http://www.SustainabilityForum.com/Blog

Or visit my personal and professional blog where I blog about Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Social Media here:

http://www.FabianPattberg.com/

See you there.

Regards,

Fabian Pattberg, Editor of SustainabilityBlog.org

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“Focussing on problems and expecting the worst will have significant repercussions on how we deal with the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.”

This is the key message from an interesting article in the Guardian this week. The article author has a fair point as well. We all need to be more positive about the future and make it happen. I know that this sounds hard. But is ist really?  This is the beginning of the article.

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‘To further trample over an already well worn quote; Martin Luther King did not begin his famous speech with ‘I have a nightmare’. As far as I know, Churchill did not paint a picture of a ‘Broken Britain’ (as the Tories’ pre-election campaign did) when his desire was for solidarity and motivation. And a recent article in the Economist points out that Britain is far from broken. In fact, statistically, in the last 15 years we have seen improvements in almost every arena bar education.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainability/blog/8

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A very powerful video on what Barack Obama should have said about the BP Oil Spill.

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An interesting article on how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). I really liked this sentence: ‘It’s important to point out that CSR isn’t about crisis management’ Very true. All in all a very interesting article.

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Back in the spring, the story of Toyota’s runaway cars looked like it would drag on for months. Then Goldman Sachs conveniently landed in the crosshairs of legislators and securities regulators, taking the heat off the automaker. In turn, the bankers on Wall Street got a reprieve at the expense of the pelicans, fish and residents of the Gulf of Mexico, courtesy of BP.

In all these cases, and the many others that have grabbed headlines in recent months, the damage has already been done. And for the most part companies have surrounded themselves with crisis-management teams and public-relations hired guns to deal with their short-term problems. But if they’re smart, troubled companies will also review their policies around the emerging field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to discover why things went so wrong, say sustainability experts. Doing so could even help avoid a repeat of their woes in the future.

Read the complete article here:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/06/14/when-things-get-messy

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Let’s hope BP are are sincere with their efforts to make it right in the Gulf of Mexico. Although sometimes it feels as if BP has been advised by people as insincere as this person played by Michael Caine:

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The current discussion about the suicides at Foxconn are a sign of the things to come for technology companies such as Apple and HP that they need to act now to provide a higher degree of transparency within their supply.

This is an interesting article from SocialFunds highlighting this challenge ahead for these companies.

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Since January, at least ten employees of Foxconn, the giant contract electronics manufacturer whose facility in Longhua, China employs some 300,000 workers, have committed suicide, most of them by jumping from the roof of the four-story dormitories in which they lived. Foxconn manufactures products for such US-based computer companies as HP, Dell, and Apple.

Statistically, the number of suicides at Foxconn is not unusual for young people in China, although the frequency of suicides this year is alarming. An estimated 90% of Foxconn’s workers, who typically work 12-hour shifts and share living quarters with up to ten co-workers, are between 18 and 24 years old.

Of course, the precise causes of the suicides of Foxconn’s workers are unknown. As Dan Viederman, Executive Director of Verite, a US-based non-governmental organization (NGO), told SocialFunds.com, “It would be inappropriate at this point to blame the suicides solely on working conditions.”

Read the complete article here:

http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/2962.html

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This is and will be a big and very difficult future topic once the climate actually goes down hill in a way we as humankind notice notably. Why? Well because the developing world will and is feeling this impact many  times as strong . Therefore topics such as access to medicine, disease prevention and access to fresh drinking water will all have a very strong relation to climate change. At least this is what I think. In any case. Here is the article about the debate.

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Bednets and drugs will influence the spread of malaria far more than will climate change, according to a study that challenges fears that warming will aggravate the disease in Africa. Many researchers have predicted that rising temperatures will cause malaria to expand its range and intensify in its current strongholds.

But unlike usual models, which aim to predict how climate change will affect malaria in the future, researchers looked at how warming affected the disease throughout the last century.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/21/climate-change-insects

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Sustainability Reporting is not easy to do lets put it that way. It is fairly easy to report on what has happend over the past 12 months within a business but putting it in perspective, making it appaling to look at and for your stakeholders to take away the messages you want to them to know about is a very different story. This is an interesting article on this challenge and how to start of in the right way.

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Sustainability reporting is not straightforward. It takes resources to gather information and communicate it appropriately. Many companies find it daunting to consider which information to communicate, how much, and to whom. Companies that earn the highest ratings for their sustainability communications have discovered several keys to producing a top-notch sustainability report.
In preparing the recent report on “Trends in Sustainability Reporting: A Close-Up Look at Bay Area Companies” (pdf), EcoStrategy Group interviewed a number of the top-performers to find out how they tackled the issue.

Read more: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2010/05/10/how-produce-topnotch-sustainability-report

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Greenwashing is and has always been a very interesting topic in the sustainability field. This article here is a good addition to the recent articles on Greenwashing:

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This week is the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. The hype is unbelievably high as companies step all over themselves to share their latest sustainability accomplishments. In general, this is a good thing and it’s wonderful to see companies competing on green.

But there is a high risk of saying something that isn’t quite true, or of overstating the truth. Because this is the time of year for somewhat self-important pronouncements of changing the world, it’s also a time for greenwash.

The incidence of actual, pure greenwash — outright, purposeful untruths about the environmental attributes or impacts of products — is probably not that high. But there’s an awful lot out there that gets close (for a truly excellent review of the key missteps that would qualify, see the Seven Sins of Greenwashing from Terrachoice).

Read the complete article here on Globe-Net: http://www.globe-net.com/articles/2010/april/21/avoiding-greenwash-and-its-dangers-.aspx

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