Earlier this month, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to reduce power plant carbon emissions by 30 percent, critics were quick to rattle off tired arguments, claiming that the new standards would wreck the economy. But this time many businesses opposed these claims. More than 170 companies and investors, including EMC, Nike, KB Home, Starbucks, and […]
At the end of a breakout session at theBSR Spring Forum 2014 last week, Matthew Kilgarriff, the company secretary of Swiss luxury holding company Richemont, shared a thought: The market price for carbon is too low, he said. Companies should create internal pricing structures and charge departments for greenhouse-gas use, which would then be invested in […]
Today, 90 percent of what you own comes from far-flung regions via ocean, air, and land, yet the environmental impacts of transporting these products are not always clear. However, new approaches that increase transparency are improving the sustainability of the goods that fuel our global economy. We have worked with some of the world’s largest companies and […]
Twenty years ago this summer, Rolling Stone magazine confronted Nike about sweatshops in its supply chain, launching a series of events that led to the modern-day approach that global companies now apply to supply chain sustainability. After initially rebuffing critics—claiming that, beyond following local laws, the company could not control what was happening outside of its own walls—Nike […]
This article is the third in a series on BSR’s new initiative, Business in a Climate-Constrained World. The first article described why business must take bold action on climate change. The second article described the changes that business must make to address climate change. In this third article, we explain how BSR will help companies across our eight industry […]
BSR’s new climate strategy—through which we are launching two important new reports today, on Business in a Climate-Constrained World and the Future of Fuels—aims to mobilize our global business network, insights, and expertise in support of sustained business action on climate change. We start from the premise that all of our actions must be geared toward climate resilience, […]
When an international group of 77 institutional investors with more than $3tn in assets asked the world’s 45 largest fossil fuel companies to assess the risks that climate change poses to their business, they were aware they were asking a tough, complex question. Knowing this, investors launched the Carbon Asset Risk Initiative to spur fossil fuel companies to assess the risks […]
(CNN) — When climate scientist Rosina Bierbaum speaks, her central theme is the “roasted world” — a bleak picture of what the planet will probably look like if carbon pollution continues unchecked, leading to 4 degrees Celsius of warming by mid-century. Four degrees may not sound like a lot — but it would change our lives […]
Conversations about climate change and the insurance industry usually focus on catastrophic storms and their damaging financial ripples for insurance providers. Given skyrocketing extreme-weather losses in recent years, it’s surely a legitimate issue that should be making insurers re-think their business models. But insurers have another important role on the climate issue, which is how […]
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