
While many businesses get a bad reputation for putting profit above everything, including the survival of the planet, others are starting to think differently. B Lab is a nonprofit organization that encourages businesses to consider the welfare of their employees, their communities and the environment as well as their bottom line, certifying businesses as "B Corporations."
"These companies use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems and have met rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency," B Lab says. It describes itself as the equivalent of Fair Trade for coffee or USDA Organic certification for milk, separating companies that are merely marketing themselves as socially and environmentally friendly from those that are doing the actual work.
One of the ways it encourages its member companies to maintain these high standards is through its annual Best for the World awards, now in their fourth year. The awards recognize the companies that had the most positive social and economic impact in the past year. The list honored 120 of its 1,200 member B Corporations in the overall category as well as in categories for worker, community and environmental impact, citing a total of 350 companies among the various categories. They represent the top 10 percent of B Corporations for each category.
In the Best for the Environment category, 116 companies were cited, up from 84 last year. They ranged from sole proprietorships and micro-enterprises (one to nine employees) to mid-sized businesses (more than 50 employees) like California's Falcon Waterfree Technologies and Method Products, and Vermont's Seventh Generation. Though most were in the U.S., they also came from countries such as Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Kenya and China. And while many are involved directly in sustainability services and products such as renewable energy or waste management, the list also include companies whose business is travel, apparel, personal care, IT, sporting goods, travel, and food and beverage, but who see a connection between environmental sustainability and the core business.
Among the companies honored in the environment category was Fort Collins, Colorado's New Belgium Brewing Company, the third largest craft brewery in the U.S. The employee-owned, mid-sized business has been on the Best for the Environment list for the past three years, thanks to what B Lab describes as its "near-obsession with waste reduction, energy savings and water usage." Both its original Colorado brewery and the one it's building in Asheville, North Carolina are reclaimed brownfield sites.
“We have an additional program where we tax ourselves for all the additional, non-renewable energy we buy,” said New Belgium's assistant director of sustainability Katie Wallace. “We put the money toward our future renewable energy projects. We actually opened up a portion of that tax fund and are inviting our coworkers to submit their ideas for how to use that money. Many of our best ideas come from our coworkers in the brewery and warehouse," said Wallace. "By committing to involving them, we get so much more than we would if it were just a few of us up here at our desks.”
Wallace pointed out that New Belgium operates with an awareness that conserving and protecting environmental resources has a direct impact on the future and sustainability of its business model and its profitability.
“From a business perspective, we see that our resources that provide our livelihood, like water, are drastically affected by things like climate change and drought and mismanagement," she said. "Half of our water comes from the Colorado River, and there’s a business risk to being dependent on that. By reducing the water we consume, we’re also reducing our risk.”
The business with the highest environmental score was Maine's Atayne, a high-performance sportswear and outdoor apparel company. All its clothes are made with 100 percent recycled or organic materials, what it describes as "athlete gear made from trash."
"We became a B Corp because we didn't like the story that was being written by most of the business community," says company founder Jeremy Litchfield. "It was an easy decision to join the movement to write a new one."
“Today's honorees inspire all companies to compete not only to be best in the world, but best for the world," said B-Lab co-founder Jay Coen Gilbert. "We hope many will take the first step by using the B Impact Assessment to measure and manage their impact with as much rigor as their profit."
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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