World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

My name is Rogue, and I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to introduce myself and my passions in this essay. I’m currently a senior attending Bioscience High School. Some of my hobbies include hiking, gardening (though I’m not that good at it), and learning!

Nature is our most valuable resource, and we all have a role to play in protecting it. From providing clean air and clean water to protecting our food systems and ecosystems, nature works hard for us. Let’s give thanks to nature this Earth Month with actions big and small that can help the planet.

Where to begin? Whether you’re interested in individual- or corporate-level actions, or something in between, we have put together a list of key dates and ideas to guide the way. Small actions can add up to big benefits for our planet. You’ve got this.

Today is Pi Day, the one day each year when math nerds everywhere trade their calculators for forks and celebrate pi the tastiest way possible with actual pie. As a math nerd whose work encompasses food and the environment, I’ve decided to mark the occasion by calculating the environmental footprint of a single slice of key lime pie. Maybe two slices… purely in the name of science, of course.

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.

Impact investing can play an important role in scaling promising solutions for conservation and food production. That’s why World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched WWF Impact, a new investing arm that makes impact-first investments into early-stage companies that align with our conservation goals of advancing more sustainable food systems.

Food production—fundamental to human survival—poses a paradoxical challenge. While agriculture produces food necessary for continued human existence, it is also a significant threat to the environment and biodiversity, fueling climate change which in turn impacts us. Nonetheless, if done properly, agriculture can also be a tool for fostering resilience in a way that restores ecosystems and nature. Today, the global food system is responsible for 27% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is a leading cause of habitat destruction, including 90% of tropical deforestation, according to WWF’s Living Planet 2024.

To both nourish a growing population while also protecting critical ecosystems and nature, new ways of producing and consuming food are needed. Historically, technology has played a fundamental role in transforming food systems. The Green Revolution is one such example, where new breakthroughs in genetic improvement and crop productivity dramatically boosted yields. Today, a new type of agriculture revolution is needed—one which better stewards and respects the planet and does so in a sustainable way. Technologies and innovative business models can be an important part of this transition, providing promising solutions for shifting society towards a more nature-positive food system and advancing WWF’s conservation mission. However, there is often a lack of funding and resources to enable the growth of these promising business models. That is where impact investing comes in—impact-first financing that deploys capital to generate both positive social and environmental outcomes for people and planet.

In the last decade, impact investing has blossomed in sectors like health, education, climate, and gender. A variety of actors are entering this space, from venture capital funds and multinational development banks to charitable organizations like WWF which use investments to advance their missions. Overall, it is estimated that the size of the impact investing field reached $1.57 trillion USD in 2024, growing with a 21% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) since 2019. Impact investors strongly integrate impact into their operations and have an impact-driven investment thesis, in which they only make investments in companies and sectors that further their impact-strategy. The figure below shows where impact investors fall along the “impact-returns” spectrum. Impact funds make investments that prioritize an “impact return” over economic return. This is where WWF Impact operates. We use patient capital to make investments that are economically sustainable, maximize impact, and further WWF’s conservation objectives and charitable mission.

Leading companies know that addressing plastic pollution is important for their business continuity, resilience, and license to operate, and it's also the right thing to do. Companies are in many different places on their sustainability journey, and need support on how to act, advocate, and invest towards meaningful, measurable impact.

Annual reporting through ReSource: Plastic, as outlined in this year’s Transparent report, has helped inform many companies’ mitigation strategies, raised their level of ambition, and pushed companies to improve their data collection processes and disclose more accurately and comprehensively.

The major takeaways from the past five years of ReSource: Plastic reporting include:

A couple of years ago, if you drank a bottle of iced tea in Ocean County, New Jersey, it would have been the rare polypropylene item that even had a chance of being recycled. That's because the system was relying on one of the few workers at the county's recycling center to easily recognize and capture polypropylene packaging by hand. The rest—yogurt tubs, takeout containers, and other polypropylene packaging—often ended up at the landfill.

While that scenario is one of a number facilities face, sortation at a facility is only one part of a much larger opportunity for polypropylene recycling. The US generates about two billion pounds of polypropylene waste annually and currently only recycles 8%. Capturing this material requires building out stronger domestic supply chains supported by increased collection and sortation capabilities, and ensuring end markets can repurpose the post-consumer material for use in new products.

At The Recycling Partnership (TRP), we are working to establish and expand such supply chains. The investment needed to do that is large, but so are the prospective returns: Over five years, $17 billion applied to proven recycling solutions would deliver an estimated $30.8 billion in economic benefits that extend over a decade.

While beef production is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and has the greatest average global emissions intensity per kilogram of meats, there are also opportunities for the beef system, including beef and feed producers, to improve their carbon footprint. Improving our ability to know where and how beef is produced and who along the value chain – from farm to retail -- is playing a part in incentivizing and implementing carbon footprint improvements can help better recognize and financially reward those making climate benefits happen. A new project is working to make this transparency and accountability happen.

World Wildlife Fund, in collaboration with FAI Farms and Standard Soil, have been awarded a two-year USDA Conservation Innovation Grant (CIG) titled Traceable Beef for Climate and Conservation. In July, USDA announced it would invest $90 million in 53 CIG projects. 

This two-year USDA CIG will develop and test an innovative framework that measures, tracks and allocates verified carbon outcomes across full beef value chains and validate the methodology through targeted implementation with producers. The primary scope includes Iowa and Oklahoma, but we are open to considering other producers if they meet the criteria.

Understanding the Scale of Plastic Pollution

By now, most people are aware that plastic pollution has become a crisis, devastating ecosystems and communities around the globe. That’s because the evidence is all around us in plain view – littering roadsides, overflowing from trash cans, and washing up on beaches. However, while we may know that plastic pollution is pervasive, it is hard to fully comprehend the monumental scale of the problem when so much more of it is out of our sight, from the plastic waste we export to developing countries to the plastic floating in remote parts of the ocean or breaking down into microplastics.

If you don’t understand the scale of a problem, how can you effectively take steps to address it? How can you know what is working and what is not? That’s where data collection comes in.

And more specifically, the need to make sure that the data we are using to understand plastic pollution are harmonized across companies, industries, and even countries – otherwise we will never fully comprehend what we are up against or what solutions are most impactful.