Business + Sustainability

Conflicting reports on optimizing sustainability in business

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:51:57 -0700

Two news clips with conflicting messages on the impact of sustainability on business caught my attention on Twitter this morning:

Mark Fulton @DeutscheBank: “We need to get the message out that sustainability really does give superior risk-adjusted return” #sust24 - Carbon Disclosure Project

Businesses say #sustainability is vital in the long term, but margins are lower on sustainable products http://ow.ly/b5VUa via @Accenture - BusinessWire Corporate Reponsibility News

Reading into the BusinessWire article uncovers more detail: “A majority [of CEO’s] (56 percent) say it is currently more expensive to be a sustainable business. 49 percent say that margins are currently lower on sustainable products and services.” Full report is here.

We’ve come a long way in the past two decades toward finding solutions that meet business needs more sustainably, but I expect we’ll continue to see conflicting messages for several more decades before we optimize. Sustainability in business is still in “early stage” development as a field and practice. Some standards have emerged – Carbon Disclosure Project, Global Reporting Initiative, UN Global Compact – while others are still being defined and tested – supplier scorecards, design standards, “green” product marketing.

We’re a long way from optimizing sustainability in business. My response to the CEO’s cited in the Accenture report is: the early results are in that sustainability leads to better business, but each industry and company needs to invest the resources to figure out how it works for them.

Where are you seeing emerging success stories?

May 20, 2012 solar eclipse in the Bay Area. Where were you?

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:51:56 -0700

May 20, 2012 solar eclipse in the Bay Area. Where were you?

Solar eclipse in the Bay Area with photo reflections.

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:50:43 -0700

Solar eclipse in the Bay Area with photo reflections.

Wow! This is why… americasgreatoutdoors: People have been...

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:42:39 -0700

Wow! This is why…

americasgreatoutdoors:

People have been drawn to the rugged coast of Maine throughout history. Awed by its beauty and diversity, early 20th-century visionaries donated the land that became Acadia National Park. The park is home to many plants and animals, and the tallest mountain on the U.S. Atlantic coast. Today visitors come to Acadia to hike granite peaks, bike historic carriage roads, or relax and enjoy the scenery.

Photo: Xavier Cohen, National Park Service

…and places I must visit.

Find of the week: The good and bad trends in sustainability.

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:22:54 -0700

Find of the week: The good and bad trends in sustainability.

Find of the Week: Good and Bad Trends

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:32:30 -0700

A week of trends, good and bad, for sustainability in business. Three landmark reports were released this past week that provide directional indicators of sustainability adoption by business and consumers.

First, the good trend: new models for supplier engagement. Apparel company Levis Strauss and Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmental groups leading the charge on sustainable investments, co-authored a report that describes Levis’ new initiatives to engage suppliers on human rights. While this is an individual company case study, it’s part of a larger trend for more relational engagement of suppliers to address sustainability and social impact concerns. Companies like Levis, Nike, Ford, Dell, and Walmart are proving a new model for supplier engagement that we’ll likely see replicated and scaled in coming years.

Now the bad trends: U.S. business progress on sustainability is not on track and U.S. consumer participation in social causes declined. Ceres published a bold roadmap to corporate sustainability in 2010 and released a report this week announcing that progress is “disappointing”. Specifically, only a third of the 600 companies it studied had set time-bound greenhouse gas emissions targets, let alone made progress toward meeting them. Indicators for governance, human rights, and stakeholder engagement are equally discouraging.

On the consumer spectrum, a study by PR firm Edelman finds that consumers have actually decreased their involvement in social causes. Edelman tracks consumer involvement in social causes, which is a rough indicator of consumer preferences for brand alignment with social issues, according to the report. U.S. consumer involvement in a social cause dropped to 53 percent this year from 60 percent in 2010.

This isn’t news to anyone who works in this field. Sustainability department budgets are growing modestly, if at all, while many companies still have no goals or strategy and there’s no clear sign from investors, consumers, or regulators that sustainability is a top concern. The market just isn’t rewarding sustainability investments or sending clear signals to prompt further sustainability initiatives by companies.

Do we need more structural change such as fixing externalities, water and carbon pricing?

Wow. Hunter Lovins, President of Natural Capital Solutions, is...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:30:02 -0700

Wow. Hunter Lovins, President of Natural Capital Solutions, is one of the pioneers and gurus in our field of sustainability in business. She advised one of the original Industry Titans, Interface, and many other companies early in their sustainability journey. Her message is one I highlight in my mini-series, Business + Sustainability: we have made good progress…and we need so much more to arrest the drastic disruption to ecosystems we see today.

Her process to begin integrating sustainability:

1) Discovery: What are the ecosystem services your company depends on?

2) Understand Costs: What is the cost to our company of the way we do business now?

3) Innovate: Dramatically change how you do business to eliminate those costs.

The benefit? “Becoming an iconic company by a commitment, a deep and transformative commitment, to sustainability”.

This interview by Triple Pundit’s Nick Aster is well worth the ~10 mins captured in the video: http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/04/interview-hunter-lovins-fortune-brainstorm-green/

Patience. Art. Science. This is the life of the sustainability...

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:35:00 -0700

Patience. Art. Science. This is the life of the sustainability in business professional. Did I mention patience? Good thoughts from VOX Global SVP Tony Calandro with a nice shout-out for sustainable jobs guru Ellen Weinreb.

Two days ago I had lunch with a friend who is managing sustainability at her company in her spare time since her firm has no formal position yet. As the Catalyst, she has had numerous successes - audit and retrofit of their U.S. facilities, LEED certification for their newest facility, an internal carbon calculator for each client account. As a Scout she’s seeing increasing customer interest and one who has threatened to require full GRI reporting for their suppliers.

And it hasn’t been easy, so overarching everything is Patience. She’s still the volunteer Sustainability Manager with this $4.5B company. She wanted to know from me whether other managers have had to be as patient as her. They have.

Calandro is right, most sustainability professionals within companies have made progress by being the Catalyst, Engineer, Connector, Scout, and Collaborator. Until there are stronger market signals, we need those tools of science, the art of our craft, and a healthy dose of patience.

Original article: http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/04/five-hats-worn-every-successful-chief-sustainability-officer/

Business + Sustainability 101: State of Green Business

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 05:29:21 -0700

I think of Dana Carvey impersonating George Bush Sr. when I say: the state of green business looks good. It’s probably more accurate to say that the State of Green Business is maturing.

This fifth and semi-final in the mini-series Business + Sustainability 101 focuses on the emerging standards and improved tools. The first two posts, Green Leaders and Industry Titans, highlighted early pioneers in the field. The Ecological Challenges and Economic Reality touched on rapidly changing ecosystems that impose new costs to our economy. Today, I write about the convergence of process and technology that help companies adapt to our changing planet and marketplace.

Standards and Tools of Sustainability

Global business craves repeatable and scalable processes. The field of sustainability is a market innovation, but its evolution tracks many previous economic changes such as Quality and Information Technology. Like standardized language in IT systems or Lean Six Sigma in Quality, sustainability has developed its own standards.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) are quickly becoming sustainability’s tracking and reporting standards for business. Now in its third generation, the GRI offers guidelines to collect and disclose material environmental impacts such as enterprise energy and water emissions, labor and human rights. It describes a set of core and optional indicators for each of these categories and provides additional industry-specific guidance for numerous industries.

The CDP takes a financial performance perspective to reporting. It represents 551 investors with assets of $71 trillion and sends an annual questionnaire to companies asking them to measure and report carbon emissions and climate risk as it relates to business risk for the company. It recently added scope 3 carbon emissions and a CDP Water Disclosure program to its reporting. In 2011, 81% of Global 500 companies that received the questionnaire responded and CDP claims companies in its Carbon Performance Leadership Index perform better in both carbon management and financial performance.

Performance also matters at the product level, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the current standard to measure environmental performance of products. LCA is a scientific process that measures energy, waste, water, carbon, toxins and other impacts from natural resource extraction through disposal of a product’s life. An LCA certified by a third party is the highest standard for product accountability, though it is a lengthy process. The Sustainability Consortium plans to release more efficient measurement and reporting standards for material impacts at the category level.

Tracking down all this data can be exhausting, which is where sustainability Enterprise Management Software (EMS) comes into play. The tools of EMS recently reached a tipping point where a slew of companies, from SAP to small software companies like Hara and Credit360, are competing for dominance of a rapidly exploding market. Software solutions can be broken into five categories according to Groom Energy, all with some level of data collection, management, analysis and reporting.

Reaping Rewards

These better standards and tools are facilitating widespread adoption of sustainability in business. Reports by KPMG, BCG, and Accenture show that more than 2/3 of mainstream companies are adopting sustainability practices. Most Fortune 500 companies now have at least one person Manager or above tasked full time with sustainability. A select few, 20% of the market according to McKinsey, lead the field integrating sustainability into the business unit, functional, and business process level.

These early adopters are reaping rewards. Last year, three Harvard Business School researchers published a study of 180 companies for 18 years and found that environmentally and socially responsible businesses outperformed their peers. Even more recently, another analysis suggests that greenhouse gas disclosures produce positive shareholder returns when announced, as much as an additional $10 billion for the 84 companies reviewed. AT Kearney and Goldman Sachs show similar performance results related to sustainability management.

Reading the Tea Leaves

The field of sustainability in business now has many standards, tools, and results to continue to mature. Despite these gains, many companies continue to struggle with understanding how ecological changes affect their business, let alone manage those business risks and opportunities. Internal financial, cultural, misaligned incentive, and process barriers continue to create hurdles. The integration of sustainability into business and the economy is facing growing pains.

Final Blog in Series: Reading the Tea Leaves

Business + Sustainability 101: The Economic Reality

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:01:12 -0700

Sustainability is a field of costs and benefits, of winners and losers. After a hiatus of several weeks, the Business + Sustainability six part series resumes with a focus on the cost of ignoring ecological disruption and a few economic benefits of moving toward sustainability.

In the first two parts of the series, I described the Green Leaders and Industry Titans who blazed trails for sustainability in business and use it for strategic advantage. The previous article broadly explains several Ecological Challenges we face as a planet with a focus on climate change. This fourth article describes why sustainability matters to the economy and business.

The Economics of Ecology

Talking about the economy in terms of ecology is a bit like driving through California with a map of Texas. That’s where ecosystem services come in handy. Ecosystem services are the benefits provided by Earth’s ecosystems to humans such as food, fuel, fiber, water filtration, nutrient cycling, climate and disease regulation. They provide a map to align the demands of economy with the supply of ecology.

Rapid ecological change of the type we face today transfers many costs from nature to society. In a landmark study published in the journal Nature in 1997, Dr. Robert Costanza and a team of scientists found that the estimated value of all ecosystem services was at least $33 trillion. In other words, that is the cost to the economy if we had to provide those services ourselves. At the time of the study, $33 trillion was nearly twice global GDP.

Ecological Change: Threat or Opportunity?

The costs to the economy of disruption to ecosystems is climbing. An Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise and KPMG analysis of global trends such as resource scarcity and urbanization estimates that costs will double every 14 years. Last fall, McKinsey and Company showed that constrained natural resources are increasing commodity prices and volatility. Insurers Munich Re and Swiss Re report the cost of increasingly frequent and severe weather-related natural disasters, which cannot be directly linked with climate change though are consistent with anticipated impacts, is rising.

Addressing even one ecological change, climate change, is daunting by itself. In 2004, environmental economists Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow proposed 15 “stabilization wedges” – activities using current technology that could reduce carbon emissions by 1 gigaton each. A gigaton reduction of CO2 emissions, a single wedge, would require adding 4 million 1 megawatt-peak windmills (100x current capacity) or doubling fuel efficiency of 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 mpg. All 15 are necessary to hit a goal of 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2, which is still well above the 350 ppm that many advocates target.

While ecological change is likely to increase costs, it can also be a motivation for significant economic benefits. A McKinzie study produced a greenhouse gas cost abatement curve and found that the marginal cost of some measures such as building insulation and fuel efficiency cost -€150 (negative 150) per ton of carbon reduced, ie a net return. A recent report by Citi Investments and Ceres confirmed the McKinsey findings on fuel efficiency by showing that U.S. automakers can expect to earn an extra $2.4 billion with higher 2020 fuel standards.

Just Better Business

Whether it is cost or opportunity, winner or loser, depends on where you are in the economy but we can agree that most business as usual cannon continue. Our current model of raw material extraction, waste production, and fuel consumption puts us on a trajectory of ecosystem disruption beyond what we can likely adapt to.

The focus of the remaining two articles in this series will be on what traditional business is doing to use and restore ecosystems in a new way. Early adopters are finding that doing things more sustainably is just better business.

Spring in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Who knew there...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 21:26:00 -0700

Spring in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Who knew there were so many bird species in Southern California (behind the prickly pear)?

Reality Social Intrapreneur The work of social intrapreneurs –...

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 05:47:00 -0700

Reality Social Intrapreneur

The work of social intrapreneurs – professionals leading social impact and sustainability projects inside businesses – looks fun, though it can mean a long, hard slog and lot of pushing against the flow. Sound like the life for you? Then read on.

The following are anonymous quotes by social intrapreneurs from a class called Social Intrapreneurs taught by Professor Jerry Davis and former student Chris White once a year in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. I had the privilege to share lessons from the course for GreenBiz.com in a seven week series from Jan – Feb 2012 (full series here).

These are the “Reality Social Intrapreneur” quotes, some of which could not be shared because of their potential reputational impacts on employers. A total of seven intrapreneurs representing Fortune 500 and other companies across several industries presented to the class.

Enjoy and may you find success building better business through sustainability and social impact.

File link here.

The Phoenix Roundup Each section clockwise from top...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:55:00 -0700

The Phoenix Roundup

Each section clockwise from top left:

Fun

Flowers blooming at Joshua Tree National Park

Desert Tortoise at Joshua Tree National Park

Hiking The Flatiron in Lost Dutchman’s State Park

Big Bro Mark in Run for your Wife at the Broadway Palm Theater

Dave Weinglass - host and friend - descending the Flatiron

Work

Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference

Green is Green Panel Blog

CSR and Reputation Panel Blog (to be posted)

Food

Four Peaks Brewing

Dick’s Hideaway Carne Adovada

Measure and engage. According to Bloomberg’s Lee Ballin...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:10:05 -0700

Measure and engage. According to Bloomberg’s Lee Ballin and Praxair’s Riva Krut during yesterday’s “Green is Green” panel at the 2012 Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference, sustainability can be a source of productivity when it includes these two principles.

They focused on the value of rigorous measurement and engaging employees, even for engineers who Krut taught to measure the energy savings of efficiency projects they were already doing. “The lesson was communicate, communicate, communicate. It was just unobvious to our engineers that lean is green,” she said.

The company now includes lean and green training during its onboarding process for new engineers.

Read more on the Boston College Corporate Citizenship Conference blog here:

http://blogs.bcccc.net/2012/03/measurement-and-engagement-to-create-green-from-sustainability/

Find of the Week: Pop song carbon footprints. Put out my fire,...

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:30:06 -0700

Find of the Week: Pop song carbon footprints. Put out my fire, anyone? Wow, enough said. Go McSweeney!

Business + Sustainability 101: The Ecological Challenges

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 -0700

I’ve gone this far in the mini-series, Business + Sustainability 101, without explaining the ecological challenges, resource constraints, and pressing global changes that propel sustainability into the forefront of issues in our era. The series is a brief overview of the state of sustainability in business today, how it got there and why, and where it’s headed.

In part one, I described the Green Leaders like Patagonia who blazed the trail for integration of sustainability into business. In the second post I talked about several Industry Titans who make sustainability a strategic issue. This third blog attempts to outline the ecological challenge we face globally that make this relevant to business.

A first day of any class in my Natural Resources graduate program began with an inventory of environmental challenges that should be familiar to many. Climate change. Biodiversity loss. Pollution. Deforestation. Species extinction. Water scarcity. Disappearing wetlands. The litany of environmental problems is daunting and most sustainability professionals are unable to keep track of all of them.

The important point is that almost every ecological indicator we track shows a global natural system in decline. One of the largest attempts to measure the impact, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, was a four year undertaking that combined the contributions of more than 1,360 scientists from 95 countries. The research found that 60% of ecosystem services – benefits provided by nature such as pollination, climate regulation, and water filtration – that were studied were degraded or used at a non-renewable rate.

Another more recent approach examined control variables within seven global ecological subsystems and found that two were already outside of the Safe Operating Space for Humans while a third – climate change – was rapidly approaching a threshold. Finally, the World Wildlife Fund publishes a Living Planet Report every few years to measure humanity’s demand on natural resources, our “ecological footprint”. The 2010 study concludes that annual resource consumption exceeds the planet’s ability to regenerate by an estimated 50%.

Many impacts are dispersed by space and time or affect our economic and social systems only indirectly. Since the scale, complexity, and rate of ecological change of the planet can be overwhelming, it’s best to focus on one challenge: climate change.

The Only Metric that Matters

The only metric that matters is 350. Although it’s very difficult to determine the “correct” level we should set our global thermostat, many researchers say 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide is the target for atmospheric concentration to maintain a tolerable climate system. Anything above could destabilize the global climate system and release from Pandora’s box the really bad stuff we don’t want to see by the end of the century. Oh, and we passed that level around 20 years ago.

The challenge of climate change goes like this: fossil fuel combustion emits carbon dioxide, which adds to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere absorbs heat and increases temperatures. Global carbon dioxide concentrations further increase from activities such as loss of forests that would otherwise absorb carbon dioxide. Finally, ecosystems and weather systems respond to changes in temperature and are changing.

Carbon dioxide concentration is climbing. Temperatures are rising. Ecosystems change. Currently, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration continues to rise at approximately 2ppm per year. Most importantly, many of the ecological consequences we would expect to see with these changes – increasing frequency and severity of storms, decreased precipitation in some regions with increased precipitation in others, regional weather and temperature extremes – are already occurring.

Who Cares?

The loss of fuzzy animals that we all love aside, who really cares? Why should business care? These challenges are not about species loss alone, but the disruption of planetary subsystems like the carbon cycle, ecosystems, and weather. The economic and social consequences are becoming too large to ignore, even for business. The cost of action is great. But so is the opportunity, and the cost of inaction could be even greater.

Next Week: The Economic Reality

An Intrapreneur's Homage to the Sustainable Economy

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:05:05 -0700

Fred Keller, CEO of Cascade Engineering, featured prominently in the final article on my seven part GreenBiz.com series on social intrapreneurs, professionals leading social change at companies. He made a passionate argument that the green economy is well on its way that I wasn’t able to squeeze into the article. Today I bring you his fantastic quote:

“There’s evidence that we have this emerging sustainable economy:

1. There’s a growing recognition by a lot of folks that maybe our resources are not infinite.

2. There’s a growing class of consumers willing to think more about the impact of their purchases.

3. You’ve got a growing number of entrepreneurs that want to work in this type of environment.

4. You’ve got a growing number of investors that want to invest in this kind of thing.

5. Finally you have some governments that want to think about how to use business and the markets to solve some of our toughest problems.”

-Fred Keller, CEO, Cascade Engineering

Next Week: Reality Social Intrapreneur – Anonymous quotes and tips about many of the realities of being a social intrapreneurs.

Business + Sustainability 101: The Industry Titans

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:00:06 -0700

I remember reading Ecology of Commerce laying on the grass in front of my house when I was 17, awed by the possibility that business could actually be good for the environment. Exxon was still mired in a costly legal battle over the Valdez oil spill while Prince William Sound was mired in a clean-up effort. At the time the notion was radical: everybody knew that economics and environment mixed like water and oil. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who discovered a new possibility in the book.

Last week I wrote about the Green Company Leaders who proved the market and developed early sustainability standards for business. This week’s part of the mini-series entitled Business + Sustainability 101 covers the Industry Titans that followed.

Industry Titans

In the deep south in the early 1990’s a carpet company little known beyond its market rose as the first Titan. Ray Anderson, president and CEO of Interface also read the Ecology of Commerce and for him it was personal. According to Anderson’s TED Talk, Interface was specifically called out by author Paul Hawkin as a “plunderer of the earth”. He floored company executives when he decided to turn the claim on its head and begin the ascent of what he called Mt. Sustainability.

A much more public pressure prodded Nike and Walmart to begin their sustainability journey. Toward the end of the 1990’s the apparel industry was under public scrutiny and outcry for labor practices of its supply chain and Nike garnered much of the attention. A small team was tasked with evaluating social and sustainability practices of the company to make sure something like the withering attacks never happened again.

In the middle of the last decade, pressure on Walmart mounted from an increasingly organized cadre of environmental NGO’s and labor groups. Walmart eventually tired of fighting the accusations of poor working conditions and environmental degradation and decided to try a more proactive approach by announcing its first sustainability commitments in a 2006 Fortune Magazine cover article.

Many more companies launched sustainability initiatives in their own ways. GE created the “treasure hunt” to identify energy efficiency projects. Coke and Pepsi discovered a new form of competition in sustainability and tried to outdo each other with greener products and waste, carbon, and energy reductions. Manufacturing behemoths Alcoa and Dow plowed full steam into reducing carbon, energy, and water intensity of their products and Ford built the largest green manufacturing facility of its time.

Some initial commitments were too bold for the time. BP shocked the oil industry as the first major oil company to publicly acknowledge climate change. It launched a very aggressive campaign to move Beyond Petroleum, which it abandoned several years ago (and went Back to Petroleum?). In the mid 2000’s, Dell announced it would become carbon neutral and retracted this past year.

Successful Titans find ways to leverage sustainability for competitive advantage. Interface is #1 in the industry and cut greenhouse gas emissions 82% while doubling profits since sustainability became a goal of the company. Nike tied sustainability to its innovation process and discovered it could drive significant breakthroughs and performance benefits. GE’s Ecomagination program claims $18B of its revenues are generated from the eco-friendly portfolio. Walmart plans to save hundreds of millions of dollars by squeezing inefficiencies from its operations and supply chain.

These are bold moves and radical departures from the mindset of business even ten years ago. And yet carbon keeps rising, biodiversity keeps falling, ecosystems are in decline, and species are lost. We have known about many environmental problems for decades but recent science suggests the ecological challenge me be even bigger than we think. Even given these initial efforts by Green Company Leaders and Titans, the response of business may have to be bigger than we think.

Next in series: The Ecological Challenges

Dow-UM Collaboration on sustainability…a Drive to the...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:18:00 -0700

Dow-UM Collaboration on sustainability…a Drive to the Better Answer

“Drive to the Better Answer”: Dow-UM Collaboration

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:17:00 -0700

Today’s announcement of an unprecedented $10M collaboration between The Dow Chemical Company and the University of Michigan is exactly the type of next generation approach necessary to reach global sustainability. It is, as Dow CEO Andrew Liveris put succinctly, a “Drive to the better answer”.

Joined by University of Michigan (UM) President Mary Sue Coleman, the pair announced the collaboration that will attract and fund 300 aspiring sustainability professionals in their UM studies and research. “The uniqueness of this program is that it is not rooted in any one discipline,” said Coleman. “I believe it is the only way to solve problems as pervasive as the ones we’re facing in protecting our natural world.” The panel, hosted by the Detroit Economic Club, featured two current students studying sustainability and was moderated by GreenBiz Executive Editor Joel Makower.

“It is imperative to reduce our carbon emissions and human footprint [globally]”, Liveris said. His company has already reduced energy consumption 20% across the board and invested in climate, wind, and solar technology development. He emphasized looking forward toward an optimistic future and the need for more collaboration to solve the really challenging problems like sustainability. “We’ve tapped all the low-hanging fruit for ideas. Where do we go now?”

Coleman reiterated the daunting task that can only be solved through innovative approaches. “We need breakthroughs in ‘wicked problems’, the toughest global sustainability challenges – human behavior, water, land use”. The university has 19 top ten programs in fields like health, sciences, policy and a $1.25B research portfolio. She emphasized that all are critical to addressing sustainability. “We cannot win the sustainability race as a country. It is global. Everybody has to be involved”.

According to Coleman, early work by the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise and the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute were instrumental in building credibility to launch the new collaboration. Berry Kennedy, a student earning an MBA and MS in Natural Resources with the Erb Institute, says she came to UM because of the program. “I wanted to continue an education that was as interdisciplinary as the work I was doing,” she says of her early career working in Latin America on market mechanism for ecosystem protection.

A drive to the better answer requires new modes of working, new ideas and research, and a new class of professional. “We need leaders collaborating across every sector and every field of study. New ways to make this world a livable place for generations to come,” said Liveris.

#DowUM