I just read through an article on China Daily in which Marcos Fava Neves, professor of strategic planning and food chains at the School of Economics and Business, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, proposes to add another dimension to the model of sustainabiltiy. Normally we consider the economic, social and environmental perspective (triple bottom line) when assessing sustainability. Marcos Fava Neves proposes to add in the context of organizations that struggle to implement this concept as part of their planning and operations pro-activeness as an additional measure.
When reading the article I started wondering whether pro-activeness is really what we are missing. Companies do most of the time act in different ways. In my eyes the issue is rather a lack of ownership and leadership in the space of sustainability. In a traditional company structure sustainability is not assigned to any specific department and therefore it is unclear who should be taking the lead on this.
It’s not just about what you do but also about how you link individual activites. Ideally an organization has an overall sustainability strategy and links activites to this strategy with the aim to create one real and coherent sustainability story. Transparency and involvement of internal and external stakeholders is key here. This involves HR, marketing, business development, and many other divisions.
Getting everyone on board requires not just pro-activeness but also smart leadership.
You may wonder what this post has to do with Sustainability: I do believe that the shift towards social media is not only important for Corporate Marketers. The fact that corporations have to become more transparent also means they have to start reviewing their current business operations: How compliant are we really? And how do our stakeholders perceive our performance?
Some years ago it would have been a great opportunity for a Business to move towards social & environmental responsibility to gain a competitive advantage. Today it becomes more and more a must to not fall behind your competitors and to avoid a potential crisis.
Being truly transparent does not only mean that a corporation needs to implement a CSR report that is compliant with GRI standards we are talking about a process of change management that is not to underestimate. It’s not just about the numbers but also about the motivations & meaning given to these values by each and every employee.
Only in the moment a researcher from the R&D division, your supply chain partners and the external maintenance guy live up to this philosophy and come to work every day because they truly believe they help save the environment and add benefit to the community by working for an organization, one can talk about a successful implementation of this approach. It’s not just a one-off exercise. It’s rather a cultural transformation of the whole organization.
A few weeks ago I went on a night walk with the local group of Friends of the Earth in Brussels. The activity was organized in the spirit of Earth Hour 2009 – an action initiated by WWF on March 28th 2009.
This was the core message of the campaign:
Our walk in Brussels went on for 3 hours through the local forest area Forêt de Soignes. 3 hours in the dark in the middle of a forest; looking at star signs with a group of like minded environmentalists – What’s a better way of spending the ‘earth hour 2009′?
The walk in any case was a success and it would be a surprise if Friends of the Earth Brussels would not continue organizing enjoyable walks and awareness raising events here in Brussels. Thank you for the nice evening. › Continue reading
Twestival is a series of events that will take place on the 12th of February all around the world.
The aim is to raise at least about 4000USD per event so that one well can be built and give people in the developing world access to clean drinking water (this event supports the cause charity:water).
The event is to 100% run by volunteers. Publicity is mainly made via networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. For some more information, watch the video below:
This programme focusses specifically on events & festivals for younger people. The idea is to motivate the crowds to recycle an item that tends to create the biggest waste (in terms of volume) on most bigger festivals: Plastic bottles, cups and cans. › Continue reading
Nature does not stop where land ends. We all have heard about reefs that are being threatened due to over fishing, water pollution and other factors that cause damage under sea level. But have you ever thought about doing something about it?
Professor Wolf Hilbertz could be described as ‘architect of the ocean’. Together with his colleagues from theGlobal Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA) have developed a way of recreating the reefa technique seems very simple – so simple that eventually a five year old would be able to dream it up: What do we do with all the corals and fish if their reef is being destroyed? Let’s build them a new home!
The actual execution of such a project requires however a firm technique, lots of manpower, and support of experts like Professor Hilbertz of the GCRA: A huge structure of iron bars is build on land and then transported to the reef location. Slowly and with lots of patience a group of scuba divers help to safely guide the big and fragile structure to its final location. After it has been placed they fix fractures of corals that are broken off a former reef on the iron bars of the structure.
Its not as easy as it sounds to actually make a reef ‘grow’ on such an artificial surrounding– but there is a solution: A technique called Electrolytic Mineral Accretion Technology (BiorockTM). This is a method that causes the crystallization of minerals on the outside of the iron structure by creating safe, low voltage electrical currents through the seawater. This technique speeds up the formation and growth of chemical limestone rock shell-bearing organisms and skeletons of corals. The reef starts grows rapidly.
Professor Wolf Hilbertz passed away in August 2007 but his dream still exists: The recreation of reefs which is a milestone in saving one of our biggest and for a big part still unexplored natural resources: the Ocean.
Here a case study from Pemuteran, Bali:
Images by Wolf Hilbertz; video by Rani Morrow-Wuigk.
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