World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

As our society faces many uncertainties, one thing has never been more clear – investing in the health of our planet provides a foundation to build resilient communities for both people and nature. Many companies are at the forefront of driving innovation and developing strategies that help our global community tackle challenges, including climate change. For years most sustainability strategies existed within a company’s four walls, but as we settle into a new decade, companies are starting to embrace nature-based solutions to deliver impactful results that help propel us toward a carbon neutral future.

Recently, P&G announced a new project with WWF to advance restoration in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, which is part of a larger commitment for its operations to be carbon neutral for the next decade. To better understand what these investments in nature really mean, we asked WWF’s Sheila Bonini, senior vice president for private sector engagement, and Kerry Cesareo, senior vice president for forests, to help break it down:

Business is a critical lever for driving the shifts we need to fix the broken plastic system. WWF’s Bioplastic Feedstock Alliance (BFA) addresses a key piece of this puzzle, the shift towards the responsible sourcing of plant-based plastics, known as bioplastics. To match the scope and scale of this complex task, BFA is structured as a multi-stakeholder forum for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and science-based thought leadership to advance our understanding of bioplastic in a circular economy.

Today, BFA welcomes Kimberly-Clark as the newest member of this ambitious consortium.

As the world closed its doors and hunkered down to stop the spread of COVID-19, Google employees used the extra time at home to help WWF search for prohibited wildlife products being sold online.

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has spotlighted the devastating effects of wildlife trade and its lasting implications on global public health and economic stability. While the link between wildlife and human well-being is new to some, the technology sector including companies like Google have invested significant resources into collaborations with conservation organizations such as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to address wildlife trafficking online, helping to stop illicit activity and prevent future global pandemics such as COVID-19.

The Urgency of Collaboration—and Acceleration

We have arrived at a pivotal juncture in our history. In order to avert catastrophe for people and nature, we must limit the increase in average global temperature to below 1.5 degrees. Forests alone could make up one-third of the solution to our climate challenge but only if we take bold steps to restore, protect, and better manage them.

Finding the right balance between food imports and domestic production will continue to be a challenge as COVID-19 disrupts supply chains and governments want to ensure that food will be available for their citizens. Trade is an essential part of any sustainable food system. There will be pandemics, droughts, and plagues of locusts in any given year, and unfortunately, like now, sometimes all in the same year. Trade helps the global food system fill in the cracks created by disruptive individual or multiple events, regardless of their origin, that may lead to localized rolling hunger across a landscape.

One of the biggest threats to the ocean is unsustainable fishing. When done right fishing can benefit people while maintaining balance in nature. But when fishing practices take too heavy a toll on the marine environment, wildlife populations and critical habitats decline, which jeopardizes jobs and a critical food supply.

Fishery improvement projects—called FIPs—are the most widely-used approach for raising standards in fisheries around the world so that species, habitats, and people can all thrive. WWF helped pioneer the approach more than a decade ago and today FIPs account for nearly one in every ten pounds of fish caught worldwide.

After more than a decade of leveraging seafood buying power to catalyze these improvements in fisheries, we now have a good idea of what is working and what parts of the approach need to be improved. There’s never been more incentive to get it right—and fast.

One of the less-publicized COVID-related threats to the environment is the inadequate response to reports that almost 200,000 crew on cargo shipping vessels cannot go home despite completing their voyage. These cargo vessel crew are stuck onboard and cannot be relieved by a new crew due to widespread travel restrictions. Almost all world trade is shipped via these vessels, which when operating with fatigued crew increasingly risk collisions and other accidents, which can cause fuel spills, cargo lost overboard, and other significant harm to oceans and surrounding environments.

The United States has not had a consistent role or leadership voice when it comes to the global response to climate change - leading the negotiations on Kyoto, and then withdrawing; leading the negotiations on Paris, and then withdrawing. But beneath that instability lies a consistent and positive trend in the actions of everyday people and their communities, a strong and growing desire for America to rise to the climate challenge. Last week marked the third anniversary of President Trump's announcement of his intent to withdraw the US from Paris. The world looks remarkably different than it did then, and many of us are grappling anew with the pervasive and debilitating forces of racism and the rolling devastation of the coronavirus. Today, we want to celebrate positive trends in climate action, specific to the role of non-federal actors, that have continued unabated during that time and have the potential to scale.

WWF envisions a world with No Plastic in Nature by 2030—a world where our resources are never wasted. We cannot meet this goal without the power of business. ReSource: Plastic, launched in 2019, leverages that power so we can work together to stop the flow of plastic into nature. In the activation hub’s first year we worked with five principal members—Keurig Dr Pepper, McDonald’s Corporation, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks, and The Coca-Cola Company—as well as thought partners The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Ocean Conservancy to establish a baseline of plastic use, outlined in the Transparent 2020 report. We set out to understand how much plastic companies are using; what portion of it is recycled, virgin, or plant-based; and where this plastic ends up once disposed of—if it’s re-used, recycled, incinerated, landfilled, or ending up in nature.

As few as 100 companies have the potential to prevent roughly 50 million metric tons of the world’s plastic waste by 2030. We are one step closer to our goal of No Plastic in Nature with the addition of Amcor, Colgate-Palmolive, and Kimberly-Clark as new members of the ReSource: Plastic team. These three global companies have already demonstrated leadership on plastic in their respective sectors; as members of ReSource they take that leadership to a new level.