Business & Finance

Watching the world food system race towards a moment when it can’t possibly produce enough food to nourish the world’s population, the World Wildlife Fund launched last week a Markets Institute to Advance Sustainable Food Production with the help of some big food companies. Mars, Kellogg, Unilever and others are involved. Their mission is to quickly scale market-based solutions across the industry to change how food is grown, procured, shipped and distribute so that natural resource will be sustained to grow food for future generations, too. ...

Driven by concerns about food safety and illegal fishing, major seafood companies are working to improve how they trace fish through the industry’s complex supply chains. But in many parts of the world, fish are caught by artisanal fishers, not by massive trawlers. For these small-scale fishers, existing tracing technologies are often too cumbersome, complex, or expensive to use. This means they are often ineligible for sustainability certification (and the economic benefits that entails), because they can’t prove where, when, and how their fish were taken.

Amazon has a reputation for forward thinking, but when it comes to sustainability, the company has often fallen behind the times. For years, it has weathered criticism over its worker treatment, recycling and other sustainability metrics. Recently, however, the online retailer has signaled that a change may be on the way. Dara O’Rourke, a leading expert on global supply chains, has joined the company’s sustainability team.

Sustainability, sometimes under the banner of corporate social responsibility (CSR), used to be a specialty practice used by only a few companies, like Nike and Coca-Cola, to manage risks to their high-value brands.

A host of major tech companies like Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB) and Amazon (AMZN) are part of a new investment fund managed by UBS, that brings sustainability investing to life. ...

Chris Larson is the new CEO and President of New Island Capital Management, Inc. New Island Capital’s mission is to help its clients deploy capital – at scale – to generate appropriate, risk‐adjusted financial returns and transform the way natural resources are used, businesses are built and communities thrive. Read more

Traditionally, the divide between a for-profit or nonprofit organization was clear: for-profit businesses would engage in revenue generation and nonprofits would engage in charitable work to solve social issues and would largely stay away from revenue generation. The rise of social enterprises in recent years, however, has made that distinction less and less clear.

Fellow Judith Rubin wrote this article in 2003, but it still holds today. Feel free to use the "Writing a Gift Letter" sidebar at the bottom of the article to encourage your own relatives and friends to rethink their giving habits.

As we enter the holiday season, Fellow Alicia Daniel offers a checklist for Earth-friendly toy buying.