April 22nd, 2011

Climate Change Letter to WSJ Editor

A guest post from my friend, Jeff Dubin, sent to Wall Street Journal
_________________________________________

Dear Editor:

Like politicians engaging in “gotcha politics,” The Wall Street Journal is once again engaging in “gotcha climate science.”  The WSJ and other climate change skeptics are having a field day with the 2005 United Nations prediction of fifty million climate refugees by 2010 (“Climate Refugees, Not Found” editorial, April 21).  Climate change skeptics point to this report, the UK Climategate scandal, and other missteps by climate scientists as evidence that the so-called “climateers” are being unnecessarily alarmist.

Why can’t the Journal and other skeptics aim higher than just finding chinks in the climate change community’s armor?  The Journal and other skeptics would be far more persuasive if they presented their own body of solid science showing that climate change is not happening.  It’s easy to say “gotcha!” but that’s about all climate change skeptics can do when the facts are overwhelmingly not on their side.

If The Wall Street Journal wants to responsibly propagate a less alarmist view of our climate, it will have to be less disingenuous in the facts it cites.   For instance, the editorial is technically correct when it claims that “global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction [of fifty million climate refugees] was made.”  But to imply that climate change is not happening because 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest years on record while ignoring the overall warming trend over the past several decades is a great example of scoring rhetorical points at the expense of honesty.

Jeff Dubin
Princeton, NJ

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March 10th, 2011

Funny, fun & games

Read an important reminder about the need for comedy and humor in helping forward messages around the serious topic of sustainability — especially when so much doom and gloom has traditionally been associated with it.

There certainly aren’t enough funny or fun campaigns around the topic. However, here’s one funny example of a big sustainability-oriented Audi campaign (a commercial from the Super Bowl before last).

Here’s another campaign from Volkswagen designed for fun.

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January 17th, 2011

5 Predictions for Sustainability & CSR in 2011

As we move forward in 2011, what can those of us working in the field of sustainability and corporate social responsibility expect this year? Some big things happened in 2010 that helped shape the field, both good and bad, as the economy started to catch its footing again. Expect to see even more this year.

For the first time, a variety of factors are actually leading to something of a “race to the top” among organizations of almost all types and sizes in efforts to have positive environmental and social impacts. The business world has undergone a huge evolution in recent years, as has the social sector. Some organizations have started treading where no one ever imagined they would just a few short years ago.

Pollyannaism? Perhaps, but I think infectious optimism will continue to produce effective solutions to our most pressing problems from the amazing leaders in our field. With the assumption that these trends will only continue, here are my top five predictions for sustainability and CSR (terms I use interchangeably) in 2011 and beyond.

1. Increasing momentum for the field of business sustainability.

Economists are predicting that we’ll start to see more traction in the economy. Even as I write this, the Wall Street Journal reports that economists see greater risk from an economy that overheats in 2011 than from growth that’s too slow. I’ve seen sustainability grow through the “great recession,” with the underlying dynamics becoming only stronger. With an economy picking up steam, the sustainability momentum will not only continue, but will also increase.

2. Sustainability through leadership will become more important.

It will no longer be enough to simply respond — stakeholders will become increasingly interested in seeing organizations identify and lead on areas where they are capable of doing so. Moreover, many sustainability leaders, having seen the benefits of their own proactivity, will continue to find more areas to be proactive and take leadership — and will find it less necessary to react to what others around them are doing.

Examples of such leadership are Starbuck’s search for a sustainable solution to disposal cups and its recent Beta Cup campaign, and Timberland’s “Green Index” on its products and packaging and “Eco Index” efforts for industry standards.

3. More accuracy and less misleading fluff in sustainability communications.

This will hold true for both external and internal communications for a variety of reasons:

• The Federal Trade Commission’s newly proposed Green Guides, released in October, will start to shape behavior, as well as affect the tone of new marketing and communications campaigns — and final guides are likely to be released this year.
• Skeptical consumers and NGOs will demand less fluff or will continue to “out” organizations that spread greenwash via social media and other channels, forcing ever greater transparency and dialogue.
• Competitors will increasingly become watchdogs over each other, as P&G did with Seventh Generation last autumn, having recognized the increasing importance of sustainability communications to competition.
• And organizations are continuing to more substantially integrate sustainability at the individual employee and candidate level via effective communications as well as in other important ways.

This trend will be a huge help to those who have taken substantive steps on the sustainability journey — figuring out how to best talk about what they are doing in regards to sustainability has often been as big a challenge as any aspect of actually “walking” it.

4. A greater need to address the end of life cycle for both products and packaging.

Manufacturers and recyclers that can reuse raw materials from old products will be at a distinct advantage over those who don’t and are subject to shortages, rising prices and increasing costs around environmental regulations. Nowhere is this more obvious than in China’s recent tightening of exports of rare earth elements needed for the manufacture of a large variety of products.

Moreover, there can be no real long-term sustainability without the ability to reclaim and reuse the raw materials from the vast majority of products produced today.

5. Companies will increasingly realize the importance of resilience.

Some smart thinkers are beginning to realize that even in a best case scenario, humanity will have to adapt to a world that is warming, an increasing scarcity of water and other important resources, and many other challenges with massive effects both foreseeable and unforeseeable. “How will we best prepare for and adapt to such realties?” therefore becomes the multi-trillion dollar question.

Resilience is an idea that helps answer this question — one increasingly discussed through the great recession and whose time has come. The Center for Resilience at Ohio State University defines resilience for our purposes as “the capacity of a system to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of unforeseen changes, even catastrophic incidents.” Many of the concepts of resilience overlap and are intertwined with sustainability.

Nothing that came out of COP 16 last month changed the need for resilience thinking for climate change purposes, for example, and it will gain as much traction in this context as anywhere.

This post originally appeared in GreenBiz.com.

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March 23rd, 2010

Power to the Stakeholders – Nestle, Greenpeace and Facebook

Social Media Continues to Reshape Stakeholder Relations

By Beth Bengtson

It’s clear that the rise of social media is transforming the relationship between companies and stakeholders. Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools are filling a void for stakeholders who crave authentic, two-way dialogue.

But these new channels of communication can also reveal the challenges companies face when social justice activists criticize a company, its products and/or practices. Tagged “digital activism,” these stakeholders have used YouTube and websites to launch massive campaigns against companies.

Now digital activists are flooding Facebook pages, which has been a tremendous tool for stakeholder engagement, to criticize corporate practices – the most recent being consumer products giant Nestle. As CNET reports http://bit.ly/9Cj01K, activists led by Greenpeace have “infiltrated” Nestle’s Facebook page to pressure the company to abandon getting palm oil from unsustainable sources.

Read the rest of this entry »

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