Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Based on the belief that storytelling is the most effective way to capture hearts and minds, a new crowdfunding site for carbon offsets aims to use its platform to go beyond engaging concerned individuals.
CarbonStory wants to get companies on board to launch employee engagement programs — and perhaps even the customers of company brands — through offsetting projects of their choice within a gamification framework.
Read the full story at SustainableBusiness.com.
Why do a determined minority – often in positions of power – refuse to accept that climate change is happening despite the overwhelming scientific evidence?
A new study may provide a clue. Researchers at the University of Western Australia found that people who expressed faith in free-market ideology were also likely to reject scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that burning fossil fuels helps to cause it.
Read the full story at Environmental Leader.
Have you considered how employee engagement can drive your sustainability strategy and how you can also leverage sustainability initiatives to engage your employees and create a values-driven culture of collaboration and creativity?
While the majority of employees fall under the umbrella of not engaged (emotionally detached) and actively disengaged (negatively view the workplace), few companies even know how to engage their employees in social and environmental sustainability.
In a recent Harvard Business School Working Paper entitled “Public Procurement and the Private Supply of Green Buildings”, researchers Timothy Simcoe and Michael W. Toffel examined the impact of environmentally friendly government procurement policies on private-sector adoption of the targeted products.
The authors found that municipal government green building procurement policies that apply only to municipal buildings also accelerate the use of green building practices in the private sector, both in the cities with these policies as well as in neighboring cities. They also found that such government policies encourage private-sector investment in complementary services, which likely reduces green building costs to private developers.
In a working paper from Harvard Business School entitled “Pay for Environmental Performance: The Effect of Incentive Provision on Carbon Emissions”, researchers Robert G. Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, Shelley Xin Li, and George Serafeim analyzed the incentive structures of climate change management for a sample of large, predominantly multinational organizations, then characterized and assessed the effectiveness of different types of incentive schemes that corporations have adopted to encourage employees to reduce carbon emissions. Some of their key findings include:
In celebration of Earth Day, Harvard Business School complied a list of recent research relating to the the history, efficacy, and social responsibility found at the intersection of business and the environment. Read the summaries and download the papers at http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7239.html.
Read the full story at Environmental Leader.
Cosmetics companies need to address the environmental consequences of consumption if they are to significantly reduce their ecological footprints, Sustainable Cosmetics Summit organizers say.
Read the full story in GreenBiz.
Corporations, non-governmental organizations and other major institutions increasingly conclude that they will be more successful in attaining their individual objectives by collaborating with other partners with aligned interests. This realization has accelerated because of the emergence of a growing number of global-scale problems — water resource scarcities, challenges to producers in providing sufficient quantities of food products, limits for key raw materials in manufacturing operations — as well as a heightened understanding that no single institution has the capacity to provide solutions to these and other challenges.
Several jurisdictions in the United States have recently adopted residential energy use disclosure policies. Residential energy use disclosure is a promising policy option for a number of reasons, including (1) how it might motivate people to address valuation of energy-efficient homes in the home sale process; (2) how it can encourage energy efficiency upgrades for sellers aiming to make their home stand out in the market and/or for new buyers; and (3) how it can generate information needed for better valuation of energy efficiency improvements in a home for appraisals and mortgage underwriting.
This report is structured as a review of the four main types of energy use disclosure being implemented in the U.S.: asset ratings; utility bills; energy efficiency features; and benchmarking. This is followed by an examination of energy disclosure/rating methods that are not mandatory but provide interesting insight into issues surrounding labeling programs. Efforts to disclose energy use and energy efficiency characteristics abroad are also explored in this report, and a number of studies on the effectiveness of longstanding residential energy performance rating programs are highlighted.
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Here’s the most noteworthy finding among the spring 2013 crop of surveys and polls on Americans’ environmental attitudes: “Millennials Pretend to Care About the Environment,” a headline from DDB’s most recent Life Style Study that concluded, “When it comes to being environmentally friendly, Millennials are talking the talk, but not walking the walk.”
So much for the incoming class of citizens and consumers.
That’s par for the course, it seems. My seventh annual sampling of the crop of environmental opinion data that blossoms each year in the run-up to Earth Day doesn’t offer much reason for optimism. (Here’s a link to last year’s report, which also contains links to my annual posts going back to 2007.) The overall field of surveys, as far as I can tell, has declined over the past year or so, likely reflecting a drop in interest in the topic by marketers.
