Five ways business can make a positive impact on the planet
CategoriesSustainable News

Five ways business can make a positive impact on the planet

In 2002, Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, and Craig Mathews, founder of Blue Ribbon Flies, founded 1% for the Planet – an organisation that encourages businesses to commit to donating at least one per cent of their annual sales (not profits) directly to vetted environmental organisations. This giving is then tracked and certified by 1% for the Planet through receipts and revenue documentation.

Fast forward to today, and the organisation has certified $500 million in donations and has set an ambitious target to reach the $1 billion mark by 2027. “Of the $500 million, we certified a hundred million in 2023 alone and it’s made up of small and large donations,” says 1% for the Planet CEO Kate Williams. “It’s diverse, democratic, and distributed – most giving at scale is in big chunks by big players who are calling the shots, but we have a mix of players all over the world coming together and demonstrating that if everyone participates, we can drive big, smart change.”

The many organisations supported by 1% for the Planet members work towards a wide range of goals, which means that for businesses looking donate, there will be something that aligns with their ESG strategy and offers tangible results. We’ve picked five inspiring examples.

Going wild for nature

Walking through the lowland British countryside at the turn of the 20th Century, you would be surrounded by the thrum of life, from the drones of insects and the songs of skylarks and turtle doves to the ‘qwark-qwarks’ of toads. In the uplands, you would stand a chance of spotting a black grouse or maybe even a golden eagle. Today, not so much. Since as recently as the 1970s, 41 per cent of UK species have declined, and wherever scientists look – from farmland to coastal waters – the number and abundance of species is waning. Despite this, Rewilding Britain believes that through protection, restoration, and regeneration work, the rich mosaic of Britain’s habitats can be reclaimed, with benefits not just for biodiversity but also for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Local communities, meanwhile, benefit from more resilient and diversified nature-based economies, as well as improvements in mental and physical health. The organisation has built a network of around 800 rewilding members and 25 marine projects, covering 145,000 hectares of land and 50,000 hectares of sea. Its ultimate goal is to restore and connect habitats across at least 30 per cent of Britain’s land and sea by 2030. Find out more.

Note: Springwise supports Rewilding Britain through its 1% for the Planet donation.

Girl power

In sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people live without electricity – over half of the region’s population. Hundreds of millions more survive with a limited or unreliable power source. Stable access to electricity is transformational for communities on the continent, and in off-grid areas there is a unique opportunity to bypass fossil fuels and go straight to cleaner forms of generation. For Solar Sister, women entrepreneurs are the key to this process, with the organisation investing in local women so that they can start, grow, and sustain successful clean energy businesses. Support comes in the form of training, mentoring, and a ‘business in a bag’ – a set of key tools to get business owners up and running. In 2018, the organisation set a target to recruit, train, and support 10,000 women by the end of 2023, which it successfully surpassed. Every dollar invested in Solar Sisters creates $10 of economic impact, the non-profit claims. Find out more.

Blue is the new green

Hugging the coastline of every continent except Antarctica is a belt of ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems. Coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangroves, kelp forests, and wetlands, these marine habitats are hotbeds of biodiversity, and they also act as a massive carbon sink. For all the (justified) popular focus on rainforest preservation, research suggests that coastal wetlands sequester carbon at ten times the rate of mature tropical forests. But despite their importance to the global carbon cycle, marine habitats are among the most threatened on earth with 340,000 to 980,000 hectares of blue carbon ecosystem lost each year. SeaTrees is a programme run by US non-profit Sustainable Surf that delivers coastal restoration projects across all five of the main blue carbon habitats. The on-the-ground legwork is delivered by local charity partners, and the projects deliver benefits to both people and the environment. To date, SeaTrees has planted just under 3 million mangrove trees and 40,000 square feet of seagrass, while restoring over 500,000 square feet of kelp, 14,500 coral fragments, and 85,000 square feet of watershed. Find out more.

From food waste to fine fare

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), if you could collect all the food that is lost and wasted around the world, it would be enough to feed 1.26 billion hungry people every year. In the UK alone, we throw away 9.5 million tonnes of food waste in a typical year – even though 8.4 million people live in food poverty. FareShare is the UK’s national network of food redistributors. Collecting surplus food from businesses across the food supply chain, its 18 member organisations provide the ingredients for nutritious meals to frontline charities and community groups. Delivered via homeless shelters, schools, lunch clubs, and community cafes, the rescued food nourishes vulnerable people of all ages from schoolchildren to the elderly. Each week, FareShare provides enough food to feed almost a million people. Find out more.

Securing Mother Earth’s sacred spaces

In 1990, a gathering of tribal grassroots youth and Indigenous leadership came together in the US to compare notes on the environmental ills afflicting their respective lands, waters, and communities. Out of this was born the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), an organisation that helps tribal governments and Indigenous communities build mechanisms to protect their sacred sites and natural resources for the benefit of all living things. In the process, the network facilitates economically sustainable communities and promotes environmentally friendly livelihoods. Practically speaking, IEN acts as a clearinghouse for information, organises campaigns, and convenes meetings of Indigenous community and youth groups, primarily in North America, but also globally. Find out more.

The world is facing many environmental crises from climate change to biodiversity loss. But 1% for the Planet’s environmental partners are demonstrating that, despite this, there is cause for hope. The giving of thousands of global businesses adds up to a lot, and is being translated into tangible action on the ground.

Written By: Matthew Hempstead

Springwise is proud to be a member of 1% for the Planet. We feature Kate Williams in our latest report, Horizon 2030, where she shares how business is helping drive positive change as we approach the end of this decade. To read her opinion piece in full download Horizon 2030 here.

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How can computer vision boost business efficiency?
CategoriesSustainable News

How can computer vision boost business efficiency?

Spotted: Computer vision, a field of artificial intelligence (AI) in which computers derive information from images and video streams, has a range of applications in the real estate sector, whether that is for office-based or manufacturing businesses. 

Now, US startup Groundlight is speeding up the technology’s deployment. The company offers an accessible platform for developers, including those lacking data science expertise, to create robust computer vision solutions swiftly. Crucially, the technology eliminates time-consuming processes such as dataset gathering and model training, that typically take months to complete. 

Developers describe their visual task in natural language, and Groundlight instantly converts it into a tailored model. The platform then continuously refines this model based on expert human feedback, expediting development. 

Groundlight is designed for companies with large warehouse or retail footprints. Teams can apply the technology to create models that meet their business’s specific needs, whether that be providing warehouse teams with alerts when delivery trucks arrive or improving forklift routes for both efficiency and safety throughout a building. Groundlight’s platform can also be helpful in shops by providing managers of large retail spaces with models that alert staff when check-out queues form or when items are dropped or spilled on the floor.

There’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to boosting the efficiency and sustainability of retailers, and Springwise has spotted innovators making an impact with hyper-local micro-factories and warehouse robots.

Written By: Keely Khoury

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“Architects Are Bad at Business:” Here’s Why and What We Can Do About It
CategoriesArchitecture

“Architects Are Bad at Business:” Here’s Why and What We Can Do About It

Evelyn Lee is the Head of Workplace Strategy and Innovation at Slack Technologies, founder of Practice of Architecture, and co-host of the podcast, Practice Disrupted. She will serve as the 101st President of the AIA in 2025.

Every architecture and design firm is a business first. It’s easy to forget while celebrating our design awards and the stories of our contributions to the communities where we live, work and play. But to pursue the work that brings us so much joy, it is, first and foremost, essential to have a profitable and agile business that continues to adapt to the changing nature of the economy.

Architects aren’t necessarily known for being good at business or even enjoying having conversations on business operations. We would rather spend our time talking about the projects, the impact of the design, the materials that went into them, and the changes made within the project delivery process to make it so successful.

But the phrase, “Architects are bad at business,” has become a crutch, if not an excuse, to continue to be bad at business and avoid the conversation altogether.

So why are we this way?

OrfiSera by YERCE ARCHITECTURE

Architects are often more focused on the creative aspects of their work rather than business ones.

The problem with focusing only on creativity often means losing focus on things like project management. This means we spend so much time focused on only one aspect of the business, but businesses are systems, and every aspect of the system needs attention to be successful.

Architects are not trained in business practices.

Anyone who went through an accredited degree program could tell you that the one-hour seminar on professional practice taught students more about avoiding lawsuits while practicing than it did about running a business effectively. And even if it was the class was more broadly focused, there’s too much to learn in a single class to be effective.

What’s more, the ongoing education of individuals, once in practice, is often more focused on project work and does not extend beyond that.

Architects are often reluctant to change.

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, it is more important than ever for businesses to be agile. Agility is the ability to adapt quickly to change, and it is essential for businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition (especially the growing competition coming from outside the profession). However, architects, no matter how innovative we are with our projects, are otherwise stuck in our ways and resistant to change.

Good business operations require continuous improvement, and it not only takes a change mindset but a commitment of resources, both time and money, to examine what is and isn’t working.

OrfiSera by YERCE ARCHITECTURE

Architects are not good at selling their services.

How often have you heard an architect say, “The work speaks for itself.” Sure, there was a time when architects were discouraged from advertising their services (from the late 1800s to the early 1960s), but even with advertising being off the table, there are many different ways to sell services that most architects are not using.

Architects don’t like to ask for help.

While it’s easy for us to be good at what we are good at, it’s often harder for us to realize what we are not good at and, more importantly, to not stand in the way of letting other experts do their thing. I don’t know how often I’ve heard an architect say about a business operations consultant, “They just don’t understand what we do and how we do it.”

In many ways, we make ourselves out to be so unique that we get it in our heads that no one else can understand what it is we do and how we do it. We then put it on ourselves to do everything, and in essence, nothing more gets accomplished.

OrfiSera by YERCE ARCHITECTURE

So what can better business operations do for our architecture and design firms? There are many benefits, including:

  • Better communication and collaboration: Well-designed business operations can improve communication and collaboration within an architecture or design firm. This can lead to faster decision-making, better problem-solving and more efficient use of resources.
  • Streamlined processes: By streamlining processes, firms can reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to complete tasks. This can lead to increased efficiency and productivity.
  • Automated tasks: By automating tasks, firms can free up their staff to focus on more strategic and creative work. This can lead to increased efficiency and profitability.
  • Better use of technology: By using technology effectively, firms can improve their efficiency and productivity. This can include using project management software, cloud-based collaboration tools, and other technology solutions.
  • A focus on continuous improvement: By focusing on continuous improvement, firms can identify and implement changes that will make their business more efficient. This can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage.

In addition to the benefits above, better business operations can also help architecture and design firms to:

  • Attract and retain top talent
  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Improve profitability
  • Expand into new markets

OrfiSera by YERCE ARCHITECTURE

Design thinking has taken hold in many different areas, and architects often share their desire to own the space. I think there’s an opportunity to raise our value there, but to showcase what we can do, we first have to start with what we can do within our firms.

Stay tuned for our upcoming articles offering specific guidance and steps to design and implement better business operations.

In the meantime, we encourage you to download Practice of Architect’s Agile Practice Resource. This free living resource is designed to equip you with the knowledge and tools necessary to bring more agility to your practice.

Architects: Want to have your project featured? Showcase your work through Architizer and sign up for our inspirational newsletters.

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