World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

With the threat of climate change, plastic pollution, food waste, the loss of wildlife and critical ecosystems and more, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the issues our planet faces. As individuals, we want to make a difference, but often the question is: where to begin?

In honor of Earth Day, we would like to equip you with resources to make it easier for you to show love for the planet on April 22 and beyond. These tips are also perfect for sharing with others at work or in your community.

Climate change is expensive. In 2023 alone, NOAA recorded 28 climate change related disasters in the U.S. whose damages clocked in at more than a billion dollars each. Those 28 disasters cost the U.S. economy just shy of $93 billion in a single year. To give a sense of contrast, from 2018 to 2022, federal product liability Approved Class Action Settlement Awards and Punitive Damages, which are part of a category of risk that private companies are required to report on, together totaled about $415 million nationwide over five years. And despite the uncertainty involved in litigating class action product liability, an investor would be rightfully upset if a company failed to disclose a pending suit.

A step forward with a new rule

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published a draft rule in 2022 on how publicly traded companies should report on their climate risk. In response, the SEC received over 24,000 comments on the draft rule and finally voted on a final rule on March 6, 2024. It is not often that such a mundane government meeting about financial reporting receives so much attention but there is a very good reason why: climate risks are increasing, they are expensive, and they can’t be managed if we don’t know where the problems are.

SEC Chair Gensler made clear that SEC staff have been working for years to develop and finalize this climate disclosure rule to provide decision-useful information to investors because climate risks are material and we couldn’t agree more. Climate risk can – and very often does – impact a company’s bottom line and it is critical that investors have sufficient information in the financial report to determine if a company’s finances are sound. Some companies have been reporting on climate risk for years and often do so in stand-alone sustainability reports, but this SEC rule standardizes the process and requires the reporting to occur in the financial report where it belongs and in a way that allows investors to compare across entities on an apples-to-apples basis.

You are what you eat – or, more precisely, you are what you’re eating has eaten. Corn, for example, is so present in the diet and processing of the cows, chickens, and other animals eaten by Americans that the author Michael Pollan, in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” quotes one researcher who calls us “corn chips with legs.”

For companies that produce animal proteins – the beef, fish, and fowl that make up so much of our dinner menus – knowing what is in animal feed is a key to knowing whether their animals are getting the right nutrients.

But there’s a surprising little secret in that world: most livestock and aquaculture producers don’t know the sources, much less the practices, associated with the production of ingredients in the feed that they give their animals.

The US Round Table for Sustainable Poultry and Eggs (US-RSPE) gathered 65 industry leaders, experts, and stakeholders in November 2023 for their annual meeting. This pivotal conference aimed to propel the sector’s sustainability efforts by addressing critical issues within the poultry and egg supply chains and creating a collaborative atmosphere for workshopping shared challenges.

In 2018, WWF was a founding member of the US-RSPE, in part because of the need to encourage market transformation towards sustainable intensification and the need for continuous improvement at speed and scale yet seen. The roundtable has evolved to not only be the thought leader on the sector’s continuous improvement, but to be a space for leaders to collaborate and advance action on shared challenges across the pillars of people, planet, and poultry.

The meeting encouraged and facilitated rich discussion across all three pillars of poultry and egg sustainability – people, planet, and poultry. Robert Bonnie, USDA Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation shared his optimistic perspective of the industry’s progress and opportunities, followed by timely discussions on how to advance the impact each organization has associated with biosecurity and bird health, effective workforce development strategies, and poultry feed sustainability.

Executive Director of US-RSPE, Ryan Bennett, expressed enthusiasm about the outcomes of the meeting, stating, "November was a chance for us to provide the resources and knowledge for the poultry sector to go into 2024 ready to support and change the conversation about poultry sustainability."

The meeting served as a platform to set the course for the organization's growth with the release of a new strategic plan, building on the success of the member-driven metrics framework and its impact on the poultry and egg sector.

A significant achievement highlighted at the conference was the current progress on the Roundtable Framework Tool, the first-ever sustainability assessment tool designed specifically for the poultry and egg industry. With a year of implementation behind them and having met past strategic objectives, US-RSPE is aiming to scale further, supporting the sector's growth and sustainability.

As the Framework continues to be a game changer, Bennett emphasized the organization's commitment to increasing awareness and expanding support to drive positive change within the industry. The US-RSPE annual meeting has proven to be essential for those dedicated to advancing sustainable practices within the poultry and egg sector.

All those bottles on beaches, fashion garments in landfills, and obsolete tech devices in dumps or incinerators, didn’t have to meet this fate. They became trash because a plan wasn’t put in place at the beginning of the product lifecycle to recapture the waste and use it to make new products and materials. That’s the basic premise of a circular economy. And it takes responding to external factors, collaborating internally, and coordinating across the entire supply chain to accomplish it well.

Having worked at WWF for over eight years leading large corporate partnerships, I saw that the most sustainable companies didn’t have the biggest sustainability teams. On the contrary, these brands effectively embedded sustainability strategy, and personnel, into each functional area: marketing, supply chain, finance, etc. This is an evolution from the often grassroots, isolated sustainability teams of years prior. The strongest companies strive to meet consumers where they are, satisfy shareholders, hold one another accountable, and meet government compliance rules.

As we think about creating a truly circular economy, the level of complexity increases as do calls for new ways to work together to drive change. Internal and external coordination must be ratcheted up. There is no room for siloed thinking; change requires a systems-thinking approach to understand the interdependencies within and outside of an organization. Additional tools are needed, especially in a rapidly changing landscape with circularity expectations from regulators, shareholders, and consumers.

Governments

One significant shift currently underway involves the ways that governments are tackling one of the major challenges in circularity: plastic waste.

Governments at the local, state, and national levels are addressing plastic waste in different ways. Perhaps most significant is the Global Treaty to End Plastic Pollution, which is establishing a set of legally binding global agreements that delineate the steps and timelines necessary to change the production and consumption of plastics. Along with domestic and state legislation, initiatives like this will lead to regulatory measures. Encouraging creative thinking requires internal collaboration among stakeholders and countless others to make that shift from a voluntary to a regulatory landscape.

Companies

As Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Business change as critical as circularity requires implementing a change in corporate culture. One of the best ways to shift culture is to involve cross-functional teams in designing process change. It ensures collective understanding, clarity in accountability, and personal responsibility. In addition, making a concerted effort to align incentives across functions will encourage internal behavior change, which is especially effective when linked to corporate targets. The result is more employees taking ownership in their respective roles and encouraging the right conversations at the right levels of seniority.

Consumers

Circularity presents a new way of doing business and engaging customers. It is no secret that companies track legions of customer data before, during, and immediately after a sale. But infrequently do they continue to track that product (and its disposal). And most don’t provide guidance to the end user about how to manage or reclaim a product or its materials. Plus customers can feel abandoned when they are left to dispose or recycle the products and packaging on their own, without the help of the company who produced it or the municipality who collects it. This is a missed opportunity for circularity!

Since leaving WWF, I have been working to launch the Global Impact Collective, a new consultancy that uses systems and design thinking to advance sustainability implementation at pace.

Design thinking is an important process, which sometimes requires an expert guide and facilitator to ignite innovative ideas. The process brings together crucial stakeholders who can contribute different perspectives to the same problem. And when used well, it has become a powerful tool to drive alignment, improve collaboration, and surface truly innovative solutions.

At The Collective, we bring together key teams, including product design, sourcing, packaging, marketing, sales, finance, and others – people who don’t often find themselves in the same room at the same time, focused on problem solving. This process gives organizations the space and speed to develop many creative ideas and solutions at once. And because all the stakeholders are in the room, new solutions are socialized and pre-vetted for testing.

Consumers, governments, and companies can’t solve the plastic waste problem on their own. Coordination across sectors will be critical to understanding the perspectives of different stakeholders and making sector-wide progress. But before cross-sector collaboration happens, internal coordination within your organization is key. When you bring design thinking into the equation it invites an expansive, perspective shifting mindset. It allows you to say, “how might we…”, opening the door for broader, more creative solutions that are more inclusive and engage players throughout the value chain.

The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of WWF.

Arizona in February is known for snowbirds, sunny skies and of course, sustainability! GreenBiz24 will take place Monday, February 12 – Wednesday, February 14. This annual conference brings together leaders from across the country and around the world to share ideas, trends, and innovations in sustainability.

As always, WWF experts will participate in workshops and panels, lead discussions and provide valuable insights to conference attendees looking to find new and innovative solutions to help their companies and organizations take their sustainability and conservation efforts to the next level.

If you’re participating in GreenBiz24, we invite you to join a workshop or session featuring WWF experts and of course come say “hello” during conference networking breaks. Here’s where you can find us:

Each year the Markets Institute at WWF releases a list of potential emerging developments that will affect the global food system and will be important for producers, consumers, the private sector, and governments to consider. The topics are identified through research, interviews, data analysis, gleanings from others, and especially through discussions with the Markets Institute’s Thought Leader Group. Here is a condensed version of our full report. As always, we welcome feedback, so please get in touch.

Our Planet needs nature to survive, and so does our financial system. Increasing biodiversity loss represents serious environmental and social risks to the stability of our price and market economy. With over half of the world's GDP heavily dependent on functional natural ecosystems, nature loss does not only directly affect companies and industries for example through supply chain disruptions, but also impacts communities who depend on fragile natural resources for their livelihood.

Findings from our recent annual assessment (SUSREG), which tracks progress on the integration of environmental and social risks in central banking and supervision activities in 47 countries, mostly members of the Network of central banks and supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), the Basel Committee (BIS) and International Association of Insurance Supervisors (IAIS), shows that since our first assessment in 2021, several central banks, financial supervisors and regulators are making notable progress.

WWF’s Wood Risk Tool helps companies tackle unsustainable logging and unacceptable trade while supporting responsible forestry

Conserving forests requires a tremendous worldwide effort from all sectors of society — governments, companies, communities, conservation organizations and individuals. And while we can celebrate successes around protecting priority threatened forests, driving large-scale forest restoration, and improving management practices in working forests, these vital efforts continue to be undermined by illegal and unsustainable logging that harms nature, people and climate. WWF’s new Wood Risk Tool is one step toward addressing this pervasive problem by helping companies stem the flow of illegal and unsustainable timber into the market.

Illegal logging is a scourge of truly global proportions. It accounts for most of the timber harvest in many producer countries, particularly (but not exclusively) in the tropics. Indeed, 10%–30%* of the global timber harvest is estimated to come from illegal origins.