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State leaders, delegates, business leaders, and other stakeholders have convened in Paris for the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP 21). Here are a few highlights from last week: 

On Tuesday at COP21, the MIT Climate CoLab announced the launch of a series of online contests to help strengthen the resilience of vulnerable countries to respond to climate-related hazards. The suite of contests are part of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Resilience Initiative: Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape (A2R), a global, multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at accelerating action on the ground to enhance climate resilience of the most vulnerable countries and people by 2020. 

Stakeholders are yet again criticizing the European Commission's Circular Economy Package. The original policy, released in December of last year, was denounced as insufficiently ambitious, resulting in its dismissal and a review process over the course of 2015. The Commission adopted the revised package on December 2nd, but some claim the new policy is even weaker than the original.

State leaders, delegates, business leaders, and other stakeholders convened in Paris for the U.N. Conference of the Parties (COP 21). Here are a few highlights from the final week: 

JetBlue Airways became the first U.S. airline company to join the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials, a multi-stakeholder coalition that works to promote the sustainability of biomaterials. 

It started as a dialogue about "ingredients of concern" in cosmetics and other personal care products, orchestrated by rival retailers Target and Walmart. Three years later, that ongoing conversation - facilitated by the Sustainability Consortium and Forum for the Future, and representing 18 industry stakeholders - has produced an ambitious series of recommendations that guide principles of sustainability for this class of consumer goods and how these metrics should be disclosed.

Shifting cotton production to a more sustainable model presents a number of opportunities across the value chain, yet only 13% of cotton is grown in a sustainable manner, with only 20% of that actually being sourced by companies for their products. Leading international retailers, cotton standards, industry initiatives and stakeholders are banding together to form Cotton 2040, an initiative that seeks to make sustainable cotton a mainstream commodity rather than a niche market.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation launched the Circular Fibres Initiative, a multi-stakeholder effort to build a circular economy for textiles. Nike and H&M have joined the initiative as corporate sponsors. The C&A Foundation, the Danish Fashion Institute, Fashion for Good, Cradle to Cradle, and Mistra Future Fashion will also participate in the initiative.

"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.