World Wildlife Fund Sustainability Works

In our Behind the Scenes series we speak to WWF staff to learn more about their work and what makes them tick. For today’s post, we had the pleasure of catching up with Akiva Fishman, WWF's Manager of Private Sector Interventions to Tackle Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

For our Rising Stars series, we're featuring the next generation of leaders who are working toward a more sustainable world. We recently spoke with Mitsuko Wong, Director of Sustainability, Product and Supply Chain at Ralph Lauren to learn about her role, what she finds most challenging and rewarding, and more.

I was the first girl child to be born in my father’s family after 40+ years. In more ways than just that, I broke the mold.

I grew up in a community, in a part of the world, where spotting a single tree was a sight to behold. Growing up was an experience that was dense, crowded, loud and polluted. Wildlife sightings in the community were limited to pigeons, cows and eagles. Even as a five-year-old, I was yearning to get close to Earth. My parents made special efforts to take me to the nearest available parks, scant as they were. I so loved trees that I named my two favorite trees "Camel" and "Elephant."

Then, somehow, as a stroke of luck, I came across this wacky man by the name of Steve Irwin. To me, as a five-year-old, he fired my imagination. I was glued to his “Crikey!” catchphrase and would watch in sheer awe the wonders of wildlife. It came to such a head that I was called “Animal Planet” by all my cousins. My never-ending queries about the natural world, and really everything else, earned me the name “question bank.”

That’s when I knew I wanted to do something in the natural world. Life is not a straight line. It took a circuitous journey to truly understand how my love and passion for God’s green Earth could be expressed in the form of a career.

For our Rising Stars series, we're featuring the next generation of leaders who are working toward a more sustainable world. We recently spoke with Simone Emilie Gourguechon, Director, Global Sustainability & ESG Strategy, at McDonald’s Corporation to learn about her role, what she finds most challenging and rewarding, and more.

Hidden water is water that is not felt or seen in final products, but is required for almost every step of the production process. The water footprint of textile and apparel companies includes freshwater use throughout the phases of clothing production from growing cotton or other materials, to manufacturing and finishing the final garment. Therefore, water use needs to be effective and efficient across the value chain. By working to uncover where water is hidden within the value chain, the partnership between Ralph Lauren and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is finding innovative ways to decrease water-related risk, preserve the resource, and benefit the environment and local communities.

For our Rising Stars series, we're featuring the next generation of leaders who are working toward a more sustainable world. We recently spoke with Erika Meschkat, Senior Analyst, Sustainability, at The J.M. Smucker Co., to learn about her role, what she finds most challenging and rewarding, and more.

North America’s grasslands are one of the least protected and most at-risk biomes on the planet, and as the grasslands disappear, so do the critical ecosystem services they provide. During the last decade, over 2 million acres of grasslands were plow-up to make way for croplands across the US and Canadian Great Plains. This is a rate of habitat destruction that’s comparable to the clearing of the Brazilian Amazon, and it’s occurring in our own backyard.

In 2021, to combat this loss, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched an exciting new three-year partnership with Air Wick^® called “One Square Foot.” The partnership’s mission is to reseed 1 billion square feet (~23,000 acres) of previously disturbed grasslands and wildflower habitats in the Northern Great Plains (NGP). Wildflowers are not just beautiful: they provide food and shelter for pollinators, grassland birds, and many other species that are native to the region. In our first year, despite on-going drought conditions across the NGP, WWF’s Sustainable Ranching Initiative was able to reseed nearly 51 million square feet of wildflower and grassland habitat.

For year two of the partnership, we hope to create even greater awareness about the importance of grasslands and wildflowers through a campaign extension of One Square Foot called the “Super Bloom.” In nature, a Super Bloom is when millions of wildflowers bloom at once, carpeting a landscape in color as a response to a period of late winter or early spring rains. Beginning on March 12^th, WWF and Air Wick^® aim to create a Super Bloom by planting a record-setting number of native wildflower seeds —and we want you to join us. From March 12^th through June 1st, 2022, if you share any wildflower to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest—a photo, a video, an illustration (any wildflower counts)—we will plant one square foot of wildflowers in the Northern Great Plains as a thank you, and to help further restore this important habitat. Just tag your posts with #SquareFootSuperBloom and share them to your feed. It’s that simple!

To learn more about the “One Square Foot” initiative and the wildflowers that are native to your part of the US, please visit our project webpage.

For millions of us, a walk in the woods changed from a pastime to a necessity during this pandemic. It’s about as safe and socially distanced as can be, and access to forests has often helped ease my mind. After being indoors for days on end, forests became a place where I could escape and unwind. Spending time in forests makes me feel better. But what’s the science behind that, and could forests be doing more for our health?