those of you who watched South Park). But those days are over.
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Tags: Assurance, auto, climate change, mark line
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December 16th, 2011 by Dave Knight
We’ve all seen the little messages at the foot of e-mails urging us to ‘save the planet’ by reducing unnecessary printing. The wonders of technology now mean we can send written communications to each other while avoiding the environmental impacts of producing paper and ink and using the energy needed for printing.
Hang on a minute though. Are paper copies necessarily a bad thing? How do we know technology is ‘greener’?
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Tags: climate change, dave knight, digital media, publishing, sustainability
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November 29th, 2011 by Mark Line
Last week was a food sustainability feeding frenzy for me. I participated in three events focusing variously on: food companies and sustainability, the role of marketing, and how to influence consumer behaviour. The first was a breakfast briefing, hosted by our friends at The Futures Company, where I was a panellist. Later that day I attended Unilever’s live webcast update on Sustainable Living hosted by Jonathan Dimbleby. The next day, I spoke at a Footprint Forum event at Innocent’s new HQ in West London, where we looked at sustainability issues and the food service sector. Richard Reed, one of the founders of Innocent, entertained us all with his take on sustainability in his unique business.
All of these events were well organised and the quality of the conversation was unusually high. It’s certainly the case that sustainability and the role of marketing is one of the issues du jour and rightly so. But certain aspects of this debate bemuse me.
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Tags: climate change, food sector, mark line, marketing, sustainability
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November 24th, 2011 by Dave Knight
I was speaking to a friend Tim Harford, ‘The Undercover Economist’ writer, columnist and presenter, the other day. He said most economists had been taken by surprise by the repeating financial crisis. Watching the events of the last six months unfold has been very revealing. It is not just the economists that seem to have been wrongfooted, it is the politicians, policy makers, regulators and supra-national institutions like the EC.
All of them seem to be flailing around desperately looking for ways to prop up the endless growth-based system that everyone takes for granted as being the only way. You can see the discomfort in their faces, it really is desperate. And the striking thing: no real solutions. The only thing on offer seems to be pumping ever more ‘money’, or liquidity, back into the system through the very channels which caused a great deal of the mess in the first place – the banks and financial institutions. This is like catching a band of robbers and then giving them even more bounty and asking them to redistribute it again to their victims!
I don’t want to get started on the banks, nor even the fundamental difficulties with the principle of endless growth based on finite resources. What I do want to offer is not a fully rounded solution, which would take some serious global coordination on a scale which has never been achieved so far, but moreover an option which could be developed into something workable if the political will was there.
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Tags: carbon, climate change, dave knight
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October 21st, 2011 by Todd Cort
Most of us can agree on some common cases of greenwash. For example, the label on an environmentally toxic household product that sports pictures of trees and bunnies. Or the claims of a product’s recyclability when, in reality, there’s no infrastructure to recycle it. But we ran into more philosophically challenging examples as well in the course of the 2011 Tomorrow’s Value Rating (TVR) research.
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Tags: todd cort, tomorrow's value rating
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October 14th, 2011 by Mark Line
Last Saturday, I went to Earthquakes in London, a National Theatre/Headlong production here in Bath, UK. It was an epic play, essentially about the end of the world. The timeline stretched from the swinging sixties to some centuries into the future. The production looked at how we respond to information about the impacts of overpopulation, resource depletion and climate change.
Although its focus was broad – almost cosmic – at its heart was a very personal story about particular people, their relationships and choices. It posed uncomfortable questions about how we face up to corrupting influences, both subtle and obvious, to live out our personal responsibilities. And although all that might sound hard-going, the production was far from ‘worthy’. I think all of us left the theatre, challenged by a rather difficult question: Why can’t we all respond more decisively to difficult messages about our impact on a planet whose resources are dwindling?
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Tags: communication, mark line, strategy, sustainability
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July 11th, 2011 by Todd Cort
The debate over whether increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases were resulting in climate change ended years ago. They are. More recently, the debate over whether humans are the primary cause of climate change also ended. We are.
The debate in the US has recently raged over who has the authority to curtail industrial greenhouse gas emissions – particularly from power generation, the largest source of emissions. Is it the job of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA – the federal regulation agency) or of individual states? Or is it up to companies to voluntarily curtail emissions?
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Tags: carbon, climate change, power generation, todd cort
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June 29th, 2011 by Jason Perks
Assurance is often misunderstood and I’m concerned that a new study of the market for assurance of sustainability and corporate responsibility reports compounds the problem by painting a skewed picture of where the market is going and even what assurance is.
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Tags: aa1000as, Assurance, jason perks
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May 25th, 2011 by Rob Pearson
Reflecting on the Ethical Corporation Responsible Business Awards held in London earlier this month, which Two Tomorrows sponsored. What struck me was the mix of attendees. We had the usual faces from the major corporations, but in equal number were delegates who had come, many for the first time, to learn about the latest thinking on all the topics covered during the two days.
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February 8th, 2011 by Doug Bannerman
I had the honor to be at the New York Stock Exchange this week for the GRI Focal Point USA launch which puts “resources on the ground” for current and future sustainability reporters in the form of sustainability veteran and reporting expert Mike Wallace, GRI Director.
Webcast live, the event was attended by more than 200 representatives of US corporate GRI reporters, Wall Street investment firms, major accounting firms and organizational stakeholders such as Two Tomorrows. While some participants expressed disappointment at not getting to ring the opening bell, for many of us just being in the hallowed “cathedral of capital” was excitement enough.
For the GRI to establish a US presence brings the Amsterdam-based organization full circle. Originally launched as an initiative of Boston-based Ceres in 1999, the GRI was the brainchild of Alan White (present at Monday’s event) and co-founder Robert Massey.
In his opening remarks, GRI Chief Executive Ernst Ligteringen was direct in his rationale for setting up shop stateside: Despite the overall growth in sustainability reporting worldwide and year-over-year uptake of the GRI reporting framework, the US continues to lag Europe when it comes to GRI reporting.
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Tags: aa1000as, doug bannerman, GRI, Reporting, socially responsible investment
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