Episode 187: The WRI director on sustainable food systems; the lifecycle of corporate commitments
Plus, how reporting can help investors and more on China's Belt & Road Initiative.
Week In Review
Tune in around 4:37 for commentary.
Features
The director of the World Resources Institute, Dan Lashof, on how to create a sustainable global food system (15:30)
How do you feed 10 billion people while preserving biodiversity, maintaining land to store carbon and keeping biomass at play for our energy systems? It's about responsibly using our global land budget, says Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute for the United States. Much like a global carbon budget, managing the global land budget is about figuring out the most productive use in terms of growing food and sequestering carbon for different acres of land. Lashof discusses how to implement solutions for a sustainable food system, from behavior change, market fixes, policy levers and more.
How can reporting help investors? Make it value-based (22:29)
Sara Bernow from management consultancy McKinsey recently published an article investigating how sustainability reporting can help investors. There are three things, Bernow says: Investors are increasingly conscious of sustainability and financial performance; investors still struggle to make decisions from companies' sustainability reports; and alignment of reporting standards is seen as the major opportunity to close this gap. Bernow explains the challenges and opportunities, from materiality to risk to measuring.
GreenBiz's editorial intern, Cyan Zhong, on a summer of reporting on corporate sustainability (30:24)
Ever wonder what happens in the GreenBiz office? Northwestern Medill school of journalism graduate student Cyan Zhong found out. She spent her summer reporting on corporate sustainability and just released last week her heavily researched final article on the lifecycle of corporate sustainability reporting. From Citi to Adobe to Intel to Ingersoll Rand, she found that companies wanted to tell the story of their goals. Many had hit them earlier and were setting new ones, while others had set ambitious ones and were on track to meet them soon.
*Music in this episode by Lee Rosevere: "Credit Roll," "Curiousity," "Late Night Tales" and "Here's the Thing."
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