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Companies Asked to Get Serious About Climate Change

A new Conference Board Executive Advisory report, “Global Climate Change: Fact or Fiction? It Doesn’t Matter, The Issue is Here to Stay,” warns that regardless of whether scientific evidence is irrefutable, climate change will have a major impact on business and can’t be ignored. A recent CERES/Innovest report concludes that business may be heading into the “eye of a perfect storm that will result from the convergence of several important trends:”* scientific consensus* increasingly aggressive government action* growing shareholder interestOn the shareholder side, they point to three trends. Awareness on the part of mainstream international investment institutions such as AMP Henderson and Friends Ivory & Sime, growing market participation and globalization of pension investment, and growing shareholder activism. Increasing public disclosure requirements reinforce these trends. The bottom line is that financial stakeholders care more than they have in the past about what companies do with respect to climate change, and companys climate change policies influence their investment decisions. Another reality the report points to is that the global economy will make a transition to a less carbon-intensive economy. The only question is how quickly it will happen and who will be the winners and losers. As if more confirmation were […]

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High Performance Buildings On Your Desktop

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Wish we’d done it ourselves! It’s been on the list, but we haven’t gotten to it yet. Now the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has given us a platform to catalog and learn about high-performance building projects around the world. The High Performance Buildings Database has been seeded with about 25 projects – most of them well known – and you can add your own. You can enter a project of any size, from any country, from a campus to a home. You can search by building type, location, size, keyword, and many other parameters. There is lots of flexibility in the depth of information you enter and in the project itself: it can simply have several notable green features or be a certified LEED project. A convenient menu on the left enables you to quickly look through the project’s features: finance, land use, site and water, energy, materials, indoor environment, images, ratings and awards. One of the profiles, Stadium Australia, served as the main arena for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. The design team employed the most comprehensive energy modeling to date for a stadium project. The building systems and materials chosen optimized energy use – passive ventilation and natural […]

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Four Major U.S. Companies Advance Green Power Markets

The Green Power Market Development Group was launched in mid- 2000 to jump start the green power market by member company purchases of renewable energy. The group was organized by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and Business for Social Responsibility with the goal of creating 1,000 megawatts of new cost-competitive green power for corporate markets by 2010. So far, the group is responsible for 15 megawatts of green power generation — enough to supply 11,000 homes. Members include Alcoa Inc, Cargill Dow LLC, Delphi Corporation, DuPont, General Motors, IBM, Interface, Johnson & Johnson, Kinkos, and Pitney Bowes. Since January 2001, four member companies have implemented or signed contracts for new green power projects: General Motors started using local landfill gas to power factories in Fort Wayne, Indiana, this February and has signed contracts for plants in Shreveport, Louisiana and Michigan. The landfill gas will provide the Indiana facility about 5 megawatts of electricity generating capacity a year. IBM facilities in Minnesota and Texas purchase over 5.4 million kWh of electricity from wind per year. IBM has a 5-year agreement to buy green power for its Austin, Texas manufacturing and development facility. It buys 5.25 million kWh per year of energy […]

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Surveys Show CSR Trend Continues Upward

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European Social Investing SurveyThe results of a European-wide social investment survey, “Green, Social and Ethical Funds in Europe,” show the market is rapidly expanding. Participants included 302 financial analysts and fund managers across 9 countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The survey was conducted by Avanzi and the SiRi Group, with the support of CSR Europe and Euronext. A third of survey respondents say they offer socially responsible investment (SRI) products now and 15 percent say they plan to introduce them. Of those that offer SRI products now, 60 percent offer them to a select group of targeted customers; only 15 percent systematically offer them to all customers. Almost half of those interviewed, though, perceive a demand for SRI products in the marketplace. When long-term performance is the same as for conventional funds, 77 percent say they prefer an SRI fund even if returns are slightly lower in the short-term. Whereas 30 percent of respondents believe social/ environmental performance affects a company’s market value in the short term, the number increases to 86 percent when looking at long-term performance. Easily accessible information on SRI performance is the main barrier to SRI expansion. 87 […]

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