A regular blog about (un) sustainable business. A focus on practical stuff, not blue sky pretentious waffle. Around 6000 regular readers, surprisingly.
A couple of weeks ago we held our first sustainable landscapes conference in London. It was a combination of conferences and a culmination of four years work in some ways. We merged our smallholders, deforestation and elements of our agriculture conferences together and somehow it worked. Huge thanks to our many sponsors and supporters of…
Can Bordeaux become a sustainable landscape for viticulture and winemaking? One top CEO thinks it can. Here’s an exclusive interview on my wine blog: http://sustainablewineblog.com/2018/10/30/thomas-duroux-ceo-chateau-palmer-on-making-bordeaux-sustainable/
A few months back, I facilitated a session with Goetz in Accra, Ghana, at the TFA 2020 conference, on rural sustainability initiatives that will scale. It was a fascinating 45 minutes or so, and his company, *Golden-Agri Resources, seems to me to be leading the way, with a few others, in this area. The evolution in…
Here’s our take on the latest in and around Soy sustainability. Proud to work with colleagues Ian Welsh and Tom Idle on this piece, although I must say I had little to do with it, other than suggesting we go more in-depth than the usual 500 words. Tom and Ian have delivered some excellent analysis…
Following my previous posts: “The ten most important issues in…business and plastic pollution/innovation“ and “The 13 most important issues in…business, modern slavery, forced labour and human rights” let’s move on to the topic of sustainable commodities sourcing and landscape approaches to sustainability. So here’s what our research came up with as some of the key issues…
Following my previous post: “The ten most important issues in…business and plastic pollution/innovation“, moving onto the topic of business, modern slavery, forced labour and human rights, here’s what our rigorous and market-tested research came up with as some of the key issues. (Excuse the click-bait headline but it got your attention) It’s not all of…
At Innovation Forum, the team and I spend a lot of time working out the complex answers to one simple question in each of the areas we work in. That question is: “What are the most difficult issues/challenges in this particular area?”. We then spend months, often longer (given events are often repeated) working that…
By Chris Eves, forestry officer at the Zoological Society of London Speaking recently, Christophe Deloire, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, stated that: “None of the main issues which humanity is facing will be resolved without access to information”. With 2017 the second worst year on record for tropical tree cover loss, now is a good…
I haven’t posted on here for a while. We’ve been busy publishing on the main Innovation Forum site, which has hugely increased traffic in the last few months. We think this is due to our audio content, which is proving extremely popular, we think because a) its pretty good and b) its a flexible format…
Reading this from WEF, “Are you breathing plastic air at home? Here’s how microplastics are polluting our lungs”, all it needs is a few credible studies to confirm this, and global textile, home furnishing and manufacturers could have a major issue on their hands, and fast. Research needed into scope of the problem, and viable…
It’s not often I sit down to write a post that could well annoy almost everyone I know. This is one of those. But it’s a risk worth taking. Someone needs to say, I think, what I am going to say here. Scott Poynton blogged about this area recently, and I had the same conversation…
First, and for a long time, we had philanthropy, and there was no need to measure that, except in cash given, and tax breaks received. Then we had early CSR, let’s say at some point in the 1980s, and that was about happier communities, some more motivated employees, the odd bit of PR and some…
Chris Meyer from the Environmental Defense Fund has put together an insightful blog post on the above topic, which is particularly timely, given this week is the TFA 2020 AGM in Accra, Ghana, where I am moderating a panel session on scaling up zero deforestation initiates, with speakers from Golden Agri Resources and Mondelez. I’ve…
For the last two years, we at Innovation Forum have held conferences on this above topic in Washington D.C. Firstly with the Pew Centre and in 2018 with the Nature Conservancy, at their offices in Arlington. Thank you for the support to both organisations. Here’s some of the anonymised notes from the conference. A couple…
As you might know, we love a good old podcast at Innovation Forum. We find they get a lot more interest and listens/downloads than text articles, perhaps because they are convenient, and human-centered. So here’s quite a few we’ve taped recently, with executives from leading companies and other experts, on a whole host of sustainability…
I'm Toby Webb, founder of Innovation Forum, a sustainability focused research, publishing and events business. I've also been a lecturer on Corporate Responsibility at Kings College London and at Birkbeck, University of London for eight years. I work with large companies all over the world and sit on the sustainability advisory board for Walgreens Boots Alliance. From 2006-9 I lead the development of UK CSR policy, resulting in the Responsibility Deals framework. I can be contacted at Tobias DOT Webb AT innovation-forum.co.uk
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