ESG initiatives suddenly find themselves in the political crosshairs. Laws have been passed in several states – and others are pending – requiring legal action against companies not considered supportive enough of fossil fuels.

There is even pressure on firms who refuse to support certain cable or wish to make greener investments.

Occasionally, a company resists being pulled down by this type of political pressure, but it isn’t easy: the gravity well surrounding today’s business climate is both deep and wide. Resistance requires courage and by no means all such companies have that.

The example of one company that did have the courage to resist and, by so doing, caused important change far beyond their own walls, is instructive for today’s browbeaten executives, who are mustering the courage to do the right thing.

Goldilocks happened on a beautiful property but in those days the criteria for such a purchase were simple and few: too big or too small? Too hot or too cold? And so on.

Today’s buyers must beware of an entirely new set of parameters when deciding where to live: too many hurricanes, or too little water? Is there an atmospheric river in the forecast, or a 20-year drought? Climate change is about to render large swathes of what has been the cradle of civilization uninhabitable, while other areas, previously covered in ice, are being prepped for cultivation.

Let’s face it, compared to today’s buyers, Goldilocks had it easy!

Corals and other marine dwellers are already crushed by so many pressures that adding sunblock to the list is simply piling on. Yet thousands of tons of the stuff is piled onto coral reefs annually, and though some brands call themselves ‘coral safe’ and various governments are banning specific ingredients, the science of the sunscreen-coral relationship is by no means clear.

There are, however, simple alternatives – hats, clothes, and umbrellas, for example – that humans, with our penchant for the new and modern, have largely abandoned.

When the ancient Hebrews crossed the Red Sea, they would have found a barrier more daunting than the chariots of their pursuers: huge masses both deep and wide of colorful, fruitful, and razor-sharp corals.

Today, though corals appear headed for extinction around the world, those in the Red Sea are surprisingly healthy and abundant. In learning why these polyps have proven so hardy while others perish, science may have learned how to save the world’s gasping and bleaching reefs.

It seems almost impossible for a large, slow-moving white balloon, seen easily through binoculars, to sail across the United States for days without the authorities’ knowledge. It happened because our high-tech detection equipment was tuned to identify fast-moving, superheated, metallic objects… a ballistic missile, say, or a MiG 29 fighter jet. Once we recalibrated the systems to include cold, white, bucolic blimps, voila! Several more were identified in North American airspace almost immediately.

The same principles apply to business, and especially to business risk. In a world reeling from a blistering pace of change, and amid radically new local and global threats, the same old approaches to risk won’t cut it. To render unknown, unseen risks visible, one must look differently. The instruments with which risk is identified must be recalibrated, the parameters widened dramatically.

Paddling giant NRS wondered what might happen if consumers knew of the company’s values.

Would revenues increase? What value would the market place on brand-level sustainability commitments vs. product-level initiatives?

Using our Customers Science™ approach, we ran scenarios using the Valutus InVEST™ model and found… well, let’s just say doing good does indeed lead to doing well, so long as people know about it.

Ideas, opinions, and innovations evolve, as do the methods for tracking them. But most of those methods are mired in media metrics, or 20th-century tracking.

But one method – ours – is E3Evolution™, a better choice for those who need to know which trends sustainability leaders are seeing, what they are saying about them, and any steps they may be taking to address them.

Just as humanity harvests only a miniscule fraction of the solar energy continually falling on Earth, we have as yet to make use of the incredible kinetic energy produced by the world’s waters. The Florida-to-North Carolina section of the Gulfstream alone offers an estimated 163 Terawatt hours per year in renewable, carbonless power, and there are prototype turbines already in the water ready to cable that power to shore.

There are challenges, certainly, but with oceanic currents touching every inhabited continent, a source of free power is about to be available to all.

Uniquely adapted to low-oxygen, high-saline environments, mangroves have historically populated, and protected, exclusively equatorial and sub-tropical shorelines.

But with sea levels beginning to submerge coastal communities and crops around the globe, drastic action is needed to protect as much coastline as possible – including in the temperate zone.

Happily, mangroves are already marching northwards, and that march is being encouraged by global warming, which is opening up new areas where mangroves can thrive. Unhappily, they are also under threat from human activities.

Those in what has long been called the ‘temperate zone’ are well-schooled on the impact of wind chill, which measures how cold it feels when cold temperatures and wind are factored together. This February’s historically cold blast brought with it wind chills that broke records across the Northeast and threatened the life of anyone who ventured out without proper gear.

But while wind chill is known to most, few are as aware of the Heat Index, a measure not just of hot temperature but of how hot those temperatures feel when humidity and other conditions are factored in. The Heat Index acts as a predictor of physical impacts every bit as deadly as wind chill.
 
As the planet warms, and heat waves increase in frequency, duration, and intensity, the Heat Index is about to become standard protective equipment for those venturing outdoors.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo / Unsplash “A thousand times have I sought to find the element that makes thecharm complete… That I may bid them enter the toys and mannikins.”– The Master Toymaker, Babes in Toyland, by Victor Herbert In Victor Herbert’s Toyland, the Master Toymaker must finish Santa’s toys in time for Christmas and, since each…

In an inescapable prison, with daily torture and probable death looming, one man hashed out a paradoxical approach to survival: see the unwinnable situation exactly as it is; yet never lose faith that, in the end, you will prevail.

Climate watchers are finding that this middle path, a slender slope between optimism and pessimism, is a paradox that applies perfectly to the latter Anthropocene.

Christmas trees are creatures of the forest no more. Saplings and trees by the millions are now carefully tended on dedicated Christmas-tree farms.

But with heat waves becoming more frequent and intense, tree farmers are taking a beating.

Luckily, both farmers and scientists have a few tricks up their sleeves.

In our innocence, we ate Cadbury Eggs, drank hot chocolate, and made S’mores by the campfire without a pang of guilt.

Alas, cacao, the base material for chocolate, has proven incredibly problematic. Issues such as deforestation and child labor have persisted despite various pressure campaigns and commitments.

But there is, finally, progress on both the public and private fronts.

No doubt our favorite bonbons will taste that much better once these issues have been resolved, and at last there’s progress.

All was quiet at Twitter until new owner Elon Musk made it so anyone with eight bucks and a grudge could receive Twitter’s “blue check” verification without actually being vetted, leaving companies vulnerable.

As we all know by now, it didn’t turn out well.

Most firms have no comprehensive framework for vulnerability, but Valutus does: the V Model.

The SEC’s new proposed rule mandates scope 1, 2, and – with exceptions – scope 3 GHG reporting along with reporting of other climate-based investor risks.
But aside from better informing investors, this will make it easier for companies to do things the sustainability community has long been screaming for: begin working towards meaningful science-based targets, (SBT); plan effective ESG strategies; and bring sustainability professionals into C-suites and boardrooms for keeps.

Hi mom, hi dad. It’s us, the kids born in 2022, writing to you from 2095. As it turned out, we’re living through the IPCC 6th Assessment’s worst-case: the hellish ‘very-high emissions,’ scenario’ for 2080-2100.

It’s not the zombie apocalypse, mom, but it’s bad. How bad? What are life and climate really like at the turn of the 22nd century? Well, well, glad you asked.”

The planet finally came together in Nairobi, Kenya, to tackle the billions of pounds of the incredibly useful yet ubiquitous and everlasting polymers.

With macro, micro, and nano plastics in every inch of the global environment, including human organ tissue, it’s a critical problem to tackle. They made a great start, and came up with the world’s first binding plastics treaty, currently being finalized.

The problem? Production, the most problematic plastics issue, did not appear to be on the table

All modern businesses are faced with the difficult challenge of capacity, puzzling out how to accomplish much more with much less.

We’ve been hard at work inventing a broad portfolio of Data, Metrics, and Tools sustainability professionals can use to help their companies and clients Do More Today. Come on in for a tour of our workshop.

This February, two additions to the costituzione made environmental husbandry a pillar of Italy’s values as a nation. Article 9 now includes “protection of the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems, even in the interest of future generations,” as a fundamental principle.

Using hyperbole when describing latter-day climate events creates the illusion that such events are still, as they used to be, rare.

Since humans plan and prepare for norms, not anomalies, such misnomers can feed the notion that climate change isn’t really happening… it’s just another 100-year storm. Such a discontinuity, as futurist Alex Steffen calls this phenomenon, requires people to reconcile an image of the world that was there with the new reality of the world that is.

Once humans began walking upright and making Chevrolets, they could accomplish what only volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and changes in Earth’s orbit have done before: rapidly melt the cryosphere. The cryosphere, a critical and beautifully balanced component of a delicate ecological system, is creaking and groaning and, most importantly, thawing. Levels of carbon in the atmosphere from human activity are so dense that the next ice age, due in some 50,000 years, has been rained out. According to scientists, it won’t begin for at least another 100,000 years hence, and growing.

Climatologists are teasing out the extraordinarily complex systems and conditions that have obtained over the millennia. Measuring gas levels, air currents, saline conditions, flora and fauna, volcanic conditions, temperatures, meteor strikes, and more.

They are doing this in order to understand how the climate is influenced by environmental factors, and to use that information to address how we can best manage the climate of today – and the even more dynamic one perhaps still to come.

But wait, some of these conditions happened thousands, even hundreds of millions, of years ago. How are they getting their data? CSI: Climate Sleuths Investigate.

Noah, apocryphally tasked with saving the world’s fauna, received some highly detailed instructions about how to do it.

Today, more than a million plant and animal species are slated for extinction and we’re scrambling to understand how to preserve them.

Seed banks, zoos and aquaria, breeding programs, and in vitro embryos are some of the tools in use to keep as many of those creatures viable as possible.

Whether or not those are enough remains to be seen.

Before looking forward, let’s recap the things on our front burners in 2021.

The intensity of global sustainability efforts has placed its lack of useful professional tools into stark relief. Companies, already struggling with capacity, deserve a complete set of timesaving, flexible, interactive tools.

Valutus added several such arrows to our quiver over the last year, designed to cut weeks or months of difficult work from tasks like performing materiality analyses, setting carbon targets, determining how to make commitments more credible, and aligning a corporation’s promises with its purpose and performance.

We also enhanced the ability to quantify customer preference for sustainable products and companies using Customer Science™, and put hard dollar values on that preference via the InVEST™ model.

And we crafted the most useful and up-to-date way to stay on top of what stakeholders expect (Stakeholder Science™), what issues are accelerating toward us (VIEWS™ and E3Evolution™), and how seeing over the horizon can help craft more robust scenarios and strategies (Scenario Science™).

Plus, we revisited and updated our analysis of emerging risks and coined the term “Total Carbon Ownership” for the increasing tendency of regulators, customers, and the legal system to hold organizations accountable for their contributions to the climate crisis. (For more on what Valutus has been up to, and our tools and programs designed to create a surge in capacity, tease out sustainability’s low-hanging R.O.I., and dramatically increase speed on all the above, you can read more here)

Fictional thieves went after Canada’s strategic maple syrup reserve in 2005 and, ten years later, real syrup desperados made off with a substantial chunk of it. In 2021, however, it was climate change that stole the sweet stuff.

Climate ramifications meant a drop in production and half the reserves were emptied to cover the shortfall.

The historical range and output of the sugar maple – from Tennessee to central Québec – is now at risk, as are flapjacks everywhere. There is, or may be, still time to keep this condiment in its proper latitudes but determining where the sap runs depends on us.

A substance called lignin gives wood it’s brown color and its opacity. Yet apply a little heat here, a pinch of vacuum there, a sprinkle of simple kitchen chemistry just so, et voila! A substance almost as clear as standard glass but stronger, more shatter-resistant, and generating almost no CO2 or dangerous chemical residues compared to glass.

The value of advance notice, to handle risks and find rewards, hasn’t changed. The trick is to gain that advantage, but how?

The answer, we believe, is Stakeholder Science™. It was designed by sustainability and materiality experts for exactly this purpose, and is comprised of interlocking, proprietary services and methodologies that, together, offer rich context, data, and strategy
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They illuminate the ‘now’ while scanning the horizon and reporting what’s coming in real time, along with strategies designed to meet it.

What happens when a company has more demand than capacity? Then again, what would happen if the entire field of sustainability had more demand than supply?

Fortunately, both issues can be addressed with an elegant four-part solution: blazing-fast tools; better strategic information; catalytic techniques that amplify impact; and valuation showing that the ROI from more investment in capactity is more than worthwhile.

A quiver full of such techniques can allow companies and sustainability executives to do much more with the capacity they already have, and to expand capacity so they can do even more.

Anyone who’s changed a tire while semi-trailers roar past, or stood at the entrance to a subway tunnel as the train approaches, knows how much wind energy these machines generate. Yet that force blows wastefully away, dissipating in some field or side-tunnel.

What if, instead, we harvested this energy to light our homes and run our machines?

Turns out the cost of upright windmills – rather than the behemoths of the countryside – is quite low. The cost of the wind? Free as air.

The electrical properties of certain bacteria have been studied for a long time. But now, it is believed the critters living and creating biofilm mats in certain Yellowstone thermal pools could be made to generate enough electricity to power small electronic devices. They could do this in some of the harshest environments on Earth, while gobbling PCBs and other environmental toxins for lunch.

It may read like science fiction but, down the road, we may be powering our phones and computers with these microscopic, pollutant-munching, electron-streaming microbes.

“The pilots’ association … seemed simply indestructible. And yet … in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting, were things of the dead and pathetic past!“ – Mark Twain (1883) When Simple Tools Were EnoughWe’re heading to an important meeting in heavy traffic, unfamiliar terrain, a…

For all our elegance of design, the deconstruction of our buildings invariably ends in massive piles of toxic rubble.

Architects and ingineers are working to unbuild our structures as thoughtfully as we build them.

The useful lives of such Reversible Buildings transcend market conditions, making them far safer investments than standard structures.

The question is, will we take the wrecking ball to our current model of construction?

Rice is the single most essential food crop on Earth, the staple food of billions. Yet around the world, many rice varieties – and millions of other plant species – are being sorely tried by climate conditions they aren’t genetically adapted to.

Still, some varieties can manage higher temperatures, wetter or drier conditions, and various elevations, better than others.

Within its slender curves, Vietnam boasts temperate zones, tropical rainforests, mountain highlands, monsoon-swept flatlands and – to the south and east – more than 2,000 miles of corrugated coastline. In other words, it’s an ideal place to search for such varieties.

This is not an academic exercise. Whole populations may soon be dependent upon the success of such a breeding program.

In early 2020, we forecast the coming legal challenges to unsustainable behavior in Blame: The Worm Will Turn. That April, almost exactly a year before the landmark legal decisions described below, we wrote about forensic climate accounting, saying: As costs and damages from human-driven climate events continue to rise dramatically, so will lawsuits against Big Carbon industries…

In the next few years, hundreds of millions of people are going to be underwater without creative solutions to hold back, manage, or adapt to higher sea levels.

For submerged or chronically engulfed communities to survive, they will require homes that can withstand such conditions.

Where relocation is impractical or impossible, floating homes are an obvious part of the solution

Paddling giant NRS wondered what might happen if consumers knew of the company’s values.

Would revenues increase? What value would the market place on brand-level sustainability commitments vs. product-level initiatives?

Using our Customers Science™ approach, we ran scenarios using the Valutus InVEST™ model and found… well, let’s just say doing good does indeed lead to doing well, so long as people know about it.

Carbon emissions related to buildings – already a nightmare – are expected to double by 2050 if action at scale doesn’t occur.

But what if skyscrapers could be turned into full-scale solar farms?

Humanity has the materials and the technology to do this. Does it have the will?

While all companies have climate footprints, some have much bigger feet. Which is why having the heavyweights on board is necessary.

One of these, Danone, has now committed to putting €2 billion-plus into a “climate acceleration plan.”

Any realistic chance of reaching the IPCC’s deadline for carbon will require more – many more – initiatives like this.

Even so, every company that jumps on the pile is helpful

There is only one area of the globe left which is largely free of airborne plastic: the Southern ocean.

That’s bad news for the rest of the world as the very air is infested with micro- and nano-plastics on a scale that is somewhat shocking.

Few, if any, are taking aim at the source of all the mischief: microfiber textile manufacturers.

Flat-soled sandals with a thong are by no means new but the vast majority are made from polyurethane foam and stay in the environment for centuries.

Algae flip-flops meanwhile, are utterly renewable, carbon-storing, and biodegrade as quickly and easily as the organic plant material they’re made from.

Could there be alternatives to concrete? Materials that did not produce 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions and require enough sand to make a band more than 30m high by 30m wide around the earth?

Short answer: yes.

Some 800-million people lack electricity globally. Many sub-Saharan Africans do not have access to either natural gas stoves or electric burners, so they cook with charcoal, which is severely damaging to both the climate and human health.

Now, several startups have begun offering affordable pay-as-you-go stoves and phones, expanding access to electricity, communication, and safe cooking methods.

Land, while it contributes carbon to the atmosphere, is in fact a tremendous carbon sink. Rocks, trees and foliage, peat and soil, all can store immense reserves of carbon. With better husbandry of soil, forests, croplands, and water, we could do an untold amount of good for the environment.

The two sides of the land-climate coin, the very peril that may be our salvation, is that so many of the solutions on land are so intrinsically simple.

Any threat to the rice yield will affect not only those who depend on it now, but also the 2.5 billion humans we expect to welcome by the end of this century. Yet the conditions that dramatically increase yield and significantly reduce methane, are the same conditions that can lead to a potentially far more serious climate problem: N2O.

Why write a book focused on value and values? And why should we be talking about the benefits that come from acting on values; isn’t doing good its own reward? Shouldn’t we leave financial benefit out of it? The short answer is: no. Absolutely not. Many companies freely acknowledge there are huge problems that need…