World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

I had the opportunity to talk to the award-winning filmmaker and scientist Valerie Weiss, who has directed popular shows including Outer Banks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Dr. Weiss received a Ph.D. in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard, and says this scientific background has influenced her approach to storytelling. Her interest in human behavior and cause-and-effect relationships compels her to dig deeper into the characters’ motivations, making stories more emotionally rich and resonant. Dr. Weiss is also passionate about promoting sustainability on set and weaving environmental messages through her work.

Water is often assumed to be the world’s most abundant resource. While more than 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, only 0.5% of that is fresh and available for use. This finite resource and our freshwater security is in increasing peril. The global population has exploited our rivers, lakes, and aquifers creating a water crisis that is undermining human and planetary health. Now, billions of people lack access to safe water and sanitation, food insecurity is on the rise, and we are losing freshwater species at alarming rates. Why is this happening? Because we have failed to properly value the very water we rely on.

The High Cost of Cheap Water, a new report from the World Wildlife Fund addresses this issue head-on. Not only is water critical for community and species health, but water is also a necessity for industrial production of goods, their transportation, and the production of the energy needed to underpin the entire supply chain. There are no siloes when it comes to freshwater access and usage; every decision we make about water impacts another industry or community. When considering the total footprint that water has across our society, WWF estimates that the total global quantifiable economic use value of water in 2021 is approximately US$58 trillion, equivalent to the combined GDPs of the United States, China, Japan, Germany and India.

We know that no one organization or company alone could ever solve the nature or climate crises. That’s why leading companies recognize that cleaning up their internal operations is not enough; for change at a global scale, they must influence entire industries to shift toward more responsible practices.

But since change at this scale is slow and complex, how do you track if and by how much your organization is influencing the conversation and effecting change? Could it be possible to assign hard numbers to such an abstract concept?

This summer, I endeavored to answer those questions, researching and building a methodology to define and efficiently track influence in the future. I specifically studied the influence of case studies authored by WWF’s Markets Institute, but the lessons I learned could be applied to multiple uses.

New and proposed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) laws and regulations in the U.S. and EU represent a major step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, illegal deforestation and conversion of land, illegal fishing, and forced labor.

The new laws will affect the ways companies do business across borders and within certain jurisdictions. And they will have huge implications for environmental and social impact. But implementing the regulations is going to be difficult for many companies to do on their own. For those, collaboration is the key.

Seaweed, although often overlooked in Western diets, has been a staple in many Asian cuisines for centuries. This rich source of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants is valued for its savory umami flavor. The cultivation of kelp, a popular type of seaweed, has a much lower environmental footprint compared to traditional agriculture on land. As climate change and increasing resource consumption create concerns over food security, kelp is gaining recognition as a food source with a low environmental impact. But many misconceptions still surround this sustainable superfood. In the first blog post of our Seaweed Explainer Series, we’ll examine the differences between wild harvested kelp and farmed kelp.

Agriculture is one of the most essential aspects of our society—it sustains life, it creates jobs— contributing USD $3.6 trillion and employing 27% of the world’s workforce.¹

The need for sustainable resource management is more important than ever. Without it, agricultural production consumes excessive water (about 70% of the planet’s fresh water). It also significantly contributes to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and is a leading pollutant in many countries, infiltrating water, marine ecosystems, air and soil.

Unsustainable farming practices can not only have serious impacts on the environment but on people as well. When managed sustainably, agriculture can help preserve and restore critical habitats, improve soil health and improve water quality. With demand growing for food, WWF is working with key stakeholders, including governments, companies and farmers to implement better management practices that benefit both the environment and the producers’ bottom line.

Yesterday at New York Climate Week, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched the Nature-Based Solutions Origination Platform (NbS-OP), a new model for scaling up, aligning and mobilizing public and private finance for high-quality nature-based solutions (NbS) under an integrated landscape finance approach. With this model, interventions to address nature loss, expand sustainable livelihoods, and mitigate climate risks are planned, financed and implemented holistically across large tropical forest territories, helping to ensure lasting success. The five initial landscapes where the NbS-OP will focus are the Atlantic Forest (Brazil); the Central Annamites (Viet Nam); Madre de Dios (Peru); the Northern Highlands/Diana (Madagascar); and the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico).

They journeyed from 11 countries on five continents. From as far as South Africa and as close as the United States: hundreds of firefighters working to dousing the wildfires that have done unparalleled damage to Canadian forests this year and sent plumes of thick smoke across North America.

Their willingness to brave exhaustion and danger to stop the damage to northern forests was as startling as it was inspiring. It was incredible to see firefighters from my home country of Costa Rica decamping the tropics to do what they could in very different conditions. I was also struck by a sentiment shared by a South Korean firefighter on why he had made that trip.

“In my mind, it's the same forest,” Kim Man Ju told the CBC. “We should keep the forest. That means a promise to the future, a promise to the globe.”

This spirit of partnership is what we need to take forward from this grim and tragic summer, which has torched not only Canada but also Hawaii and large swaths of southern Europe amid record air and water temperatures and dangerously dry conditions.

We need to throw our collective weight behind a promise to the future, a promise to the planet.