🍃The Sustainability Top 10: fierce a la Costco, stealth, Dolly Parton, brand it? Approaches to consider for a complex and eventful 2025
Welcome back and happy new year! 🖐,
2025 is shaping to be a complex and eventful year. Just like some of you going under cover with your sustainability efforts, this is a maxi tea 🍵 edition under the guise of a normal one. Here are The Green Tea's Top actionable, innovation, and hot sustainability stories this week!
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Latest Trends & Strategy
1. Whether to avoid lawsuits, to position themselves to get more (or not lose) government business, from a void of true values, to go stealth green, from a lack of brain oxygen from too many jiujitsu chokeholds, or else, we continue to see the reverberations of the election results and anti-ESG efforts. More financial companies are exiting climate alliances (Citi/BofA, Blackrock) and CEOs are axing or changing policies (CEOs, Meta). But one company bucked the trend very publicly and received significant coverage for it: Costco stood its ground and restated the business case for DEI. read here
With and without words, what Costco is telling its harassers….
Taking Action
2. Wherever you stand on the developments above, a lot of recent articles focus on how to handle the moment we are in:
-(WSJ) Be like Dolly Parton (“the country music star rarely voices her personal politics, even though she has supported gay rights, Covid-19 vaccine research and other philanthropic efforts. ‘Everybody loves Dolly Parton and no one knows what she stands for’”). read here
-(G&A) Instead of walking back ESG commitments, brand them. read here
-(WSJ) Focus on the benefits of green without focusing on green message (“You’re going to need a lot of power. Instead of touting projects as ‘clean and affordable,’ renewable [energy] firms highlight their projects’ ability to meet energy needs”). read here
-(Trellis/Sust Brands) Restate the business case with “head and heart” approach or with “cheaper now, more expensive later”. read here and here
3. (Trellis) While most companies seem to be staying the course, another story that seemed to get a lot of coverage was Walmart announcing that it will miss its interim emission targets, which highlights that emissions reductions will likely be a bumpy road ahead. read here
4. (Trellis) Regardless of that, Walmart has managed to reduce the carbon intensity of its growth. And here are two other examples of how companies are pursuing significant growth paired up with emissions reductions (Mars, Aldi).
Green Innovation
5. (Crunchbase) Cleantech funding fell in 2024 but there were some bright spots and big dollars for these startups. read here
Reporting and Regulatory Corner
6. (ESG Today) And because keeping track of reporting deadlines is becoming a full-time job, here is a calendar to help you with that. read here
7-8-9. Also from the reporting front:
-California to give companies an extra year before fully enforcing new climate reporting rules. read here
-EU adopts new rules requiring 100% recyclable packaging by 2030. read here
-The European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG) announced the release of its voluntary sustainability reporting standard for non-listed SMEs (VSME), to enable small companies to report on ESG issues in a simplified and consistent way. read here
A Changing World…
We started the year with news that I think we all expected to be the case: 2024 was the hottest year in recent history and global temperatures exceeded 1.5 Celsius above the pre-industrial era for the first time. And more voices are joining around the message that the global crisis around climate, water and biodiversity must be addressed together or risk trying to fix one and aggravating the other. The signs of interconnectedness are everywhere around the world, a theme shared in previous editions. The unknowns of the connections are beyond existing human knowledge and therefore the risks from the consequences of not doing enough are a Pandora box and, likely, very high.
What did you think of this edition of The Green Tea?
Warm regards / saludos,
Julio