This month’s featured webinar is a wild one! Wanda Kolo, Director of Sustainable Operations and Construction Management at the St Louis Zoo, leads this captivating presentation, which outlines the St Louis Zoo's sustainability initiatives from planning to execution. Kolo discusses the zoo’s focus areas, including waste management, water and energy use, composting, and sustainable landscaping. The St Louis Zoo is an example of sustainability in action, and this presentation details how viewers everywhere can implement some of the zoo’s initiatives in their own lives. Enjoy this webinar for a glimpse into how the St Louis Zoo is making a positive impact on communities around the world.
Why Stand Alone ESG Ratings Could Improve Reporting
While Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings are becoming more prominent with over $120 billion funneled into sustainable investments in 2021 (more than double the $51 billion from 2020), these ratings are an imperfect effort for sharing relevant information with investors.
A recent Harvard Business Review article made the argument for assigning companies a stand-alone rating focused solely on climate risk. Authors Felix and Milica Mormann believe that a climate-specific rating would help distill the complex information about a company’s carbon footprint and climate risk into a user-friendly format. They also believe that this shift would help avoid some of the flaws that currently reduce the impact of ESG ratings.
One prominent flaw of current ESG ratings is that methodologies and definitions vary between rating agencies. The Mormann’s use Tesla Motors, the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, as an key example. Electric vehicles are widely hailed as a major development in the global strategy to alleviate air pollution, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigate climate change, so it seems like a no-brainer that Tesla would perform extremely well when it comes to the environmental aspect of ESG ratings.
But while MSCI’s ESG index has rated Tesla at the top of the auto industry, FTSE rated the company’s environmental performance as zero — with Tesla falling behind oil-and-gas major ExxonMobil in terms of sustainability. This is only one inconsistency across ESG ratings that confuse investors and threaten to erode popular faith in the ESG concept itself.
We are hopeful that the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) at the United Nations COP26 late last year will unify ESG standards. Time will tell and it is clear that when it comes to sustainability efforts we do not have any time to waste.
The Need to Green the Cannabis Industry
Sustainability needs to be at the heart of every business. When we think of the cannabis industry, we may assume it is a “green” industry, perhaps images of growing a potted cannabis plant in our backyard comes to mind? But in fact, cannabis, like other commercially-grown agricultural products, can have a negative impact on local ecosystems.
So it’s exciting to see this new industry thinking about how to comprehensively address the environmental impacts of cannabis production.
Principles for the Responsible Legal Regulation of Cannabis, a new report by the International Drug Policy Consortium tasks regulators with looking at the cannabis industry from 20 different perspectives ranging from human rights and social justice to gender and inclusive and equitable trade.
Cannabis, if not properly regulated, could be harmful to the planet according to the report. But with the right land and water management practices, the cannabis industry can become sustainable.
As a crop, cannabis is water and nutrient-intensive. When farmed outside, it leads to clearing of forests and fields, high water use, poor disposal of waste, and pollution such as pesticides entering watersheds and poisoning wildlife.
Indoor cultivation does not solve all of these problems and creates a new one: high energy use. According to the report, “ the power density of indoors cultivation facilities is equal to that of data centres. In 2012 alone, the energy consumed by cannabis cultivators in the US was estimated to amount to a 1% of the total national electricity use.”
The report goes on to caution, “Unless a formalized legal market is established, growers are unlikely to follow environmental regulations. Public officials can be inconsistent in enforcing environmental norms on illegal or semi-legal plantations.”
To address these concerns, the report proposes that governments establish regulations in two important areas.
First, in a legal market, regulations should include environmental protections that all producers have to meet. To help them make their businesses more sustainable, governments should offer financial incentives to bridge the gap while farmers transition to more sustainable practices.
Secondly, governments should impose ecolabelling that helps consumers identify which companies are practicing sustainable cannabis farming. This certification would especially benefit small- and medium- businesses enabling them to better compete for customer share.
The full report can be found here: http://fileserver.idpc.net/library/IDPC_Responsible_Leg_Reg_1.0.pdf