Daily Archives: January 12, 2022

Noah Had it Easy:
The Ark of Modern Species Preservation

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.

What We Did on Our
Summer “Vacation”

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)

Pancakes in Crisis:
Climate Change Saps our Syrup

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.