What are some innovative sustainable development frameworks for companies?

Companies have borrowed the approach from carbon credit markets to implement natural steps. The UK regulations around Nutrient Neutrality are a good example, where peatland or rivers are restored in order to increase local resilience when new developments are built. Coverage crops and low-till agriculture are similarly adopted to reduce the impact on soils, while activated biochar can replace synthetic fertilisers. These techniques all have positive effects on biodiversity as well as GHG emission management.

A typical business model in the circular economy is 'waste-to-x', whereby the waste of one system becomes the input of another that produces a value-added output (x). For example, food waste from restaurants can be fed to insects, including worms and flies, in a controlled environment to help them grow and reproduce. When reaching maturity, they can be harvested and fed to animals as nutritious foodstock. This simultaneously reduces the financial and environmental costs of dealing with the waste whilst also creating a higher value product, in this case insect protein, that is an alternative to conventional resource-intensive methods of feeding livestock.

Circular Economy models are particularly good for manufacturers of high end or complex products - some consumers increasingly look for longevity and quality anyway, and higher value products lend themselves well to being designed in a way that they can be continually refurbished and components recycled, where components can be designed with end of life circularity in mind.

A great example of local clustering is businesses collaborating with local universities and school to foster skills and attract diverse talent. This may not directly be hired by the company, but support its suppliers in having access to talent, which will make for a healthier value chain. Companies can also collaborate around defining a common language and standards around sustainability, and engage in co-regulation with local authorities, and information campaigns to reset public / customer expectations around what’s possible.

The Regenerative Business The Regenerative Business is an organizational model that is centered on the principle that each incremental unit of production should create a net positive impact on the environment. This is often termed as moving 'beyond sustainability' such that the organization not only does 'no harm' but begins to 'do good' by regenerating the environment in which it operates. For example, if a company that makes notebooks from timber requires 1 tree to produce 100 notebooks but it plants and ensures the survival of 4 trees for every tree it sources, then for each notebook produced there is a net positive contribution to the environment equivalent to 3% of a tree.

Science Based Targets, linked to Planetary Boundaries models, are increasingly popular frameworks and are sometimes considered more robust and more directly focused on environmental targets (whereas many other sustainability frameworks consider sustainability in a broad sense and include socio-economic and cultural components). I like Planetary Boundaries as this covers more than carbon and I do think we forget about our role in protection of biodiversity, conserving nitrate and phosphate flows, water use, aerosol loading, etc. Admittedly the connection most businesses can identify with these factors is less well developed than carbon footprint, and reducing carbon footprint has many co-benefits with other Boundaries areas.