Many of the improvements to sustainability originate as advancements in STEM. New techniques, materials, designs, and processes offer better efficiency and less waste, helping to reduce environmental impacts, especially when those concepts are integrated across the economy to a substantial degree. The significant upside from a massive push of STEM education will come with new challenges as well though.   With sufficient advancement and complexity, scientific fields divide, re

The condition enabling industrialized society to improve environmental conditions is economic wealth. For businesses, having resources and capital makes it possible to research, develop, and deploy sustainable technologies. It’s wealth that enables businesses to scale, leading to price reductions and widespread adoption. Even regulatory compliance requires that the regulated party is sufficiently wealthy. Municipalities depend upon the wealth of taxpayers to support shared sy

Today’s corporate sustainability marketing is unfocused and wide-ranging, a situation that can be traced to the comprehensive format of reporting schemes. They cover nearly every sustainability topic, regardless of industry, greatly reducing each corporation’s focus on the environmental impact of its core product or service. Meeting the current disclosure burden requires most of a sustainability program’s bandwidth, ensnares multiple teams in the disclosure cycle, and produce

The primary goal of the sustainability industry today is to prevent GHG emissions from entering the atmosphere, with a goal of equal additions and removals, a concept called “net-zero.” Efforts to date have been one direction - to restrict, stop, and mitigate emissions. It’s all one direction. On the day net-zero is achieved though, society enters a new paradigm where removals are not the endless mission, and “climate control” is the goal. The world will hold legacy emissions

The sustainability story of the first year of the Trump administration has been the substantial reduction of agency personnel and federal funding. This shift has forced the industry to open its mind to new pathways to sustainability solutions, without the presence of agency support or federal funding sources. The industry is taking on a new shape as its capital and human talent migrates from public institutions to corporate efforts.   Above the market dynamics at play, a key