Faye Turner
7 min Read Time | September 25th 2020
If you have not heard of Grist, they are an independent nonprofit, media organization that is dedicated to reporting and stories focusing on climate solutions and a better future.
We spoke with their writers about the downfalls of the buzzword and how we need to do more to truly live up to the hype.
We've shared a short extract of the article here and you can also read it in full by following the link below.
"The fantasy of saving the planet via ecoconsumerism and other individual measures has long since given way to a clearer vision: Effecting positive change for people and the environment requires action on an enormous scale.
Governments have a crucial role to play, and individuals can help by holding their politicians accountable. But to give humanity a shot at limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and incorporating equity into the equation, big companies will also have to step up.
That’s because the lion’s share of damage to our planet is being inflicted by corporations. Since 1983, some 71 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to 100 companies, according to a 2017 report by the Climate Accountability Institute. Not surprisingly, energy companies are the biggest culprits, but businesses in other sectors aren’t all in the clear. For example, the top 15 U.S. food and beverage companies generate nearly 630 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year — a volume that makes this group a bigger emitter than the entire country of Australia.
One intriguing new approach harnesses the power of collective wisdom to evaluate the environmental and social impact of companies. Impaakt is a collaborative platform that invites people to research and rate companies based on standardized impact analysis methodologies.
It was launched in 2017 by three founders — two of them from the finance world — who were frustrated with the insider-y tendencies of sustainable investing. Their vision is that crowdsourcing information about corporations’ impacts, over the long term, gives a more accurate picture of the ways in which companies are helping or harming the world. And they say these more robust, objective, and reactive data sets are something that investors are already eager to use in order to make more socially and environmentally impactful financial decisions."
Read the full piece here.
With the right investment companies having a positive impact on the planet are able to flourish. Our community forms part of that mission by measuring their impact.
