Thought Leadership

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation partners with Ohio Environmental Council to bring a wide variety of groups together to solve Ohio’s clean water challenges. Pete Bucher, Water Resources Director, recently shared about this movement-building approach, which includes business, agriculture, nonprofits and government, on the Foundation’s blog.

Next week I will be joining my peers at NAEM’s 2018 Sustainability Management Conference to share Intel’s story on a topic that I am really excited about – water stewardship. You may be asking why a technology company would be excited to talk about water. As we all know, water is critical to life on this planet, but you may not know that water is critical to the technology industry – from semiconductor manufacturing to data center cooling as well as office buildings (e.g., cooling towers, landscaping, restrooms, cafés, etc.). The technology that is part of nearly every aspect of our lives also depends on water.

Humanity is currently using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s ecosystems can regenerate. On August 1, humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research organization that has pioneered the Ecological Footprint resource accounting metric. Since the world went into ecological overshoot in the 1970s, D-day of August 1 this year will be the earliest.

In the past, “The CEO rule was basically keep your head down, stay out of complicated issues, because there were opinions on both sides of any issue,” Lawrence Parnell, program director at the Strategic Public Relations Program at George Washington University told the Wall Street Journal.“It’s no longer a question of if, but where, when and how to engage on these issues and what type of topics to engage on. These are new challenges and things CEOs and boards never had to deal with before, so they are struggling.”

Back in the day, corporate strategy meant defining a business mission and describing how those goals were to be reached through business practices. Today, setting a viable strategy means including many factors once considered outside the scope of traditional business planning. Brands are taking stands on multiple issues, from public, cultural questions (climate change, immigration, gun violence) to internal issues (diversity, ethics, harassment, gender pay gap).

With the 2018 hurricane season underway, Bechtel and IBM have partnered up to share lessons learned from last year’s devastating Category 5 storm in Puerto Rico and mapping their work to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

CR Experts Weigh in on the Trends Shaping Their Regions – And the World

Exploring Taproot Foundation's field-building resources, research, and tools has never been easier.

The Earth’s resources are finite, but human possibilities are not. Continuing to operate in this reality requires BOLD IDEAS, and leading companies are rising to the challenge by looking at how to manage natural resources differently, how to measure them more accurately, and how to develop products and processes that use them more efficiently. Schneider Electric estimates that commercial technologies for buildings, industrial processes and electricity production alone could move the date at least 21 days