World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

Run a motorboat up the Mississippi River in summer, and you’re likely to get smacked in the face by a fish the size of a baseball bat.

Silver carp, which exhibit a uniquely frightful jumping behavior when they feel the vibration of a boat’s engine, is one of four species of invasive carp that are causing environmental damage across the South, Southwest and Midwest, including the Mississippi River basin. Prolific breeders with no natural predators, silver, bighead, black, and grass carp have proliferated in those region’s waterways since being intentionally introduced to the US in the 1970s by catfish farmers and others.

The introduction of the carp was intended to help clean invasive and other weed species from aquaculture ponds. But the fish escaped those ponds, and their high adaptability quickly led them to dominate waterways, where they constitute up to 95% of the biomass of some bodies of water.

In an era where companies are scrambling to market their products as “sustainable,” accounting techniques sometimes override environmental impacts. Take, for example, “mass balance” accounting, which often lacks a link between the claim and the outcome.

Mass balance is an accounting method for certified products that allows for mixing conventional and sustainable materials. Under mass balance, an equivalent mass of product — regardless of whether it contains the certified product or ingredient — can be sold as sustainable as long as it does not exceed the total amount of certified product.

Our food systems are pushing the planet to its limits, while hundreds of millions go hungry and billions lack access to healthy diets. To sustain both people and the planet, a systems-wide transformation across land and sea is essential.

For the past decade, World Wildlife Fund has worked closely with the Seafood Task Force (STF) — the only global trade association uniting the world's largest retailers, seafood brands, and their partners — to enhance supply chain oversight and drive continuous improvement from vessel to plate. STF is the first pre-competitive seafood platform to institutionalize conversion-free shrimp, marking a major milestone in its journey.

You probably know that the carbon footprint of different products varies – the footprint of beef, for example, tends to be higher than that of tomatoes. But where do those numbers come from? To learn how carbon footprints are calculated, let’s take a deep dive inside one calculator that WWF devised with the Global Salmon Initiative (GSI). This calculator is being used by GSI member companies to track their progress towards an ambitious benchmark we call “The Salmon of 2030” and to accelerate mitigation efforts through shared knowledge. The core calculator was developed by Blonk Consultants and IDH.

Nothing drives deforestation in Latin America more than beef production. In Brazil, deforestation to create pasture for cattle grazing amounts to more than double the land cleared to grow soy, palm oil, and wood combined. And because leather is inextricably linked to the beef industry, the leather sector carries a shared responsibility in addressing the issue.

Now, the leather industry has a new opportunity to make a significant contribution to addressing the environmental impacts of beef and leather production. Today, WWF is launching the Deforestation-Free Leather Fund, a way for companies that use leather in their products to financially support strategic initiatives to improve the traceability, sustainability, and resilience of their leather supply chains.

Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, and 90% of ongoing deforestation is caused by clearing land to graze cattle and grow crops. But progress on deforestation- and conversion-free (DCF) supply chains remains slow and commodity-driven ecosystem loss continues at high rates. Many companies are failing to meet the urgency of the moment and have failed to even set sustainability targets.

Because the agricultural commodity trade is dominated by a small number of companies globally, actions by companies that produce, trade, and source agricultural commodities are a crucial lever to help solve the problem. But defining what “good” targets and progress look like can be complicated. This complexity can make it difficult for a company’s stakeholders – including buyers, investors, and policymakers – to tell whether new corporate commitments are a step forward or a step backward.

To help identify commitments with potentially fatal flaws, we have drawn guidance from the Accountability Framework initiative, as well as WWF’s own recommendations, to codify several key elements of a DCF commitment. If any of the following elements are found in corporate DCF commitments, they render the entire commitment suspect at best and, at worst, counterproductive. Consider these elements red flags: If you see a commitment with any of these flaws, its credibility is in question.

Healthy diets are essential, yet only a small percentage of Americans consume the daily recommended servings of vegetables. Part of the problem is access. Millions of Americans, both in predominantly minority, urban communities, and in poorer, rural areas without major grocery chains, lack access to nutritious foods.

The problem isn’t a shortage of food. We grow plenty. But up to 40% of fresh produce grown in the US is wasted. Another real difficulty is that connections between local farmers and consumers, already broken, have split even further in recent years due to supply chain disruptions and market shifts. As a result, consumers struggle nutritionally, while small farmers struggle financially and are often forced to take off-farm jobs.

To bridge this gap, the Markets Institute at World Wildlife Fund (WWF) began to explore ways of establishing a direct connection — known as Farmers Post — between consumers and nearby farmers. We’re working with the United States Postal Service (USPS) to explore allowing consumers to have fresh produce delivered to their door. This would offer a new, and welcome, revenue stream for the USPS, which has struggled with tightening budgets in recent years, making use of its distribution expertise and its unique access to all households in the US.

Our food supply chain is facing critical pressures and an uncertain future. California produces more than two-thirds of the fruits and nuts grown in the US and nearly half of all its vegetables. But due to climate change, water availability, and other factors, depending on California for all that food is increasingly unsustainable.

More than a decade ago, WWF’s Markets Institute identified this growing uncertainty in domestic food production as both a challenge and an opportunity. We set out to find “the next California,” a place to build a sustainable and equitable commercial-level specialty crop industry. We settled on the Mid-Mississippi Delta (western Tennessee, northwestern Mississippi, and eastern Arkansas) as a spot that could ease the pressure on California, avoid converting natural lands to farmland elsewhere in the country, and create an equitable engine of local growth.

This is the third in a series of blog posts on carbon accounting standards. The first post provided an overarching explanation of carbon accounting and its inherent challenges. The second post examined variability in companies’ “Scope 3” emissions—that is, emissions that originate from upstream and downstream activities, which often constitute 90% or more of companies’ emissions. Here we discuss factors behind the variability of emissions across farms and regions.

The variability in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per unit of product across the agricultural sector is striking, even when comparing identical products. Understanding this variability is crucial, particularly when assessing the complexities of supply chains. This variability manifests at multiple scales—from individual farms to regions—and significantly impacts both corporate strategy and policy formulation.

At the farm level, differences in emissions can be profound, even among neighboring farms that are both practicing conventional agriculture. For instance, two farms growing the same row crops can exhibit up to a twofold difference in emissions. Similar variability exists in aquaculture, where shrimp production emissions can vary by as much as five times. These discrepancies are often due to the efficiency of input use, influenced by factors such as soil quality, farmer skill, and local weather conditions. Such variability within a farm itself can result in certain areas being more profitable than others.

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.