Group items tagged

Sustainable food startup Impossible Foods received $108 million in series D financing, which expands its total funding to $183 million. The company is developing meat and dairy alternatives from plant ingredients.

Late last year, devastating fires engulfed 2 million hectares of land in Indonesia, impacting the health of 43 million people and emitting as much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as Brazil does in a year. They were driven by years of rampant, unregulated deforestation, chiefly for the expansion of paper pulp and oil palm plantations. Through global supply chains, we are all connected to Indonesia's fires and to the deforestation that led to them. It's easy to say we need to stop deforestation, but this is nearly impossible without adequate information. 

A huge swath of the Antarctic ice cap is already crumbling, and preventing the thawing of the ice caps might now be impossible, a major new study suggests. The melting of the area studied alone would raise the world's sea level by nearly four feet, and total thawing could lead to up to a 12-foot surge in sea levels. Still, that probably won't happen for a century or two, since the ice is melting slowly, researchers say

Animal protein consumption is rising worldwide. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Association estimates that the raising of livestock for meat and dairy products contributes to 14.5 percent of human-induced GHG emissions.

"The Elephant in the Boardroom" is a new working paper from the World Resources Institute that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: Many of today's business models are not fit for tomorrow's resource-strained world. Current consumption patterns put the global economy on an impossible trajectory. Yet few companies are fundamentally rethinking the models by which they meet customer needs. Normalizing the conversation will set the groundwork for the pursuit of new business models that allow growth within the planet's limits and generate stakeholder value in new ways.

Alaska, a major oil and gas producer, is crafting its own plan to address climate change. Ideas under discussion include cuts in state emissions by 2025 and a tax on companies that emit carbon dioxide.