
Sustainia and the UN Global Compact announced Monday a unique global partnership that is committed to building the world's biggest interactive platform for sustainable solutions. The Global Solutions Platform aims to inspire global companies to develop new products, business models and partnerships that can help reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Sustainable solutions can be found in every corner of the globe. From solar-powered water purification to sneakers made from plastic waste, they all make our world a cleaner, greener and fairer place. Unfortunately, they are fragmented and often poorly understood.
In response to this challenge, UN Global Compact and Sustainia have announced a new strategic partnership which is committed to creating the world's biggest virtual showroom, putting sustainable solutions just one click away.
The Global Solutions Platform is designed to be the go-to place for business leaders seeking connections and inspiration, for investors seeking new opportunities and for authorities in need of credible private partners. The full platform will launch in early 2017.
"The Global Solutions Platform will be a global focal point for product and business model innovation. It empowers business leaders and entrepreneurs to take leadership in this new landscape which demands solutions to global challenges," Erik Rasmussen, CEO of Sustainia, said Monday.
Sustainia brings more than five years of experience in the solutions sector to this new partnership. Since 2012, the company has worked extensively to identify the most promising sustainable solutions and global trends, presented each year in its flagship publication, the Sustainia100. These are solutions that turn food shortages into effective agriculture, unemployment into targeted education programs and digital jobs, and polluted cities into sun-powered, green metropolises. In five years, more than 4,500 solutions have come onto Sustainia's radar and these solutions will provide the initial foundation for the ambitious new platform.
100 Solutions to the World’s Most Pressing Challenges https://t.co/uWNArM6K7H @Sustainia @richardbranson @Schwarzenegger @sierraclub @NRDC— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1465308491.0
Support from leaders worldwide
According to a 2016 UN Global Compact-Accenture study, 87 percent of global CEOs believe that the UN Sustainable Development Goals represent an essential opportunity to rethink approaches to sustainability. A further 49 percent of CEOs claim that sustainability issues are already part of board-level discussions and express the need for integrating sustainability into their strategic planning. Therefore, the new platform will bridge growing awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals with the practical solutions business leaders need in order to implement their sustainability plans.
The announcement was made at the UN Global Compact Private Sector Forum, an annual event attended by senior business leaders in order to further business action on sustainable development. The full platform will be rolled out in the spring and will be supported by a global solutions campaign that will give business leaders an opportunity to submit their sustainable solutions for inclusion.
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By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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