Patagonia, Edelweiss, SKY Girls,?GHGs & Game

1.?Owner?Goals

It’s been great to see the bold decision of Patagonia ’s owner to?give ownership of the business away?to support nature get so much attention.??

And for good reason.??

While there are already many ways profits get channelled towards positive change (Pledge 1%?is one example), Yves Chouinard’s decision takes things many steps further. It’s a change to the very ownership structure of the business, putting it in the hands of a Foundation, and that’s what makes it interesting.??

How the ownership of a business is structured strikes to the heart of the way it operates and which voices are at the decision-making table. So it’s a great way to bring stakeholder capitalism into reality. There are some existing models which make this happen – employee-owned businesses like?John Lewis?are one example, as are other mutual and co-operative models. And there are Foundation owned businesses like 诺和诺德 and, now, Patagonia.???

But the truth is that these examples are rather thin on the ground. And that’s in large part because once shareholding is set, there are big financial challenges in transferring ownership.?

We’d love to see this shaken up. The world needs more Patagonia's, and making it easier for organisations to evolve towards new structural arrangements that embed different decision making priorities could therefore help drive real change.??

The?Entrepreneurial Giving Pledge?is a great starting point for new businesses: it provides a legal framework for businesses to donate a proportion of proceeds to charity right from the beginning of their journey. And while it’s harder for established businesses, as Patagonia shows, it’s possible, and impactful.??

2. Skin?Peace?

There have been many notable examples of beauty brands working to redefine negative attitudes and perceptions around beauty in the past few years. Dove is the obvious example, with its global mission to redefine beauty, but there have also been notable efforts to make beauty more inclusive and positive.??

However one area has received less focus than others, and that is age. While some brands have made moves to take on the anti-ageing mantra that runs through the industry, it is still very much the dominant stance.?

Enter B-Corp certified The Body Shop company with a move which shows they will put their money where their mouth is. The Body Shop sells a bottle of the “Drops of youth” skincare serum every 20 minutes throughout the world. But the success of the product did not prevent the company from?rebranding it to “Edelweiss”?and changing both the narrative, and the formulation. The relaunch comes with messaging around resilience and strength, stemming directly from the principal natural ingredient - the acid produced by Edelweiss flowers, a hardy specie, growing on top of Swiss mountains which resists all kinds of wind and extreme temperatures. So much more progressive than “eradicating fine lines.” And the Body Shop has said it will remove this anti-ageing focus from across its range.?

Not only is this laudable from a body image perspective, we also think there’s a broader positive message at play. If we want to live in a more sustainable world, we need to stop being at war with natural processes and start thinking about our own resilience. As small as it may appear, shifting from an “anti-ageing” product to a “pro-resilience” cream is embedded in a decisive philosophical position towards a more sustainable world. Resilience and empowerment are what society needs to face sustainability challenges, and so does our skin.?

3.?SKY?high success

A filmmaker, a psychologist, a political economist, and a sustainability consultant walk into a bar in Brighton… they are likely to have joined us at the recent World Social Marketing Conference.??

Social marketing is often confused with social media marketing, rather, social marketing seeks to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to encourage positive behaviour change in others.?

From Australia to Argentina, the Conference gathered professionals from many different sectors and disciplines, to share experiences and tools to tackle some of the largest challenges we face in society. This covered a whole host of topics; climate change, conservation, vaccination uptake, sexual harassment, healthy eating, drug use, binge drinking, to military strategy. Social marketing has a crucial role to play in improving so much of daily life.??

Good Business attended to present our experiences from running?SKY Girls; our pan-African teen girl empowerment programme funded by the Gates Foundation .

Since launching SKY in 2013, we’ve become experts at changing the behaviour of teen girls across social and health issues, including tobacco prevention. Instead of switching girls off by preaching about the harms of smoking, SKY’s approach is to create cool, relatable girl-led content – and then incorporate smoking messages within it.?

And we were honoured that amongst hundreds of entries, we received a highly commended award at the Conference for our work on SKY Girls.??

So, if you want to try and instigate behaviour change amongst consumers or colleagues, whether it be for on social or environmental issues, drop?us a line.??

4.?Rising?costs

It’s easy to understand how climate change caused by increased levels of GHGs in our atmosphere has a huge social cost. Just look at the devastating floods currently wreaking havoc in Pakistan . What’s harder, but really important, is to calculate the future cost of these social impacts in a robust way, so that decisions around policy and action can be informed by them.??

The?social cost of carbon?is a metric that does just that. It measures the economic damages, resulting from each additional ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere to provide a holistic estimate of the economic impacts of decisions relating to emissions. And it is actively used by policy setters and other decision makers around the world.?

So far so good. But the metric’s impact rests on its accuracy. And here’s the rub. The current US federal estimate is $51 per ton. However, a recent multi-year?study?has blown this estimate out of the water. Using new methodologies and building on scientific advancements researchers concluded that carbon dioxide emissions cost society $185 per ton. The research highlights how we have been vastly underestimating the harm that carbon emissions are causing.?

And this means we are also vastly underestimating the benefits that carbon reduction policies can have.??

The study has also led to the creation of the?Greenhouse Gas Impact Value Estimator (GIVE) model?— an open-source software platform allowing users to replicate the team’s methodology or calculate their own estimates.?

By highlighting the increased social cost of greenhouse gases and providing a model that can be used to continuously improve estimates globally, the study could have far-reaching impacts. We all understand carbon’s social cost, but it’s great to see how this data can add much needed weight and understanding to the problem we’re all trying to solve.?

5. The Goods:?game changer?

If you’re not ready to give up your Friday night burger, but are looking for a more sustainable alternative – this week’s Good could be the answer.?Wild and Game?provides responsibly sourced game meat from the British countryside direct to your door.?

The number of deer across the UK are estimated to be at the highest level in the last 1,000 years. Although they can be a marvellous sight (particularly for us city-folk), if left unchecked, high deer numbers can cause devastating effects to local countryside. Deer can affect the health of trees, cereal crops and destroy the habitats of woodland birds, and many farmers believe culling deer and pheasants is a?necessary part?of countryside management and protecting plant species. When game meat is sold as food rather than left to go to waste, the resultant carbon emissions are only a?quarter of that of beef. Meats sold by Wild and Game are also reared over land where flora and ground cover are encouraged and managed which benefits ecosystems.?

There are also many health benefits to alternative game meats over farmed meats. Game meat is much leaner and lower in fat, with greater nutritional value, than farmed meat. Wild animals have also enjoyed a varied, wild diet which give the meat a fuller, more complex flavour as well as being free from hormones and other additives. So, if you are not ready to give up meat for good, try Wild and Game while they are offering?70% off your first subscription box.?