Guidance on reporting for students and sustainability professionals.

By Martha Woodman, MBA

I’ve got a simple formula for you: sustainable business practices + reporting = continued improvement and growth = better business and a better world.

How do I know? For more than 20 years I taught college students about accounting. That changed in 2001, under the guidance of an inspirational colleague. Now, I’m excited to teach students not only about accounting, but about how accounting plays a key role in analyzing business’s effect on the environment. It’s an exciting time to be in the numbers world.

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Experts gather in Bonn to share ideas on urban responses to climate change.

By Philip Monaghan

In the spirit of the theme of the conference I attended in Bonn (Resilient Cities: 2^nd Annual World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change), I was pleased to overcome the shock and surprise of Icelandic volcanic ash cloud and an e-coli food outbreak to share my latest research insights with 500+ delegates from local government and global finance from around the world.

In the same week of the news that record-breaking CO2 emissions put the world on fast track to irreversible climate change, I and other delegates noted the gathering marked a tipping point in a key debate to tackling climate change.

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Sustainability pioneer John Elkington reports back from sustainability’s new frontier.

By John Elkington

When I recently had dinner in San Francisco with Joel Makower of GreenBiz, he blamed me for pulling him into the sustainability space over 20 years ago. (In the late 1980s, he translated our best-selling Green Consumer Guide into the American version.) Having just attended the London version of Joel’s brainchild VERGE, a rolling, invitation-only roundtable forum that kicked off in Shanghai and ended in San Francisco the following day, I feel quite proud. This was one of the most interesting events I have been to in a while – spotlighting key trends and opportunities at the intersection between energy, information, buildings and vehicles.

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Being a board member is a responsibility, not a sinecure.

By Elmira Bayrasli

The possibilities of the boardroom, board director Lucy P. Marcus believes, should aspire to the ideals that legendary medieval English King Arthur created at his famous table. There, knights gathered in effort and equality to erect a vast empire that changed history.

Change is one of the incentives driving individuals to join boards. Armed with good will and intentions and a collection of applicable skills to help entrepreneurial ventures, multinational corporations and non-profits catapult to success. It is this intention that has taken New York-born and UK-based Marcus to throw her passion behind sitting on boards as well as writing about best practices for boards and advising entrepreneurs, corporations and non-profits on how to develop strong boards. Board development, Marcus notes, is surprisingly something many entrepreneurs, who are so focused on their respective innovations, treat as an after thought. The situation is similar at non-profits. As a life-long member of this field, that caught my eye.

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CSR is no longer about risk mitigation and “doing no harm;” it’s about shared value creation.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Elaine Cohen

CSR is not what it used to be. Long gone are the days when managing your carbon emissions and contributing to the community were good enough. Today, the talk is about sustainable value creation. But is this a realistic objective for most companies?

CSR is no longer about risk mitigation and “doing no harm.” It’s no longer about being a responsible corporate citizen, paying taxes, developing employees or reducing carbon emissions. This kind of CSR activity may be a necessary stepping stone to sustainability but its return is limited. There is only so much money you can save by reducing your water consumption and only so many stakeholders you can appease by expanding your community outreach. The real prize is when the corporation moves beyond CSR.

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The cords of energy demand and water supply are tightening around the world’s two largest economies.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue

The coal mines of Inner Mongolia, China and the oil and gas fields of the northern Great Plains in the United States are separated by 11,200 kilometers (7,000 miles) of ocean and 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of land.

But, in form and function, the two fossil fuel development zones — the newest and largest in both nations — are illustrations of the escalating clash between energy demand and freshwater supplies that confront the stability of the world’s two biggest economies. How each nation responds could have profound implications for their domestic energy and food markets, and for economic stability across the globe.

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Left and right need to unite to defend the interests of the majority.

As part of the New Economy 2.0 series

By David Korten

From the beginning of history, Empire’s rulers have maintained their power by sowing fear, mutual suspicion and division to prevent those who bear the burdens of their rule from uniting against them. On the political right, anger is directed against government. On the political left, it is directed against Wall Street corporations.

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Weighing the pros and cons of bringing the Taliban to the table.

By Stefan Wolff

To be clear up front, what is at stake is not the exit of foreign troops from Afghanistan, but Afghanistan’s exit from its devastating civil war.  

Both exits, however, are inextricably connected in reality, even though much of the debate, especially in Western capitals, is predominantly focused on the former. Unsurprisingly thus, following the death of Osama Bin Laden, pressure has increased on the Obama administration and its key allies to commit to an accelerated withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan.

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Making the case for volunteer managers and fundraisers to journey together.

By Robert Rosenthal

As the Blackbaud Supporter Journey Tour makes its way across the country, jokes about Journey the band will definitely make less sense than they did yesterday in San Francisco. Steve Perry and company are actually from here, and so tunes like “Don’t Stop Believin’” are part of the official soundtrack of life here—and, something not easily translated.

Yet if there was one takeaway from the Blackbaud event, it was to not stop believin’ the day will come when volunteer and donor engagement operations will truly be integrated at all nonprofits—and, where leading tech services like Blackbaud and VolunteerMatch could work together to make life easier for nonprofit folks.

I want to be there…

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The northern city of Xilinhot is booming as the coal industry expands. But it will take a lot of water to feed both the city and mining.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Carl Ganter, Circle of Blue

Wu Yun, 23, tucks in her mittens and pulls on furry boots to help her father feed the livestock, as a frigid blast of razor-sharp ice crystals - some of them blackened from the dust of nearby open-pit coal mines - rolls across the horizon, stopping only to swirl and tear at exposed flesh. She hunkers down, unlatches the gate and lets the sheep out to graze on the fragile, brown stubble.

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