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A National Sustainability Council for Australia

Media Release Tony Burke, Minister for the Environment, today announced the establishment of a National Sustainability Council for Australia. Mr Burke said the council would provide independent advice to the government on sustainability issues and produce public reports against a set of sustainability indicators. “It was clear from the Sustainable Population Strategy that we need better information about how our economy, environment and society interact to inform better planning and decision making,” Mr Burke said. “That’s why the Government announced the Measuring Sustainability program in the 2011-12 Budget. “This program will allow for the collection of data guided by a …

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SME sustainability challenges 2012

In a report released by the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS), in Canada, 10 SME’s share the challenges they face in being environmentally and socially responsible. “Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) create more than 80 per cent of new jobs in Canada every year,” said Marie-France Turcotte, author of the report, management professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and Director of NBS’s French office. “SMEs also create 80 per cent of industry’s negative environmental impacts and more than 60 per cent of commercial waste. Clearly, conversations about sustainable business must include SMEs.” Download a copy of the report …

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Ikea Targets Energy and Resource Independence by 2020

Source: Environmental Leader, Oct 23 2012 Ikea today announced a plan to become energy and resource independent by 2020, which includes constructing $2.4 billion of wind and solar projects. The retailer’s new sustainability strategy, dubbed People … continue reading on: Environmental Leader

Integrated reporting “the next step”

FSinsight editor Jeroen Derwall, Assistant Professor at the Tilburg Center for Sustainability and at Maastricht University, talks about the upward trend that more companies are reporting on their sustainability practices. However, the quality of the reporting differs. He calls integrated reporting “the next step.”

Positive Carbon Management: The Buck Starts with the Environmental Data

What separates leaders from followers in the area of energy and carbon management?  Bigger cost reductions and better operating performance.  How do they achieve these results? By outperforming followers with executive sponsored programs and investing in technology to manage and analyse data. That’s the message to take away from a recent energy and carbon management report by research firm Aberdeen Group. What can be inferred from this report is that delivering improved business performance will, in the long term, only be achieved by a systematic and consistent approach to energy and carbon, which will accommodate the increasing complexity and quantity …

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Cost Effective Sustainability Through The Value Chain

By Lindsey Nelson, Published August 27, 2012 Being a green enterprise is not a cheap undertaking, but lots of companies and NGOs are looking for ways to make their value chain (supply chain, distributors, partner org’s, etc.) more sustainable. And according to a recent Forbes article, the businesses supply chain is where the ROI on sustainability shows its benefits in triple digits. In an effort to understand in-depth what makes a value chain sustainable, Forbes.com partnered with ASQ, The Institute for Supply Management, and Deloitte on a multi-year research study aimed at identifying demonstrated management practices and cost saving approaches. …

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New sustainability assessment system recognised by AILA

LESS (Local-area Envisioning and Sustainability-scoring System), developed by HASSELL, has been recognised in the 2012 Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture (AILA) national awards for its excellence in research and communication. LESS is a design decision-making framework developed to generate sustainable design solutions that lessen emissions, use of resources, and social disparity. It enables integrated mapping, measuring and monitoring of sustainability in urban areas across the four domains: social, infrastructure, governance and environmental. This allows for a triple bottom-line assessment in both the built environment and society, along with diagnosis of problems, and identification of strengths, weaknesses and successes in policy …

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Does the Chinese emissions ‘error’ matter?

By John ED Barker, Murdoch University Recent analyses that China’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions might be 1.2 gigatonnes or 20% higher than previously estimated have generated something of a feeding frenzy in the media; and not just the daily tabloids. Even The Scientific American has jumped on the bandwagon, adding a few more factoids to increase the alarm. It is understandable that we could be alarmed by a figure of 1.2 gigatonnes; that’s a mighty big figure. It’s equivalent to the total of Japan’s annual emissions, the SMH repeated, without providing the more useful fact for its readers that it …

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What’s the British music scene got to do with selecting the right environmental software?

I’ve just finished watching another brilliant episode of the series “Legendary Music Cities of the World” – this time spotlighting the extraordinary music successes of London. Beatles, Stones, The Who, the rock of Led Zeppelin evolving into the Punk phenomenon, Glamrock of Bowie & Queen, the Brit Pop gems of Blue, Happy Mondays and Oasis sandwiched between the Hit Factories of Stock, Aitken & Waterman and the Spice Girls, which in turn inspired the blossoming of modern feminine songstresses of Adele, Lily Allen and Florence & the Machine. The truly exceptional artists were able to evolve their music as the …

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