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Panera Bread has been using antibiotic-free meat for a decade, but unlike rival Chipotle, it's struggled to effectively communicate its green credentials to consumers. writes Andrew Marder. The company is introducing a communications strategy touting its produce, donations and community cafes for low-income families. "[T]here's a lot of value in the work that Panera is doing, and it just takes a few good ad campaigns to bring that value to bear on the bottom line," Marder writes.

Telecom Alaska Communications earned a 225% return on investment over 7 months by integrating energy data management services from technology company Ecova. Alaska Communications used the technology to better understand energy consumption and spending in its operations.

Coca-Cola and its bottling partners are on track to meet their 2020 water replenishment goal by balancing an estimated 68 percent of the water used in their finished beverages based on 2013 sales volume. To date, the soft drink company has replenished an estimated 108.5 billion liters of water back to communities and nature through 509 community water projects in more than 100 countries

Los Angeles County approves the start of the Newhall Ranch master-planned community north of the city of Los Angeles. The state has never seen a community quite like Newhall Ranch, proposed by California developer FivePoint. It will be a carbon-neutral development in the Santa Clarita Valley that tackles such critical challenges as climate change, water conservation, and the dire housing shortage that is severely threatening our economic competitiveness.

If the global business community is to thrive in the long term - and carry us to that flourishing future we are trying to imagine and help build - it needs to continue to scale up the ambition and influence of its efforts. That's much easier said than done, of course, though we are seeing a number of encouraging trends within the Sustainable Brands community that, while still nascent, are promising to deliver a lot of value for years to come. 

Two counties and a city in California have filed separate Superior Court lawsuits against 37 oil and coal companies seeking damages related to fossil fuel development, which the communities allege has resulted in climate-related problems in their areas. Their lawsuits are "a first-of-its-kind challenge that some liken to the high-stakes litigation of the tobacco industry in the 1990s," writes Kurtis Alexander.

The governments of the East African Community hoping to ban imports of secondhand clothes. The logic is that by stopping the trade of used garments, the apparel industry will be revitalized, create jobs and exports, and bolster their economies. What impact would this ban have on the donating Western countries? If we could no longer offload our unwanted discarded clothing onto the poor, what would we do with those clothes?

Communities on the frontlines of fossil fuel development are taking a stand against dangerous fossil fuel projects. Take a look at the big fight in the small town of Kalama, Washington. The Chinese government is planning to build the world's largest methanol refinery to convert fracked natural gas to liquid methanol for export to China to make plastics. From a greenhouse gas perspective, this fight is a big deal. The methanol refinery alone would use more natural gas than all industry in Washington combined. Flip it around: If we win this one battle and stop the methanol refinery, we stop the equivalent of doubling industrial natural gas usage in Washington State. While the gas industry tries to spin natural gas as clean, new science shows just the opposite. The bulk of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Methane leakage from gas wells and pipelines led scientists to conclude that fracked gas can be as bad coal for our climate. And it gets worse. Gas production in North America relies heavily on fracking, a process famous for polluting air and water, endangering the health of nearby residents.

Collaboration on rainforest protection can improve transparency, empower communities and boost regulation standards

A new BSR report makes the triple-bottom-line business case for investing in nature, including numerous examples from leading companies. 

Amsterdam-based association Zero Waste Europe is developing a project to empower community groups across Europe to challenge wasteful products and facilitate stakeholder collaboration on their redesign. 'The People's Design Lab' is expected to launch in June, but with only one week left in its campaign, Zero Waste Europe has raised just over €4,500 of its €8,000 goal.

It's been almost 10 years since the Coca-Cola Company (PDF) vowed to "safely return to communities and nature an amount of water equal to what we use in our finished beverages and their production," with a deadline of 2020 for doing so. To get there, it teamed up with a broad array of NGOs and government aid agencies, who established clear rules for "replenishing" the aquifers and waterways that make up a watershed, and in 2015 the company announced it not only had reached its target five years early, but even surpassed it by putting 15 percent more water into the system than it took out. This tiny pack, however, is dwarfed by a massive herd of corporates that have made similar promises without offering any indication of how they'll deliver or whether they're making progress - and it's not just a water problem.

Developer FivePoint has a new plan to reduce carbon emissions at its proposed $12.7 billion master-planned community in California's Los Angeles County after a court blocked the project on environmental grounds. The company hopes to begin construction in 2018 and will implement zero-net-energy construction when it builds the 21,500 homes, each of which will have a charging station for electric vehicle.

the European Commission (EC) announced it will begin phasing out coal subsidies and reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030 under a new clean energy package. The new clean energy plan outlines a series of legislative proposals and measures designed to help the EU meet its Paris Agreement climate goals, and why EU officials are optimistic, the green business community remains skeptical.

"Climate Take Back," as the new mission has been named, is the successor to Mission Zero, the name given to a vision articulated in 1997 that, for most outside the company, seemed audacious at the time: "To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits - by 2020 - and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence."

A company created by Stanford University is developing a self-sustaining community in the Netherlands. The 25-home neighborhood will produce its own energy from biogas, solar and geothermal sources and will grow its own food. ReGen Villages describes its focus as "[d]esirable, off-grid-capable neighborhoods comprised of power positive homes, renewable energy, water management, and waste-to-resource systems that are based upon on-going resiliency research -- for thriving families and reduced burdens on local and national governments."

Rust-belt cities such as Gary, Indiana, want to spur urban renewal through large-scale greening programs, such as transforming vacant lots into community gardens, parks and micro-habitats. "There's a tremendous interest because some of these things are lower cost than traditional development, but at the same time their implementation will actually make the other land more developable," says Eve Pytel of the Delta Institute.

BSR and Forum for the Future launched the Net Positive Project, a coalition to clearly define what it means to be net positive and build a framework on how to scope, measure, and communicate net positive outcomes. Founding company members include Dell, The Dow Chemical Company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Kimberly-Clark, and others.

A report in the journal Nature Climate Change said climate change and rising sea levels could threaten 13.1 million people living along the coastal United States. The study combines population projections with rising sea level models. The areas with the greatest percentage of people at risk are Florida's Miami-Dade and Broward counties. Smaller communities are threatened too and are dealing now with environmental changes.

BASF has joined a national effort to help monarch butterfly populations by building habitats at several of its chemical complexes in the US, and most recently in Geismar, La. "From our standpoint as a company, sustainability and environmental stewardship are at the core of our operations," said BASF Geismar External Communications Manager Blythe Lamonica.