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Blog | Monday August 20, 2018

Is This the Beginning of the End for Impunity?

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Wherever you live, and wherever you stand on the political spectrum, you probably believe that a significant share of the political elite in your country is irredeemably corrupt and unethical. And wherever you work, it is also likely that you know some senior leaders who do a poor job of conveying tone at the top and do not model or respect the organization’s stated values. There is plenty of evidence that once people attain power, they are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. The effects of power can even be compared to a form of brain damage: Power makes people less risk-averse, more impulsive, and less skilled at reading people and situations.

Nonetheless, impunity seems to be a fact of life. The human need for cognitive consistency goes a long way toward explaining why toxic organizational cultures and abuses of power can persist. A psychological mechanism known as the “just world” phenomenon inclines us to ascribe virtue to the powerful while assigning negative traits to the poor and powerless. 

Impunity is a daily issue in the lives of many who work in governance, risk, and compliance. Investigating your boss is usually a career-limiting move, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain an ethical culture without the remit or tools to hold senior members of the organization accountable. This contradiction has been driving efforts to amplify the independence, seniority, and remit of chief compliance officers.

But today, something interesting is happening. The structures supporting impunity seem to be growing less reliable.

The structures supporting impunity seem to be growing less reliable.

In politics, corruption has become an issue of far greater concern to voters than it was 20 years ago. A recent report in Foreign Policy found that more than 10 percent of the world’s nations have undergone leadership change in the past five years as a direct result of corruption investigations. In 21 countries, leaders have either resigned or been removed from office before their terms were scheduled to conclude. In many additional countries, incumbents are facing electoral defeat amid the perception that they are corrupt. 

To be sure, this hopeful scenario is not playing everywhere.  Allegations of corruption, whether true or false, are frequently used by political candidates to gain advantage. But the increasing use of this technique in itself demonstrates that concern about the integrity of political officials may be at an all-time high.

The business world, too, shows signs that impunity is no longer predictable. The removal of chief executive officers for ethical lapses remains infrequent, but such instances increased by 36 percent from 2007-11 to 2012-16. This trend is most pronounced among North American and European companies with high market capitalization. Researchers believe this suggests an overall improvement in governance and accountability to the public. 

Company boards have also become more willing to state publicly that a CEO was fired for misconduct, rather than enabling him or her to slip into early retirement. The #MeToo movement has occasioned significant turnover at a growing number of media organizations and consumer-facing companies, and it seems to have positively influenced corporate culture in some cases. A growing number of companies has even made a point of proactively disclosing challenges, rather than responding only to media investigations or internal whistleblowers. Voluntary disclosure facilitates the rebuilding of reputation and trust.

The longer-term consequences of these trends are, as ever, uncertain. The ability to replace disreputable leaders does not necessarily mark a sustained power shift in organizations. Still, today’s corporate leaders are on notice that immunity from consequences is no longer the status quo.

All of this reflects deeper, more profound societal shifts. The most important is hyper-transparency, which makes it exponentially harder for companies to keep their inner workings confidential. Leaked revelations about offshore tax avoidance, soft lobbying, and other standard corporate practices have helped spur concern and distaste over self-serving corporate agendas. Data leaks and hacks have also been embraced by unhappy employees as powerful whistleblowing tools that can help them subvert or sidestep non-disclosure agreements. 

Employees in some companies, particularly in the tech industry, feel empowered to demand that the C-suite focus on better alignment between corporate principles and personal values, and companies are listening intently. Indeed, the new trend in corporate activism on social issues is, in large part, being driven by the voices and will of employees—to a surprisingly greater extent than by those of customers or investors.

As societies across the world call for leaders who can demonstrate that integrity is as important to them as personal advantage, the pendulum seems to be swinging away from venerating wealth and power for its own sake and toward valuing integrity and social conscience. This is great news for honest leaders—and for everyone who seeks to drive sustainable, ethical behavior in a public or private organization.

Reports | Thursday August 16, 2018

Clean Cargo Emissions Factors 2018 Report

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BSR’s Clean Cargo Working Group^TM (Clean Cargo) is the leading buyer-supplier forum for sustainability in the cargo shipping industry. Annually, Clean Cargo discloses trade lane carbon dioxide emissions factors for ocean container transport, this year collected from 22 ocean container carriers on more than 3,200 ships that collectively represent approximately 85 percent of ocean container capacity worldwide. Our annual reporting indicates that average CO2 emissions per container per kilometer for global ocean transportation routes fell 1 percent from 2016 to 2017. Since Clean Cargo began publicly reporting data from the industry in 2009, emissions per container per kilometer have dropped 37.1 percent on average.

Several years ago, Clean Cargo published its peer-reviewed, standardized methodology and reporting system that has been adopted globally by the industry, with carriers submitting operational data from the entire fleet to BSR on an annual basis. The results produce environmental performance scorecards for each carrier, which are used to meet corporate supply chain sustainability goals by 95 percent of shipping customers who participate in the group.

Today, Clean Cargo tools represent the industry standard for measuring and reporting ocean carriers’ environmental performance globally. Clean Cargo’s 50 members benefit from these tools while sharing knowledge and best practices for cutting emissions, and they publicly demonstrate their commitment to global efforts to reduce emissions.

Blog | Wednesday August 1, 2018

Steps to Create Your Company’s Renewable Energy Strategy

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At the Global Climate Action Summit this fall, stakeholders from around the globe will meet in San Francisco to discuss how we can take climate ambition to the next level. Business can play a significant leadership role in accelerating the transition to a lower-carbon economy, and as we have seen through initiatives like the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), renewable energy can be a key component of climate action efforts.

Corporate renewable energy procurement should be guided by a defined strategy based on available options, key priorities, and ambition. To create your strategy, you must identify your company’s motivations for procuring renewable energy, adopt supporting goals and commitments, and identify available internal human and financial resources to aid execution.

These are the steps we would suggest to help you get started.

1. Assess Your Options

The first step is to assess the landscape of renewable energy sourcing options available on the market to determine what is feasible. This will ultimately determine the renewable energy options available to you.  

Current and future policies will impact renewable energy costs, incentives, and availability. The Climate Policy Tracker can be a useful tool in assessing how regulations will impact your renewable energy choices in various jurisdictions.

After narrowing procurement options based on geography, your company must consider specific site constraints. Here are some questions to consider:

• Is your real estate portfolio suitable for onsite renewable energy generation? Leased assets often pose a challenge for onsite generation, requiring companies to liaise with their landlords; however, renewable energy availability also poses a challenge. For example, a company that leases retail space in an urban locality with poor solar energy potential may not have the option of leveraging onsite renewable energy, despite a supportive landlord.
• If your real estate portfolio is suitable for onsite generation, what is the energy capacity of potential projects/installations? Companies with owned or leased assets that support onsite renewable energy generation should consider the energy capacity of any potential projects/installations and use this to calibrate their local procurement implementation. Asset type and energy capacity should be significant considerations when negotiating contract terms with potential project developers.
• What is your time horizon? Long-term contracts should not be considered for sites that are likely to be eliminated from the real estate portfolio before the termination of the power generation contract.

2. Create Your Strategy

Once you’ve determined what your renewable energy options are, the next step is to determine your ambition level and define your strategy for renewable energy. To ensure adoption and integration within your company, this should complement both your business and sustainability strategies. A company with existing energy intensity, greenhouse gas reduction, and business growth goals should design a renewable energy strategy that complements existing objectives and initiatives to facilitate execution. Available financial resources should factor prominently into this and will ultimately dictate the realistic level of ambition your company can set.

Your strategy should reflect your company’s motivation for renewable energy procurement. For example, a company seeking to grow the renewable energy market and illustrate private-sector demand for clean power may prioritize options like new onsite or regional solar installations and choose to only purchase renewable energy attributes (e.g. RECs) that are bundled with renewable power. One example of this is Intuit’s Purely Green Program, which the company launched in part to show market demand for wind energy in Texas for its business partners, employees, and customers. Adobe’s renewable energy strategy prioritizes onsite installations and PPAs, supported by energy efficiency and policy advocacy, to meet its 100 percent renewable energy goal. Anheuser-Busch InBev’s strategy aims to source roughly 75 percent of its electricity from direct PPAs and roughly 25 percent from onsite installations.

3. Identify Opportunities to Collaborate

While renewable energy procurement variables can be complex to navigate, you do not need to work in isolation. Collaborating with other companies can help you achieve your strategic renewable energy objectives and minimize the barriers to entry for procurement.

For example, you could consider partnering with a group of companies with regional operations who are willing to enter into a shared procurement contract. This approach, known as consortium aggregation, is both feasible for companies with energy demands that are typically individually too small for project developers and companies with significant energy demands that can appropriately distribute the project load. For example, AkzoNobel, DSM, Google, and Philips leveraged this approach in the Netherlands—each company assumed an equal stake in a wind PPA there. The shared contract can also be anchored by a company that assumes the majority share of the energy, leaving smaller companies to assume small shares of the overall project load.

Initiatives like the Future of Internet Power and REBA can also provide the resources and tools for companies to execute against their renewable energy strategies together. Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about how you can help increase your climate ambition with renewable energy in advance of the Global Climate Action Summit.

Blog | Wednesday July 25, 2018

How Do We Solve the Plastic Waste Puzzle?

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In May 2018, public and private sector representatives with a stake in plastic gathered in Hong Kong to discuss collaborative solutions to reduce plastic waste in Asia Pacific, including plastic design, technology, financing, infrastructure, and consumer behavior. The dialogue—hosted by The Coca-Cola Company and Swire Beverages and moderated by BSR—resulted in six recommendations for business action to address one of the most salient challenges facing the world today: plastic waste.

Over the last few decades, plastic has made life easier for many of us. It is durable and relatively inexpensive, and in many cases, plastic devices like IV bags and syringes have saved lives. However, the plastic production rate has skyrocketed—half of the plastic ever made has been produced in the past 15 years, and globally, only 9 percent of all plastic has been recycled. Approximately 150 million tons of plastic is currently floating in our oceans, and it is accumulating at a staggering rate—9 million tons per year.

Thus far, efforts to reduce waste have been flawed or insufficient. There are several obstacles to recycling plastics, including inadequate sorting processes, lack of recycling infrastructure, and limited financing. Given these challenges, as well as the range of actors involved—from manufacturers and food and beverage companies to waste collectors, consumers, and investors—the waste problem looks like a jigsaw puzzle. However, through combined efforts by all the stakeholders involved, it is one we can—and must—solve.

Focusing on the marine litter problem is treating the symptom of plastic waste, not the cause. For the time being, one of the most important steps to addressing plastic waste is to prevent plastic from becoming waste in the first place by ensuring it is recycled. To increase recycling rates, a key mindset shift is required: understanding that plastic is a commodity.

Commodities exist within markets, and right now the plastics recycling market is functioning well below its potential. This is especially the case in the Asia-Pacific region. Lacking supranational waste management regulation like the EU, APAC countries produce more than 60 percent of all the plastic that enters the oceans. In addition to the lack of regulation, many markets have insufficient recycling capacities, a weak supply of recyclable plastics due to inconsistent or suboptimal design of plastic products, poor recycling practices, and low demand for recyclable plastics resulting from the high cost of recycling versus the often lower cost of virgin (unused) plastic.

For many stakeholders, recycling plastic just isn’t worth it. It’s time we change that mindset and improve the system.

While business is just one piece of a puzzle that involves civil society, academia, and government regulation, businesses both small and large have an immediate opportunity to drive action. There are six feasible and realistic actions that businesses across the plastics value chain, and particularly in Asia Pacific, can take to help prevent plastic from becoming waste:

1. Generate baseline data on plastic use and recycling and recovery rates.
2. Innovate with alternative or zero packaging, new types of distribution, and consumer incentive schemes.
3. Consider setting voluntary standards on plastic design, which can increase the supply and commodity value of recyclable plastic material.
4. Establish cross-/inter-industry and public-private partnerships.
5. Inspire governments, investors, and SMEs to invest in waste reduction solutions through commitments on plastic use.
6. Create corporate green loans, bonds, and other financing mechanisms to stimulate the recycling industry.

What can this look like in practice? The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, the owner and operator of The Peninsula Hotels, announced a ban on plastic straws in its operations around the world by November 1, 2018. It’s the organization’s first step toward a broader commitment to transition away from single-use plastics by 2020. Additionally, a number of companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, The Dow Chemical Company, and PepsiCo have backed a US$150 million fund for solutions to the global ocean plastics problem, with a focus on recycling infrastructure investment in Southeast Asia, as part of a wider initiative called Circulate Capital.

While plastic waste should be considered a commodity market challenge, this does not mean that non-business actors don’t also have a role to play.

• Governments can set regulations on plastic composition and design to improve recyclability and support the plastics recycling industry through subsidies, tax cuts, and the provision of long-term, low-cost land for infrastructure.
• Civil society can support public awareness campaigns to educate consumers on the importance of plastic recycling; it also has an important role to play in advocating for regulatory change.
• Academia can produce localized research to inform national plastic policies and support government decision-making.
• Multilateral development banks and agencies can earmark funding for waste management infrastructure, as they have done for renewable energy in the past, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Keeping plastic out of landfill, the oceans, and the riverways is undoubtedly a complex task, with many entrance points, perspectives, and approaches. But now, with the global, political momentum on plastic waste, is the time for all actors to take action.

Read our full report on this issue, What Can Business Do to Prevent Plastic from Becoming Waste in Asia Pacific?, and get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more.

Reports | Wednesday July 25, 2018

What Can Business Do to Prevent Plastic from Becoming Waste in Asia Pacific?

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Unfortunately, efforts to date to reduce plastic waste have been flawed or insufficient, and, as a result, there are approximately 150 million tons of plastic floating in our oceans today. This report aims to provide all actors with a stake in plastic with a primer on plastic waste and recycling in Asia Pacific and a set of realistic and feasible recommendations for businesses on what they can do to prevent plastic from becoming waste. It was developed in consultation with representatives from the private and public sectors, civil society, and academia.

Keeping plastic out of landfills, the oceans, and the riverways is undoubtedly a complex task with many entrance points, perspectives, and approaches. With global momentum on eliminating plastic waste, now is the time for stakeholders to act.

Blog | Monday July 23, 2018

How to Implement the TCFD Recommendations to Enhance Your Company’s Resilience

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Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our era. The complex impacts it unleashes will produce significant new risks and opportunities for business. The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) has called on all public companies to report on climate risks and how they address them in mainstream financial filings.

Since climate risk is systemic and applies across all sectors, the TCFD recommends that companies with annual revenues over US$1 billion report climate risks in non-financial reports in preparation for the day when these systemic risks become material. Engaging with the TCFD recommendations today serves two purposes: (1) reporting to external stakeholders and (2) creating resilient business strategies through scenario analysis.

On the first front, the TCFD recommendations bring a great benefit to sustainability practitioners by potentially unifying the fragmented landscape of climate reporting, with alignment with CDP, GRI, and SASB underway. Over 290 companies and organizations now publicly support the recommendations; 18 companies have expressly committed to implement them as fully as practicable over the next three years.

But it is the second purpose—the development of resilient business strategy through scenario analysis—that gives the most added value for companies engaging with the TCFD.

"The TCFD recommendations do an excellent job of helping an organization evaluate and communicate the risks associated with a changing climate,” said Bruno Sarda, VP of Sustainability at NRG Energy. “Beyond risk mitigation, the use of scenario analysis can help an organization identify opportunities to bolster its strategic resilience and relevance, ensuring that it can thrive not only today, but well into the future.”  

Scenario analysis has been used for decades by business and government to improve decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Rather than basing decisions on single-point forecasts, under scenario planning, companies consider a set of plausible alternative futures to shape more adaptive and resilient strategies.

While we can increasingly predict the aggregate physical impacts of climate change, the secondary and tertiary impacts are inherently challenging to model. For example, it is highly plausible that drought and extreme weather events will cause large-scale human migration with destabilizing sociopolitical impacts—but this is not something that can be predicted with accuracy. Given how consequential these cascading impacts will be, business should use scenario analysis to start considering them now.

Here are our suggestions for how companies can implement the TCFD recommendations to both engage with stakeholders and improve their strategies.

1. Approach scenario analysis primarily as an opportunity to improve strategic resilience

The primary objectives of climate scenario analysis should be to grapple with the uncertainty of climate impacts, challenge a company’s own potential blind spots about the future, and modify business strategies to make them more robust and resilient. We believe firms should disclose the scenarios they are using, key assumptions contained in those scenarios, and information about plausible risks and opportunities for the business. At the same time, disclosure should not prevent an honest and challenging internal appraisal of business strategy.

As the EBRD and the Global Centre of Excellence on Climate Adaptation state, “the ultimate objective in disclosing the use of scenarios is to build investor confidence that a company is meaningfully engaged on the topic of climate change, that it is looking at a broad range of outcomes and is responsive and proactive, rather than defensive and reactive.”

2. Consider a broad range of climate risks and opportunities

We urge companies to take an expansive view of the potential risks and opportunities they may face. While much of the initial conversation around the TCFD recommendations has emphasized transition risk faced by companies in high-emitting sectors should emissions be reduced along a 2°C scenario, equal consideration must be given to the physical risks of climate change, which will be highly disruptive even if warming is held to this level.

Many of the most profound challenges associated with climate change lie in the cascading social, economic, and political changes that will result from physical impacts and are inherently hard to model or quantify. For example, climate-driven human migration, political conflict, economic dislocation, and changing disease patterns will have major implications for society and business. Scenario analysis offers an important opportunity to think about those risks and opportunities that are not easily built into current models.

3. Use scenarios tailored to the business and leverage data from diverse sources

Finally, although comparability in financial disclosures is important, scenario analysis is most effective when tailored to the specific circumstances of an individual company. An energy company may be most concerned about the uncertainty of inbound climate regulation, whereas a consumer products company may be most focused on the uncertainty of physical climate impacts on its agricultural inputs.

Each source of information, including the IEA’s New Policies Scenario and Sustainable Development Scenario, has its unique strengths and limitations. Were all companies to use the same scenarios, based on the same assumptions, they could inadvertently create the kind of economywide risk the TCFD recommendations seek to prevent. Using a diverse set of scenarios reduces the possibility that everyone will be wrong in the same way.  

While we agree companies should include at least one scenario that correlates with a 2°C world and another with a higher-temperature world, they should choose scenarios that play out the critical uncertainties that are most relevant to their businesses. It is important that these be plausible and challenging in grappling with the uncertainty of systemic climate risk and do not provide a false sense of security by ignoring the potential for disruption.

The ultimate purpose of the TCFD recommendations is to better prepare the private sector to understand and prepare for the uncertain impacts of climate change. Businesses should approach implementation not merely as a disclosure exercise, but as an important opportunity to enhance their strategic resilience.

If you’d like to discuss this in greater detail, please join us on July 26 at the Japan Conference on the TCFD Recommendations.

Blog | Thursday July 19, 2018

How Luxury Can Lead the Future of Sustainable Business

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When luxury leader Chanel published its full-year earnings alongside its first sustainability report at the end of June, the company made a bold move to leave behind the discretion that has characterized it for decades and instead embrace greater transparency. This change signals disruption in the industry, and there is much more to come. While disruption can create challenges, it also offers great opportunity for businesses to become more resilient and ensure strong future growth.

Companies across industries are facing major challenges that, left unaddressed, will have an impact on the resilience of existing business models. These challenges—climate change and biodiversity loss, new technologies and automation, and rising economic inequality—have specific implications for the luxury sector. Climate change and biodiversity loss are affecting the supply of precious raw materials, as well as the resilience of the sector’s infrastructure; new technologies and automation are redefining the manufacturing process, retail experience, and nature of work; and rising economic inequality means luxury brands will need to re-affirm their value, particularly in emerging markets.

Given the luxury sector's role as influencers and trendsetters and its reliance on well-functioning ecosystems, what is the role of luxury to enable and help drive environmental and social progress?

BSR’s Responsible Luxury Initiative (ReLI) is today launching a new report that offers a roadmap toward a resilient luxury sector and highlights three opportunities for luxury companies to invest in future success. The report, Disrupting Luxury: Creating Resilient Businesses in Times of Rapid Change, was developed in coordination and dialogue with ReLI members, who include Cartier, Chanel, Harvey Nichols Group plc, The Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Limited, IWC Schaffhausen, Kering, LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton S.A., Michael Kors Holdings Limited, mytheresa.com, OTB, PVH Corp., Ralph Lauren, Richemont International S.A., Swarovski, and Tiffany & Co.

The three opportunities for luxury brands that we have identified in the report are to engage in the circular economy, contribute a positive impact on society, and strongly articulate value to all stakeholders.

Engage in the Circular Economy

Luxury companies can engage in the circular economy, a system that endeavors to protect resources by using less, wasting less, and recycling more, in the following ways:

• Adopt regenerative sourcing practices and invest in the restoration of important ecosystems to ensure the availability of precious raw materials derived from nature, such as wool, leather, exotic wood, cashmere, and rare essential oils.
• Expand product life cycles by sourcing recycled and upcycled materials for products and by designing new business models that enhance the value of luxury products through giving them many lifetimes.
• Build on existing collaborative relationships with key suppliers to identify, catalyze, and support innovation in materials and processes. 

Contribute a Positive Impact on Society

Luxury companies can use both their core business strategies and philanthropic agendas to contribute a positive impact. They can undertake the following:

• Further support social and environmental progress by assessing how products and services affect society and the planet and using complementary business and philanthropic strategies to address key issues.
• Use the power of their brands to promote cultural change toward gender equality and thereby contribute to women’s empowerment; focus on empowering women in luxury supply chains.
• Help ensure that people working in their value chains receive a fair wage and provide training for workers to give them the skills they will need for future jobs.

Strongly Articulate Value to All Stakeholders

Luxury companies can prepare for transparency and better engage investors and consumers on environmental and social progress in several ways:  

• Set a new standard for transparency by providing more details about how their business practices affect the environment and local communities.
• Capture the attention of shareholders who are interested in sustainability and looking to invest in companies that create long-term value.
• Engage consumers more deeply on a new value proposition for luxury that fully integrates sustainability.

These opportunities do not encompass everything that luxury companies must do to be more resilient and sustainable. Like all businesses, they should look to global frameworks, like the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, for guidance on fundamental practices.

However, these recommendations offer a luxury-specific perspective on resilience that builds on the sector's specificities and strengths, such as close relationships with suppliers, the ability to experiment with more flexible manufacturing capabilities than mass-produced goods, and a traditionally long-term view of business focused on preserving heritage and brand equity. 

Implementing these opportunities will allow luxury companies to become a model for other sectors, demonstrating how social and environmental sustainability can fuel future growth, drive innovation, and strengthen brand equity.

If you would like to learn more about the Responsible Luxury Initiative, please contact us.

Reports | Thursday July 19, 2018

Disrupting Luxury: Creating Resilient Businesses in Times of Rapid Change

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Companies across industries are facing major challenges that, if left unaddressed, will have an impact on the resilience of existing business models. These challenges—climate change and biodiversity loss, new technologies and automation, and rising economic inequality—have specific implications for the luxury sector.  

Climate change and biodiversity loss are affecting the supply of precious raw materials, as well as the resilience of the sector’s infrastructure; new technologies and automation are redefining the manufacturing process, retail experience, and nature of work; and rising economic inequality means luxury brands will need to re-affirm their value, particularly in emerging markets. Given the luxury sector's role as influencers and trendsetters and its reliance on well-functioning ecosystems, what is the role of luxury to enable and help drive environmental and social progress? 

This report from BSR’s Responsible Luxury Initiative offers a roadmap toward a resilient luxury sector and highlights three opportunities for luxury companies to invest in future success. 

Blog | Tuesday July 17, 2018

Join Us to Empower 1.6 Million Women Workers through HERproject by 2022

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The products and services that keep our societies advancing depend on interconnected economies and global supply chains. Often, if you follow these chains to their very end, you will find women in factories or on farms: Approximately 200 million women work in global supply chains. From Bangladesh and China to Kenya and Ethiopia, women are at the heart of the production of many of the clothes we wear and much of the food we consume.

Yet these women face specific systemic discrimination and inequality that make their lives harder—and that weakens the supply chain. This inequality exists both inside and outside the workplace. For example, a man with the same experience and educational background can expect to make 41 percent more than his female counterparts in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, women in MENA and South Asian countries do 80-90 percent of the total unpaid care work.

BSR's HERproject is based on the belief that women can be powerful agents of change to address these inequalities. When low-income working women are empowered to make and act on choices they value, they can change their workplaces, communities, and societies for the better.

Through discussions with our global brands and partners, we have developed a new vision and model for empowering women in global supply chains. The aim of our new HERproject strategy is ambitious: With our partners, we will double our impact and improve the well-being, confidence, and economic potential of ​1.6 million women workers by 2022.

The aim of our new HERproject strategy is ambitious: With our partners, we will double our impact and improve the well-being, confidence, and economic potential of ​1.6 million women workers by 2022.

Over the last 10 years, we have brought together global brands, their suppliers, and local NGOs to deliver workplace-based interventions on health, financial inclusion, and gender equality. Having worked with over 60 brands in 14 countries to empower over 800,000 women, HERproject has become the largest workplace program devoted to unlocking the potential of women workers in global supply chains. 

We are proud to have stood with inspirational—and powerful—women around the globe as they drive major change in their own lives as well as in the lives of their colleagues, families, and communities.

But we don’t believe in standing still. The supply chains we work in are constantly evolving; the lives and conditions of women are not static, and neither is HERproject.

To implement our strategy, we are asking brands to make a major commitment to women’s empowerment. Through HERproject, we would like to work with our partners and help them to:

• Integrate women’s empowerment into their sourcing practices​;
• Support and recognize suppliers to make progress on women’s empowerment;
• Work toward a greater level of integration and buy-in at the supplier level; and​
• Collaborate with peers and key stakeholders to set the agenda for improved outcomes for women in global supply chains.

We would also like committed brands to work with us to enhance the visibility of women workers in global supply chains through their collective reach and influence​. We commit to help brands speak up, louder and more frequently, for the rights and welfare of these women in global policy debates.

It’s time for all of us to up our game and aim higher. For genuine change for women in supply chains, we need to commit and collaborate. Our new strategy outlines a pathway for us to achieve our vision together: empowered women, dignified work, better business.

We look forward to deepening our engagement with our existing partners and to welcoming new partners to these efforts. To learn more about these possibilities and to discuss your involvement with HERproject, please contact us.

Reports | Tuesday July 17, 2018

Resilient Business, Resilient World: A Framework for Private-Sector Leadership on Climate Adaptation

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Climate change represents a material risk to the private sector with profound implications across companies’ operations, in their supply chains, and in the vulnerable communities in which they operate. For the past three years, the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report has ranked climate risk high-priority in terms of both likelihood and impact. From extreme weather events, like hurricanes, flooding, and drought, to longer-term events like sea-level rise, the private sector faces a host of physical climate-related events that create risk on various aspects of the value chain. And yet, companies have the capacity to be powerful agents of climate resilience across society—if properly equipped with a comprehensive diagnosis of climate risk and tailored strategies for enhancing adaptive capacity to the effects of climate change.

This report assesses and consolidates the best available knowledge from natural and social science in the field of climate risk and resilience to present an accessible and actionable framework for private-sector leadership on climate change resilience inside individual companies, across complex global supply chains, and within frontline communities vulnerable to climate impacts.