Now I'd like to introduce today's speaker, Pamela Matson.
Professor Matson is Dean of the Standford School of Earth, Energy, and
Environmental Sciences,
as well as an internationally recognized interdisciplinary earth scientist,
academic leader, and organizational strategist.
Her research focuses on the consequences of agricultural intensification,
land-use change, and nitrogen deposition for ecosystem and
the atmosphere, and on sustainable development issues in developing regions.
Working mostly in the tropics, she and
her colleagues have identified the negative consequences of deforestation and
intensive agriculture for the global and local atmosphere, freshwater, and
marine systems and are working to develop new approaches that reduced those impacts
while maintaining human livelihood and well being.
She also works on the vulnerability of food and water systems to climate change.
And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Pam.
Welcome.
>> Welcome. Thank you very much for being here.
I'm glad to have a chance to talk with you this morning.
I'd like to talk about a framework and an approach for pursuing sustainability,
and what I'm going to do is start with a little bit about motivation,
why would we be doing this, why do we care?
And then provide a framework for analysis and decision making,
a framework that really anyone, any leader could use.
I'll talk a little bit on why this is really hard and then add a bit about
the tools that we can use to help make good decisions for sustainability.
So first of all, let me start with the question.
There we go.
Let me address the question, what does sustainability mean?
Of course this is the term that's used by many different people in
many different situations and have different meanings.
But there are a couple that matter to us in this context.
It really emerged initially from the UN and from an ongoing
discussion about how to help the poorest countries in the world develop.
And in develop, well, socially and economically.
Going back to the Brundtland Report in 1989,
our common future basically said, look if we're going to meet the needs of people,
we're going to be working on that very hard right now.
How do we do that and still not forego opportunities for the future,
not compromise the future ability of people to meet their own needs?
And this has been worked down very, very hard over many decades.
Today, we have a new set of sustainable development goals that the UN put
together last year through an engaged stakeholder set of discussions.
And people, and organizations, and
institutions around the world are working for those goals.
So that's sustainable development.
But now, what about corporate sustainability?
This is another major emphasis that has engaged lots
of corporations around the world over the last couple of decades.
We think about the three legged stool, and the triple bottom line, or the three E's
to represent the fact that corporations are now trying to make decisions that make
sense economically in terms of profit, but also socially, and environmentally.
And in many ways, this is now relevant to the EFC value system
that many corporations are placing on their operations.
So why do businesses engage in this?
Lots of reasons,
a lot of reasons having to do with internal business sustainability,
with the well-being of the company in both the short and the long term.
Lots of companies have engaged for efficiency savings,
it saves a lot of money by using resources more efficiently.
Many are identifying growth opportunities in new markets that
are related to using scarce resources more effectively for humans and human needs.
There are reputation issues.
There's certainly one way to attract, recruit, and retain motivated
employees who care about the world, and lots of elements of risk management.
But I think increasingly corporations are buying into this,
they are engaging in this because they are concerned.
They and their leaders are concerned about the well-being of people beyond their own
corporation.
So it's about well-being then in both cases.
So I think we can, in a sense define sustainability
with a goal of well-being of people today and
in the future of companies in this next quarter, but in the longer term.
And of institutions,
and organizations, and people here, but also all around the world.
That's the definition we're using for sustainability's goal.
So we're talking about then well-being and then we can ask a question,
what does well-being mean?
And there's been an international conversation about this.
What are the constituents of well-being?
And absolutely at the top of the list are material needs.
How do we meet the energy, and food, and water, and shelter, and
material needs of people all around the world?
But there's also well-being associated with access to health care,
with access to education, with access to economic opportunities.
And to the opportunities to live well and to make profits,
and security, freedom of want and fear, and so on.
These are all on the list.
And when we make a list like that,
we can then ask how well are we doing in that list?
How well have we succeeded so far in meeting the needs of people?
And there's a lot of progress that's been made.
We know, for example,
that more people have access to more kilocalories today than ever before.
So we're eating better.
More people have access to healthcare than ever before.
So infant mortality rates are in decline,
the death of children under the age of five, death rates have declined.
The death rates of women in child birth have declined, lots of indicators there.
And in terms of education, the literacy rates have just skyrocketed.
Most children today can read.
So lots of progress, and maybe the best indicator for
that is to look at life expectancies at first.
And when we think about that, look at the graph here,
it shows life expectancy has changed from 1950 to 2010.
In the developed countries of the world,
we're now living 80 years or longer on average.
But in every country around the world has
seen some increase in life expectancy, so that's a very good signal.
But you can also see in this graph the real problem, and that is a huge disparity
between people living in the wealthiest countries of the world and
people living in the very poor parts of the world.
And that disparity shows up in a number of different areas.
We have today a billion people who can't read.
They're mostly adult women.
We have a billion without adequate shelter or access to safe water,
or to sanitation, or modern forms of energy.
Almost a billion people go to bed hungry a lot of times.
And that's today, so a huge challenge there.
But the planet is still growing, our population is still growing.
So let's take a quick look at that to get a sense for the issue.
So homo sapiens have been on the planet for a couple hundred thousand years.
But just over the last 7, or 8, 9,000 years we've gotten to grow.
And it's because of at first, because of settled agriculture,
because of the domestication of animals, because people were living in settlements.
And so
by the time of Christ we had something like 300 million people on the planet.
We had grown, we continue to grow very slowly with more and
more people living in areas and run into some problems like the Black Plague.
But in the 1800 everything changed.
Our population growth absolutely took off incredibly quickly,
and in fact, we are still growing.
But we're not growing exponentially anymore.
We are quite clearly going to level off at a global population
level of 11 billion people or so.
Probably towards the end of this century or the early part of the next.
That's a lot more people on the planet that we don't have today,
whose needs are going to have to be met.
Whose well-being is a concern for all of us.
Now that population is not distributed evenly all around the planet,
and the growth and change in it is not distributed evenly.
So, in this figure you can see the red line towards the bottom
is the population in the developed countries of the world.
You can see they've leveled off, they're not growing.
The green line shows the population changes in the less
developed countries of the world, like in this case China, and India, and Indonesia.
Growing very rapidly at first, now within a decade, or two, or
three of leveling off.
And then in the bottom purple line you see the continued increase in
population growth in, what are the very least developed areas of the world.
The countries of Sub-Saharan Africa for example.
So we can look at that, and see where the changes are occurring,
and where people will need the most new resources, and
will need to work for well-being.
The other point about this slide is that, or
not in the slide actually is that lot of these people are living in cities now,
more than 50% today, probably more than 70% to 80% by the end of the century.
And even as population is slowing down and stopping,
population growth is stopping, consumption is continuing, it's increasing.
And that is good because many people right now don't have access to enough things
in the world.
And, many people around the world are moving into the middle class.
Though consumption will increase as well.
So you look at those trends, and
I hope you have seen huge opportunities in this, but also huge challenges.
How are we going to meet the needs of that growing, and
more consuming human population?
How are we going to do it in a way that can be sustained over decades and
centuries?
And what does this mean for all of the businesses in which we work?
How do we work towards into generation of well-being given the situation.
So, I'm going to show you right now a framework that was developed and
published in this book called Pursuing Sustainability.
It's just a primer, and this framework was intended for any leader.
Not just business leaders,
as the way of thinking about the pursuit of sustainability.
At the top of the framework we think about our goal,
the goal of intergenerational well-being.
And well-being of people, here and around the world today and in the future.
So how do we meet that goal.
Well through a whole bunch of production and
consumption activities that we're all engaged in.
We're creating the goods and services and trying to provide them for
people to consume.
We are the actors and agents doing that.
And there's lots and lots of ways that we can do those things better or
worse that will have an impact on long term intergenerational well-being.
We could spend hours talking through these things,
but what we're going to do right now is move down to
the underlying assets that control what we can produce and consume.
We're going to talk about five capital assets that ultimately
determine human well-being.
So, let's start at the top, Natural Capital, this is an asset,
these are the people of the world, people from different places,
it's the numbers of people, their demographics, their health status,
their level of education and knowledge accumulation, all of the things that
allow people, individual people, to be actors and decision makers.
We have Social Capital.
Those are our rules and regulations, the norms and
institutions, the networks that we use.
The strategies including financing strategies that allow us to move and
make decisions for sustainability.
Over on the other side of the graph we have Manufactured Capital.
This is everything we build, everything we make.
It's our buildings, our factories, the stuff we make inside of the factories,
the new technology and tools, it's our roads, and
our airports, and everything else that the humans make.
Over on the right we have Knowledge Capital.
This is the kind of new knowledge that's created in places like
Stanford University, other universities, research centers of companies and
of governments.
And it's also the knowledge that is a pain through practice in experience
in the field or in the factory.
Crucial to have that knowledge as we move ahead in a transition to sustainability.
And then finally at the bottom, is Natural Capital.
This is basically our life support system.
It's all of the resources that we call on,
in order to power that manufactured capital and to meet the needs of people.
It's the place, it's the environment in which we live,
our atmosphere, our climate system.
And the species and the ecosystems on land and in the ocean, as it provides so
many of the things that we need.
So that's natural capital.
Those five capital assets underlie our ability to meet our goal of well-being.
And the bottom line is if they go down, if we lose them, or if they're declining.
Then we're in trouble,
if our goal is to worry about the future as well as right now.
So, I would in a normal kind of classroom environment,
I'd ask you right now, which of these capitals.
Capital assets do you think is under most stress, which ones are declining.
And some of you would say social capital.
You would say without the rule of law, we can't make any progress.
And you'd be right.
Others might say it's manufacture capital.
We don't have the right infrastructure to allow these new technologies to take off,
and you'd be right there too.
But if you're thinking globally, the answer is natural capital.
Globally, there is no doubt that
our whole range of natural capital assets are in decline.
And it's not hard to see why.
If you go back to this population growth graph.
And you look at that dramatic increase.
In 1800, we had 1 billion people.
By 1924, we had 2 billion people.
By the 1950, we had 3 billion people.
Now, we have 7.4 billion and we're going to 11.
If you look at that graph and how quickly that happened,
you can kind of understand why our life support system had been in distress.
I mean, we've been in a mad dash to meet the need of people and
we've done that pretty well.
We've met need for energy by using biomass and
most especially fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas.
We've met the needs of people for food through some
wonderful new technologies that increased yields, also through virgin lands,
natural lands, agriculture and
we kept food pace, the food production had pace with human population growth.
We've met the needs of people for water for a whole range in different uses by
building reservoirs, by pumping aqua first, by using water in rivers and
we've succeeded in all of these things and many more.
However, many of those efforts have had unintended negative consequences and
simply we didn't take time to worry about the impact on natural capital.
So burning of fossil fuels, absolutely crucial for meeting energy needs and
yet is leading to very high emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases.
Likewise, greenhouse gases, methane, nitrous oxide,
carbon dioxide coming from agriculture and those together add up to a global
change in temperature that we're seeing right now.
There's absolutely no doubt of that and
that temperature change is having a range of impacts.
Things like very heavy precipitation events and flooding or
extended droughts, or sea level rise, or increased storminess.
That ultimately affect our ability to meet the needs of people.
So, the affect are sustainability goals and climate isn't the only thing.
There's a whole, long list of ways that our natural capital is being degraded.
And again, we could spend a lot of time focusing on the different
items in this list, but I'm going to move on to say,
the real challenge here is to change that downward arrow for
natural capital to an upward arrow while still meeting the needs of people,
while still paid attention to the well-being of our people in
organizations today as well as in the future and I think we can do that.
There are fantastic examples right now of companies engaging in doing exactly
that and we'll come back to that in a minute.
I want to tell you a quick story about how our efforts to meet the needs of people
have had unintended consequences and
then we'll go to some stories of where things are going in the right direction.
So green revolution, the green revolution took place in the 1950s through the 1990s.
Really, launched by a group of academic scientists as well as nongovernmental
organizations who recognized that human population was growing very quickly and
there was no way we could meet the food needs of those people without changing
the way we do things.
So they created, they invested in creating a number of new technologies.
Improved genetic materials of their cereal crops.
New ways to carry out irrigation, new kinds of industrial fertilizers,
new pesticides, new mechanization.
And as you would recognize, a lot of those new technologies launched companies or
rather companies launch those new technologies.
Huge advancement there.
Of course, the new technologies themselves are weren't going to be enough.
The people in the field have to know how to use them, so both the companies and
the nongovernmental organizations began to invest in human capital.
Training farmers in making sure that they have the education needed in order
to employ those technologies and that whole system yielded a fantastic result.
We were able to keep food production at pace with that very rapid
human population growth.
Rally wonderful, but one problem was that nobody was really paying
a whole lot of attention to the draw down in natural capital.
The soil resources, the effect of fertilizers on water systems,
the use of water for irrigation and over pumping of aquifers.
Air pollution problems, green house gas emissions and on and on.
Again, changes that affect our ability to meet the needs of people for
food in the future.
So, that went down.
There was also a bit of a drop in social and natural capital in
some places as whole communities, especially indigenous groups, lost out.
Lost their land and lost their ability to play.
Well, since then, all of our efforts within the last couple of decades have
been trying to reimburse that.
How can we do this differently?
How can we still grow enough food, engage enough companies and
engage enough individuals to meet the needs of people, but
without those negative unintended consequences and there are great stories.
I'm going to just share one story and
that is the story of the sustainable harvest coffee importers,
because I think it illustrates paying attention to all of these assets.
So David Griswold, the founder in the 1980s soon after college,
I guess volunteered by working with poor coffee farmers in Mexico and
he began to see how difficult their lives were.
How challenging it was despite all their hard work for
their well-being to increase and he decided later to create a business that
would help them improve their wellbeing, but would also be profitable.
So, what did he worry about?
He worried about finding that knowledge capital and
creating that new knowledge that they could employ in technologies in the field,
their manufacture capital that would allow farmers to get more value for
the crops that they were growing.
That would allow them to reduce the cost of fertilizers and
add more of the resources they had at hand including organic fertilizers.
That would reduce the environmental consequences of what they do.
He recognized again,
that you can have new technology that people need to know how to use it.
Farmers were engaged, were involved in learning and training and
using and improving those technologies.
So he worked with the capital asset of human capital and he made sure and
his teams made sure that the natural capital wasn't declining and
actually was improving, because of these processes.
He also focused on supply chain dynamics and increased the transparency
of the supply chain, so that those poor farmers actually understood where
their coffee was going and who was making money on it and built a trust in
a long term consistency in the supply chain that pays that back over time.
Ultimately, producing a lot of coffee.
Increasing the well-being of the people there and creating a profitable company.
The story is not over and it could go on and on,
but it gives you an idea of what one corporation can do.
So I think all the challenge for
all of us is to think about how me manage all of these assets and
their interactions in ways that promote intergenerational well-being.
And again, what I would do in classroom situation,
if you were all sitting here with us today,
is ask you to apply the framework to your challenge, to your business challenge.
In a way, it's a way of thinking about the problem.
It's a checklist to remind us not to forget really important assets
as we make our plans.
But you can take that home and do it later.
So I have to be truthful in saying, this is not as easy as it sounds.
This is a really hard problem.
And it's because these systems are very, very complex.
They are not simple, linear relationships among the different components of them.
So just briefly, let me say what a system is.
So we talked about complex systems.
A system, as defined by a huge field of inquiry, of systems thinking,
systems dynamics, systems engineering, systems analysis,
systems ecology, are all focused on understanding these complex systems of
interconnected elements that are organized in a way that achieves something.
So the boat in the picture is a system, but
the lake and the shoreline and the rescue
organizations that the boat is surrounded by could also be considered the system.
Likewise, your factory is a system,
but your business contains supply chain and other elements that
are probably a better way to think about your business as a system.
And for sustainability, we have to broaden these boundaries.
So that we include the environment and the well-being of people as well.
Okay, but systems dynamics has focused a lot on the challenges
of understanding and managing complex systems.
And there's a whole list of characteristics that make a system,
whether it's your business system or anything else difficult.
And I'm going to pick out just a couple of these to illustrate a way of thinking and
a way of analyzing our decisions and interventions.
So that we are trying to assure that they're not resulting in negative,
unintended consequences.
So let me start with positive and negative feedbacks.
I'm going to just jump into an example here to illustrate this.
This is a positive feedback cycle that plays out in many different areas and many
different organizations would approach sustainability of water use in this way.
So we have an effort going on at conservation of water.
Why are we doing this?
Because this community realized that it was using too much water and
their water resources were going down.
And they were worried about where they were going to get it in the future.
So they started to invest in conservation of water, and
they saw great results, great water efficiency results.
That led to a recognition and an awareness of the positive
results which then continued to encourage public support for
that water conservation, which then led to more conservation.
So that's the positive feedback cycle.
That's sometimes called a virtuous cycle,
sometimes called a reinforcing feedback process.
And over on the right, what resulted was that because of the water efficiency
results, they took less total water from the rivers.
And they had more stream flows that they could count on for the long term.
So that's the great success story there, seemed to work.
But one problem for
them is that their boundary around their system wasn't quite wide enough.
What happens in the situation is that because there was less total water
being taken from the rivers, there was more available water for
new business and new homes to come in and they came in.
They came into the region, and that increased total water demand.
And that increased the amount of water taken from rivers and
led to lower stream flows.
So that was a negative feedback, a balancing feedback cycle
that unfortunately led to that original effort to increase
sustainability of water use to be not successful.
These kinds of things happen everywhere.
Another quick example of that, this an example,
say that we're in a community where they're a very underprivileged community.
Where a lot of people don't have access to services, and to schools,
and playgrounds, and hospitals, and so forth.
The leaders in this area, the government, the non-governmental organizations, and
corporations decided to invest in improving infrastructure and services.
That led to an increase in the well-being of the community residents,
so exactly what they wanted to do.
And that led to more support, a success story, and
it continued government, NGO, and corporate investment.
Another positive feedback cycle,
another reinforcing one, another virtuous cycle.
But when others outside that region, who were still underprivileged,
found out about it, they saw the signs of well-being and they moved to the region so
that they could have access to that infrastructure and services.
And what happened then is that once again, that community did not have enough
infrastructure and services to meet the needs of the people.
So the positive feedback was pushed back by the negative feedback.
These kinds of feedback cycles happen everywhere, and they're so
common that they fall into an archetype that's called fixes that fail.
You have a problem, you put a fix in place, you solve the problem for a while,
but then you get unintended consequences.
And part of the problem is the scale at you you're looking,
the boundaries that you have around your system of are too small.
And there are a lot of these kinds of feedback
cycles that happen over and over again in municipalities,
in communities of all kinds, in companies, in all kinds of organizations.
The good thing about it is they happen so often that there's a list of them now.
There's ten different archetypes for these feedbacks that will get in the way
of efforts to shift towards a sustainability goal.
And you can manage for those kinds of feedback situations,
if you're aware of them.
This is an area that we could go into a lot more deeply,
but I want to move on very quickly to a couple of other issues.
Another challenge that we run into as we're trying to manage these complex
systems for sustainability is that there's all kinds of connections that
takes place across space and time, and there's a lot of invisibilities.
There's a lot of situations where what I do as a citizen is having impacts far,
far away and I don't even realize it, so invisibility.
So we sometimes get in trouble because of that, when cause and
effect are distant in time or in space,
and when solutions require actions at number of different scales.
Let me give you a quick example of this fascinating example, but
has some solutions embedded now.
And that is an example around palm oil.
So I'm drawing here on work by one of my colleagues here,
Jim Leape, at Woods Institute for the Environment.
So palm oil is an ingredient in half of the products in the grocery store.
We all use it all the time in many different kinds of purchases that we make.
If you go through the long supply chain
you can ask the question where does that palm oil originate from?
What is needed at the base of the supply chain for that?
And the answer is, it comes from palm oil plants from palm plantation.
50% of the palm plantations in the world around that are in Indonesia.
There's maybe another third in Malaysia, or
at least the palm oil is coming from Malaysian plantations.
And palm oil plantations are also expanding now into parts of
Central and Eastern Africa and Latin America.
So that's fine.
That's an agricultural crop that is needed but there are a couple problems with it.
And one is that most of the palm plantations were originally and
quite recently tropical forests often with very heavy peak soils
that have a lot of carbon in it and as the forests are burned to be
converted into plantation, they emit huge amounts of air pollutants.
And so you see pictures,
I'm sure you've seen pictures of people living in downwind cities with masks on
because they're suffering from air pollution from the biomass burning.
But they also emit a lot of greenhouse gases.
And then of concern to many communities is that they are a threat to biodiversity.
There's a threat of extinction.
This is a graphic from the World Wildlife Fund focusing on a species
that is under huge stress because of deforestation related to palm oil.
So the question that is, what do we do about that?
How do we meet the needs for palm oil without those negative consequences?
That question was addressed; it has been a big problem that has been approached.
Very slowly over time, but it's growing right now in terms of the action.
So going back to 2001, a small Swiss retailer,
[INAUDIBLE] got together with a couple of conservation organizations,
non-government organizations and
then they brought stakeholders together to create a certification system.
They developed a round table on palm oil, and they created together
a set of standards that would allow for palm oil to be certified sustainable.
So that was an important first step, seemed to make sense.
The next step was that they then and
other NGOs came in at this point tried to engage some of the biggest
corporations in the world who sourced palm oil from palm plantations.
And the first one to be brought in was Unilever, and not surprisingly Unilever
has a long record of social responsibility, and they agreed
that they wanted to use certified palm oil and not have deforestation occurring.
And then over time many, many, other players have come in,
there's a true partnership among these corporations as they seek to source
palm oil from systems where deforestation was not a factor.
So that story goes on too, but it's a nice example of how partnership
can come together to work towards sustainability.
I'm going to move on passed this next characteristic,
although it's a fascinating one and wrap this up.
So we have a lot of complexity out there as we are trying to work
towards long-term intergenerational human wellbeing.
And it would be nice if we could say there's one great set of models or
simulation models or whatever.
That all you have to do is put in an intervention and the model
will tell you whether you're going to have unintended negative consequences or not.
The model will tell you if it's a smart move to make or not.
Unfortunately, no such integrated systems model exists.
And if there were, we probably wouldn't believe it, too complex.
But there are lots of tool that we can use.
This is a list of some of them.
Many of these are use right now by corporations that are trying to make sure
that they have sustainable supply chain and many more could be used in the future.
In our discussions and courses here we can dive into these with some detail and
give examples of how these different tools are actually used to help decision makers
make good decisions for sustainability.
But the bottom line is, we're going to need a lot of humility.
We're trying to do something that is new, we're going to get some things wrong.
We need to be able to monitor how well we're doing,
to learn from our mistakes as well as our successes, and to adapt as we go.
So with that I want to just end by saying that we in our program here at Stanford,
and believe that there are three really important characteristics of leaders for
sustainability, leaders in businesses, NGOs, academic institutions, governments.
First of all the ability to understand these complex systems
which we've just been talking about.
And to make decisions recognizing those five capital assets.
The second is the mindset and the capacity to lead in this very dynamic world.
And Julia Novy-Hildesley, a Professor of Practice here,
will be speaking on this topic later in May, at a webinar.
And finally, the ability to design innovations that can scale,
that can lead to change at a scale that matters.
And Professor of Practice, Banny Banerjee,
we'll be getting a webinar on that topic also later in May.
So with that, I thank you very much for listening,
for being part of this discussion, and I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.
>> Well, thank you very much, Pamela.
This was a fascinating conversation.
And so, with that I'm going to turn it back over to Pam with a few questions
that have come up.
And so, Pam, the first question I would like to ask you is we talked
about all these very complex systems of all these activities.
Which industry do you think is the most meaningful to intervene in,
is it most relevant to, the public sector, the private sector etc.,
what are your thoughts on that?
>> I think I have to say all of the above.
I think there is a role for everyone when I teach these courses at Stanford to
the up and coming leaders in the future.
I'm basically saying it doesn't matter where you're going in your life,
you have an important role to play in this and whether you're going into
non-profits or government or corporations of all kinds, it matters.
I think, as we look at some of the big challenges today,
meeting the energy needs of people, meeting the food needs of people are huge.
And all of the industries and corporations and
companies engaged in doing those things have a role to play.
I think ultimately that example that I've showed of the Palm Oil Certification
program, it's maybe the way of the future, I think more and more.
Corporations and industries are going to be working together to try to find even
level playing fields in which they can do good for
themselves as well as do good for the world.
There's no doubt that we're going to need a lot more food, energy, water resources.
And we're going to have to find ways to provide them, much,
much more efficiently in order to sustain for the long term.
>> Thank you.
So another thread of questions that I'm seeing come up is around
the different types of intervention, or education or
activity may be needed in first world countries or more affluent societies.
And maybe third world or less affluent societies.
How are, how are the needs in this two area different I'm sure both need some
kind of intervention and, and education.
>> Right, well it's an interesting question because I think,
obviously, in the third world countries, well, let me start.
In the most developed countries of the world,
we still have lots of sustainability challenges.
We have an opportunity to use our resources, to meet the needs of people,
to focus on human wellbeing in much better ways than we are today.
So it's not like we've got it figured out.
But I think what's really interesting is to see the leap frogging in the third
world, in the developing countries of the world.
Where companies and corporations are moving in to help
the citizens of those countries, those nations.
Meet their needs through better healthcare, through more food,
through better water resources in ways that are conservative.
In ways that are smart from a sustainability perspective,
that are efficient but still meet the people's needs.
And I think companies that are engaging right now in the developing world,
in some of the poorest parts of the developing world,
are among the most innovative.
Because they have an opportunity to innovate new approaches that
actually make sense.
Both for those people right there and for the environment and for
the abilities for future generations to have their needs met.
So very exciting and I think that's the part that excites me most.
>> So we've talked about the fact that companies typically measure their success
in economic terms.
And early on in the webinar we talked about the three legs of that stool.
What are some examples you can give to ways companies have successfully used,
what measures have they used to tap into these other components beyond
the economic value?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think there's some really wonderful case studies out there.
I think, if you take a look at Unilever's 2020
sustainable living program, there's a wonderful list of
ways at every scale in that corporation they're engaging.
From the product design stage,
where they're thinking very carefully about reducing plastics,
for example, or creating new products that require less,
new detergents that require less use of water.
Those kinds of innovations that then will go out and
be actually making a big difference to people all around the world.
But then you have on the other hand,
companies that are trying very hard to manage their supply chains so
that each part of the supply chain is actually using best practice.
And that's incredibly challenging.
That's where certification programs and standards become very, very helpful.
But they're using life cycle assessment and
other approaches to try to make sure that at every stage in the supply chain.
They're doing the best they can.
I think that, really,
sustainability is something that has to engage every part of a company.
It can't just be the CEO saying we should be doing this.
It has to be the CEO and the C suite on down, committed to making it happen.
But giving opportunities to everybody in the company to use their
own innovation skills to find solutions.
And many, many companies, I think,
have done that with respect to how they use their own resources.
They reduce their energy, they reduce water, they reduce waste and
they've succeeded.
They've made money just because of that.
That's fantastic, but increasingly, companies are taking that perspective
outside of the walls of their own factories.
>> Mm-hm, all right, so you talked a lot about the complexity of the system and
how there are so many different components to each activity that we want to do.
Who is ultimately accountable for that in the sense of,
since there's so many actors.
>> Yeah, well, I think you have to put a boundary around your system and
try to do your best within it.
Ultimately, nobody is in control.
We're talking about a global highly interconnected system.
And so a lot of this is bottom-up.
A lot of it is recognizing that future well-being of one's community,
one's company, one's governmental organization or
non-governmental organization, depends on everybody doing the best thing they can.
That's one of the reasons, I think, the coalitions,
the partnerships, that are being developed are so exciting,
because there is no government for the globe saying you must do this.
It has to come from the bottom up.
That said, the UN's sustainable development goals that I mentioned at
the very beginning provide an impetus for that.
They've identified really hugely important areas that need to be
solved in the developing world.
And for companies to think about those goals, and
to recognize that these are opportunities for
them to play in an emerging market, if you will.
But to also help solve those problems, that's the exciting combination.
>> Yeah, that's really wonderful.
So I think there are a lot of people on the line today that are realizing that
this is a very, very important topic.
And would like to do more to convince potentially some others within
the organizer how important this is.
What are some hooks or
some strategies that you would use to help them make that argument?
>> Yeah, very good question.
And that's probably one that the next two speakers in our series
will be able to address much better than I,
because they're more focused on business settings than I have been.
But that said, we used to think about training people to be
the sustainability director or the environment director in
an organization, and that's still very, very important.
Those people play very, very important roles.
But we also want the top leaders to get it.
And one of the big challenges is how to engage them.
That's one of the reasons that we're launching this executive education
program, because from the very top, we want people to understand
both the challenge and the opportunity for their company.
I think the companies that have engaged probably most effectively
have had both leaders at the bottom and at the top who've worked together.
And they've empowered their employees to be innovative and
to engage at every stage, at every part of the organization, so
it becomes an organization wide effort.
And I think the payoff is pretty great for those.
Both in terms of maintaining, retaining great employees, but
also in terms of their own profitability and social responsibility.
>> Yeah, and I think one thing that might be embedded in what you said, which we can
call it more explicitly, is really talking about both the challenges and
the opportunities when you hear of all these different,
the growing population and the growth in consumption.
It's very easy to think about the challenges and be a little demoralized,
but I think there's also a lot of opportunity that could be called out
as a result of that.
>> Absolutely, and I do believe that there are many,
many corporations in the world that see the opportunity.
But, I'm glad that many of them see the opportunity not just
to have a much larger consumer base.
But to do it right with that consumer base so
that there's a long term benefit as well as a short term profit.
>> Well, good.
So we're nearing the top of the hour.
I think this webinar potentially and hopefully has left all of you on
the line with an appetite and curiosity to learn more about this.
And to dive deeper into some of the ways that we can actually affect
change as a result of all of the complex challenges that we face as
a species really, and as a planet.
And I think there will be different opportunities to do that.
So as Pamela mentioned,
there are two webinars that will be coming up in May that will be led by
Professor Julia Novy-Hildesley as well as Professor Banny Banerjee.
Both of these will be talking and
touching in more depth on some of these topics that have been discussed today.
In addition, of course, we invite you to join us in September to learn more about
this in person here on campus.
As a reminder the recording of this webinar will be emailed to all of you
within a week.
So that you can review it again and share with colleagues and friends.
And we will also be sending you some additional information about other
opportunities to engage with us.
With that I want to wish you a very good day and thank you for joining us today.
For more infomation >> Episode #6 | My GF is Transgender | Outlife - Duration: 5:26. 
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