Uplift Lifts & Bits - September 2022
September 2022 - In This Issue:
80% Of Companies Are Flunking “Net Zero”
Social & Environmental Justice: A Path to Dual Impact
50 Million in Forced Labor: It’s Time For Due Diligence
Patagonia: Putting All Their Money Where Its Mouth Is
Lifts & Bits
80% of Companies are Flunking Net Zero
“Net zero” has become both a climate action buzz term and an ambitious emissions goal for companies around the world. It is achieved through a corporate balancing act: first reduce greenhouse gas emissions and then “offset” (or cancel out) the remainder via tree planting programs, carbon capture, or other carbon sequestering initiatives.
More than 700 multinational companies have pledged to achieve net zero by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement targets. However, a recent study has shown that of the 55 largest U.S. companies that have publicly committed to net zero, 80 percent received a D or F rating for failing to show progress or provide detail on their carbon reduction strategy. Reducing emissions is not a simple or quick process, and companies can waste time and lose credibility if they promote their commitments before building a strong data-based strategy. With April’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal on climate-related disclosures, publicly held companies would be required to disclose the steps that they are taking to achieve carbon reduction commitments.
The following are five considerations for companies to set the right foundation for a net zero pledge.
Know Your Corporate Emissions Footprint. By measuring your corporate carbon footprint across your value chain, the full scope of greenhouse gas emissions and hot spots become clear.
Envision Short- and Long-Term Strategies. Determine the actions with the highest feasibility and impact to be taken in the next five to ten years to reduce emissions. Then, strategize long-term targets for the harder-to-reduce.
Prepare to Emphasize the Business Case. Buy-in is critical. Emissions reduction strategies require a committed internal cross-functional network. Prepare a strong business case for this work and get ready for relationship-building and enterprise change management.
Beware of Low-Credibility Offset Projects. Offset projects pull emissions from the atmosphere through reforestation, renewable energy, and other solutions. Purchasing offsets should only occur after reducing your company’s emissions as much as possible. Increased scrutiny of these projects also requires your company to select projects with strict criteria to ensure emissions are actually removed.
Social & Environmental Justice: A Path to Dual Impact
People often think of racial equity, social impact and environmental justice as siloed issues, but they’re connected. The lack of a healthy environment has a more pronounced negative impact on the health, well-being and safety of communities of color, those experiencing poverty in inner cities, and under-resourced neighborhoods.
Under-resourced neighborhoods are more likely to live closer to manufacturing facilities, highways, and polluted waterways. Globally, the effects of climate change and increased natural disasters make it more challenging for developing countries to recover, which plunge those countries further into poverty and instability.
Conversely, communities with more greenspace are more resilient against the negative effects of client change and related natural disasters.
So how can social impact and sustainability teams work more closely together?
Find alignment in each others’ goals. Social Impact and sustainability teams should create consistent touchpoints to talk through their objectives, goals, and look for places of alignment.
Determine where “human capital” can support. Think about the environmental goals that may require employee volunteers to support. Planting trees, supporting biodiversity, or shoreline restoration programs are only a piece of the sustainability puzzle, but many of these programs require volunteers to support.
Find external partners with the appropriate programming. Align with nonprofit organizations that have environmental and social justice projects that your company can support with financial donations, employee volunteerism or corporate advocacy.
Collect KPIs, report your actions and tell your story. Decide on shared goals that both your social impact and sustainability teams can work to achieve together. Then, embed KPIs into grants, internal and external advocacy campaigns, and volunteerism. Think deliberately about where you report your contributions and tell your story through the lens of your employees and nonprofit partners.
50 Million in Forced Labor: It’s Time for Due Diligence
Globally, there are more people in forced marriage, labor, and migration than there are people in the state of California, according to the new Global Estimates of Modern Slavery report by the ILO.
Director-General of the ILO, Guy Ryder, said: “Nothing can justify the persistence of this fundamental abuse of human rights. We know what needs to be done, and we know it can be done.”
According to the report, modern slavery has risen significantly in the last five years. 10 million more people were in modern slavery in 2021 compared to 2016 global estimates.
Forced labor and human-trafficking is a part of most corporate supply chains. Business has a critical role to play in reducing it by implementing a human rights due diligence process to identify and address human rights risks linked to your operations, products or services, and supply chain.
How does your company start to do this?
Start here:
Identify and assess the risk of actual and potential human rights impacts;
Integrate, plan and act on findings from impact assessments
Track the effectiveness of actions and measure the impact of processes;
Communicate to all stakeholders how the impacts are being addressed.
Patagonia: Putting All Their Money Where Its Mouth Is
This month, Patagonia put all of its money where its mouth is, demonstrating true authenticity to the brand and the purpose of the company. Now, Earth is their only shareholder.
Patagonia's Founder, Yvon Chouinard, and his family fundamentally changed the ownership structure of the company and ensured its legacy by transferring the voting stock of the $3 billion company to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the non-voting stock to a private foundation focused on addressing climate change.
Patagonia has a reputation that has long been admired. It comes from deeply rooted values that the company applies to how it operates, what it supports, and what it says. Standing up against the climate crisis is not a side initiative within Patagonia, it’s centered and foundational to who it is. The Chouinard family's decision to give the company's profits to the planet is another action in a long line of authentic leadership that we've seen from Patagonia. And that inspires us at Uplift.
Uplifting News:
Uplift Welcomes Dwayne Ferguson!
We are excited to welcome Sustainability and Social Impact Graduate Intern, Dwayne Ferguson. Dwayne is an environmental science professional with experience in addressing economic, social, and environmental issues. While at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Dwayne studied the spatial impacts of industrial facilities on the soil lead concentrations of parks and recreational spaces.
He also participated in youth community outreach where he assisted in fostering and exploring the environmental science identities of underrepresented middle and high school students within the Metro East area of the greater St. Louis metropolitan area. Through these experiences, he has developed skills that help him understand how environmental decisions can be made with an equity lens.
