Read the full story in the Cornell Chronicle.
Meeting the nutritional needs of current and future generations requires innovations to ensure access to healthy and nutritious food while creating equitable value chains and supporting climate and environmental sustainability.
To this end, Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability collaborated with a group of partner organizations to design the Innovative Food System Solution (IFSS) portal launched by NutritionConnect.org in May 2021.
Read the full story at Fast Company.
From stopping coal plants in Japan to pushing the Malawi government to ban thin plastics, the six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize show how much climate progress is made by grassroots activism.
Read the full story at Canary Media.
President Joe Biden has an aggressive plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy. But his administration hasn’t yet provided many specifics on how it plans to leverage public funding to drive greater private capital investment in the green infrastructure needed to reach its goals.
Bryan Garcia, president and CEO of the Connecticut Green Bank, thinks that a modern, green-tinged version of Liberty Bonds, the U.S. government war bonds from World War I and World War II, could be a valuable model for the federal government — particularly if Connecticut’s recent experience with it can be replicated at a national scale.
Connecticut Green Bank’s $25 million green “liberty” bond issuance on Thursday, its latest to support rooftop solar and energy efficiency projects in the state, was oversubscribed by nearly a factor of four, Garcia said.
Read the full story from Russell Reynolds Associates.
Russell Reynolds Associates recently partnered with the United Nations Global Compact to study the characteristics and behaviors that differentiate sustainable business leaders from other top-tier executives, the findings of which were summarized in our joint whitepaper Leadership for the Decade of Action. The article below builds upon this research to focus on the question of assessing and selecting sustainable leaders in the hiring process. Please refer to the original study for full details on methodology and findings.
Over the last 2 years (2019-2021), The Boundless Roots Community has been exploring how we can radically shift the way in which we live in response to the climate crisis. We acknowledge the need for drastic changes if we are to meet the 1.5 degree challenge. But how do we actually do it?
We wanted to get under the surface of our various efforts to create change, to better understand the critical issues that underpin shifts towards transformation and sustainable living, and improve our individual, organisational and collective approaches to change in the process. We end this 2-year journey with a wealth of insights and specific areas of potential in which we are advocating change.
April 20, 2021, noon-1 pm CDT
Register here.
Loyola University Chicago, in partnership with its Quinlan School of Business and School of Environmental Sustainability, presents a discussion of the impact of sustainability on people and communities, and the measures business can take. Speakers from supply chain, workforce development, and food insecurity will discuss training the workforce of tomorrow and the role of business in addressing sustainability opportunities in their communities.
Moderator:
Speakers:
González-Ramírez J, Cheng H, Arral S. (2021). “Funding Campus Sustainability through a Green Fee—Estimating Students’ Willingness to Pay.” Sustainability. 13(5), 2528. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13052528
Abstract: Many higher education institutions promote sustainability by instilling environmental awareness within college students, the innovators of the future. As higher education institutions face budgetary constraints to achieve greener campuses, green fees have emerged as an alternative method for universities to encourage student participation and overall campus sustainability. A green fee is a mandatory student fee that funds sustainability projects on campus and is typically managed by a group of students and faculty. We are the first to assess students’ support for a mandatory green using a single dichotomous choice, contingent valuation question and estimating the willingness to pay to fund campus sustainability using a discrete choice model. Using results from a survey at a private college in New York City, we found more support for $5 and $10 green fee values. Using both parametric and non-parametric estimation methods, we found that mean and median willingness-to-pay values were between $13 and $15 and between $10 and $18, respectively. We suggest implementing a green fee between $10 and $13 following the lower values of the non-parametric median willingness to pay (WTP) range estimates that do not rely on distributional assumptions. We hope that other academic institutions follow our research steps to assess the support for a green fee and to suggest a green fee value for their institutions
The resulting synthesis communicates how climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution can be tackled jointly within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. The report serves to translate the current state of scientific knowledge into crisp, clear and digestible facts-based messages that the world can relate to and follow up on. It first provides an Earth diagnosis of current and projected human-induced environmental change, by putting facts and interlinkages in perspective, including by using smart infographics.
In building on this diagnosis, the report identifies the shifts needed to close gaps between current actions and those needed to achieve sustainable development. The analysis is anchored in current economic, social and ecological reality and framed by economics and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By synthesizing the latest scientific findings from the global environmental assessments, the report communicates the current status of the world’s urgent issues and opportunities to solve them.
The coming decade will be one of transitions – for good or ill. How we respond to COVID-19 – particularly how governments spend their trillions – will shape our destiny going forward. The 2020s could see us transition into a world of ever more destabilising shocks, or towards a reconfiguration of the systems we rely on based on goals of equity, sustainability and resilience.
In this report, we explore some of the key dynamics that lie at the heart of these transitions. And we ask how we can make active choices now that will transform our future prospects by embedding, at the heart of our strategies and plans, the realisation that a fundamentally different model is needed. A model that puts people’s wellbeing and planetary health first, as the overriding imperatives.
Read the full story from the University of Michigan.
The virtual conferencing that has replaced large, in-person gatherings in the age of COVID-19 represents a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, but those online meetings still come with their own environmental costs, new research from the University of Michigan shows.
