Sustainable Brands Launches First-Ever Roadmap Towards Greening Your Business

Sustainable Brands (SB) launched the first-ever tool designed to help mainstream brands move themselves towards sustainability Tuesday at the SB'18 conference in Vancouver running from June 4 to 7, according to an SB press release.
The SB Brand Transformation RoadmapSM is designed for companies in all sectors and with various leadership styles and allows them to set their own goals and move at their own pace.
"For the first time, we have a roadmap that demonstrates what happens holistically in each chapter of a company's sustainability journey," Vice President Environment, Social & Governance Strategy at Iron Mountain Kevin Hagen said in the press release. "It allows you to plot where your company is today and plan a faster path to the next phase while maximizing the benefits right where you are."
The roadmap is built around a five-by-five matrix of five characteristics of sustainable companies and five steps towards sustainability.
Those characteristics, as listed on the roadmap's information page, are:
1. Purpose Beyond Profit
2. System-wide Brand Influence
3. Regenerative Operations
4. Net Positive Products and Services
5. Transparent and Proactive Governance
SB CEO and founder KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz said the roadmap had received positive feedback from Fortune 100 companies.
"We believe the SB Brand Transformation Roadmap has the potential to become an invaluable tool and the main portal that companies and individual brands will use to establish and build on their sustainability ambitions and strategies over time," Skrzyniarz said in the release.
SB was founded in 2006 with a mission "to inspire, engage and equip today's business and brand leaders to prosper for the near and long term by leading the way to a better future."
Its flagship conference, currently underway in Vancouver, is gathering more than 3,000 participants from more than 30 countries. Featured attendees include Google, Levis, Ford, 21st Century Fox and National Geographic.
In addition to launching the roadmap the conference also features more than 300 speakers and is organized around the theme of "Redesigning the Good Life."
A 2017 SB survey found that people are less concerned now with money, status and success and more interested in a simple, community-oriented life. Eighty-percent of people said they would be loyal to brands that reflected this value shift, but few could name brands that did, according to a featured conference article by Senior Vice President for Human Resources, Stewardship and Sustainability at Kohler, Co. Laura Kohler.
"Clearly, brands are not effectively connecting the dots for consumers," Kohler wrote.
Her article promoted the panel she will speak on—Harmonizing the Inside and Outside Messages: Turning Employees into Effective Ambassadors for Your Good Life Brand.
Her panel is another example of the conference's events geared to helping participants move in a sustainable direction and promote the shift.
"Position your brand for success by responding to shifting societal needs. Learn how to redesign product and service offerings and rethink business models for a changing economy," the conference website reads.
- Redwoods are the world's tallest trees.
- Now scientists have discovered they are even bigger than we thought.
- Using laser technology they map the 80-meter giants.
- Trees are a key plank in the fight against climate change.
They are among the largest trees in the world, descendants of forests where dinosaurs roamed.
Pixabay / Simi Luft
<p><span>Until recently, measuring these trees meant scaling their 80 meter high trunks with a tape measure. Now, a team of scientists from University College London and the University of Maryland uses advanced laser scanning, to create 3D maps and calculate the total mass.</span></p><p>The results are striking: suggesting the trees <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">may be as much as 30% larger than earlier measurements suggested.</a> Part of that could be due to the additional trunks the Redwoods can grow as they age, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a process known as reiteration</a>.</p>New 3D measurements of large redwood trees for biomass and structure. Nature / UCL
<p>Measuring the trees more accurately is important because carbon capture will probably play a key role in the battle against climate change. Forest <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2020/09/carbon-sequestration-natural-forest-regrowth" target="_blank">growth could absorb billions of tons</a> of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.</p><p>"The importance of big trees is widely-recognised in terms of carbon storage, demographics and impact on their surrounding ecosystems," the authors wrote<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank"> in the journal Nature</a>. "Unfortunately the importance of big trees is in direct proportion to the difficulty of measuring them."</p><p>Redwoods are so long lived because of their ability to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-73733-6" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cope with climate change, resist disease and even survive fire damage</a>, the scientists say. Almost a fifth of their volume may be bark, which helps protect them.</p>Carbon Capture Champions
<p><span>Earlier research by scientists at Humboldt University and the University of Washington found that </span><a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112716302584" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Redwood forests store almost 2,600 tonnes of carbon per hectare</a><span>, their bark alone containing more carbon than any other neighboring species.</span></p><p>While the importance of trees in fighting climate change is widely accepted, not all species enjoy the same protection as California's coastal Redwoods. In 2019 the world lost the equivalent of <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/deforestation-and-forest-degradation" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">30 soccer fields of forest cover every minute</a>, due to agricultural expansion, logging and fires, according to The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).</p>Pixabay
<p>Although <a href="https://c402277.ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/publications/1420/files/original/Deforestation_fronts_-_drivers_and_responses_in_a_changing_world_-_full_report_%281%29.pdf?1610810475" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">the rate of loss is reported to have slowed in recent years</a>, reforesting the world to help stem climate change is a massive task.</p><p><span>That's why the World Economic Forum launched the Trillion Trees Challenge (</span><a href="https://www.1t.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1t.org</a><span>) and is engaging organizations and individuals across the globe through its </span><a href="https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/uplink-issue/a002o00000vOf09AAC/trillion-trees" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Uplink innovation crowdsourcing platform</a><span> to support the project.</span></p><p>That's backed up by research led by ETH Zurich/Crowther Lab showing there's potential to restore tree coverage across 2.2 billion acres of degraded land.</p><p>"Forests are critical to the health of the planet," according to <a href="https://www.1t.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1t.org</a>. "They sequester carbon, regulate global temperatures and freshwater flows, recharge groundwater, anchor fertile soil and act as flood barriers."</p><p><em data-redactor-tag="em" data-verified="redactor">Reposted with permission from the </em><span><em data-redactor-tag="em" data-verified="redactor"><a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/03/redwoods-store-more-co2-and-are-more-enormous-than-we-thought/" target="_blank">World Economic Forum</a>.</em></span></p>EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
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