The 26th Annual Symposium: The Big Pivot Meets The Corporate Idealist

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The Wildlife Habitat Council is a hive of activity at the moment as the final pieces of our 26th Annual Symposium fall into place.

The Symposium is an annual celebration of corporate conservation and represents one of the most optimistic conservation conferences today, thanks to its focus on implementation and its role recognizing hundreds of programs under our certification programs. At this conference, action is honored and outstanding efforts are highlighted through an awards event that includes conservation partners, education efforts, newly certified programs, and long-time practitioners of conservation on corporate lands.

The meeting is designed for anyone interested in implementing conservation on corporate lands or in connecting conservation and related education projects to corporate goals for CSR, sustainability, employee engagement, community outreach, biodiversity, or STEM reasons. Participants learn from each other and network across many industry sectors including mining, building materials, manufacturing, chemicals, and utilities.

This year we are honored to host two fascinating speakers who operate at the intersection of corporations and the planet that hosts them. Each will bring a message to our audience of how we can, and should operate into the future and how conservation on corporate lands becomes an important part of becoming great businesses beyond the bottom line.

Our keynote speaker, Andrew Winston, is author of The Big Pivot and a global business strategist. From his vantage point outside of the corporate structure he has identified three global trends that will challenge businesses but also provide opportunities for companies willing to embrace new ways of participating in the global marketplace. Andrew sees natural resource scarcity, climate uncertainty and calls for transparency as three big issues facing business today and has developed ten strategies that companies should adopt to thrive and survive in this future.

In his earlier work, Green to Gold, Andrew Winston and his co-author, Dan Esty illustrated that in many sectors, companies should report, for a variety of stakeholders and reasons, that they manage environmental and social issues well. In The Big Pivot, he takes this further, showing that a more open world is causing customers and stakeholders to demand to know whether a company is a good actor on issues like climate change, resource use, human rights etc. He also builds a convincing business case for companies to not simply ignore climate uncertainty or resource scarcity but pivot to address the challenges for their own benefit and that of society.

Christine Bader, who will facilitate our plenary panel, brings a complementary but different view point. She speaks from the inside, both from her own experiences working within BP but also from interviews she has conducted with others working inside business to advance programs and projects that have a societal benefit. In The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist, Christine shows how those who work on the inside to promote safe and reasonable practices have much in common with advocates from the outside but who must tread more careful and nuanced paths. She will be joined on stage by three great models of this effort. Bill Cobb from Freeport-McMoRan Inc., Jim Rushworth from Lafarge, and Sheryl Telford from Dupont Company will talk with knowledge and passion about how to build a bridge between idealism and implementation.

Our agenda for Symposium is packed with panels, workshops, awards events and the all-important networking opportunities. Our two speakers will set the tone for two days exploring opportunities to use corporate lands to connect community, engage employees and enhance biodiversity.

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Three Ways Corporations Can Battle Invasive Species

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Invasive species do incredible damage to our natural world. From Dutch elm disease devastating the American elm tree in the 1930s, North American rhododendron hybrids choking woodlands in Western Europe today and over 30 species of introduced mammals riding roughshod over New Zealand’s wild and wonderful lands since the 18th century, species introduced accidently or on purpose can have powerful impacts.

WHC’s corporate partners, due to their international presence, their well-defined supply chains and knowledge of their industries, are uniquely positioned to make a positive difference in this arena.

The spread of invasive species is ranked second only to habitat destruction and degradation as the leading threat to biodiversity. Invasive species crowd out natives, outcompete native species for resources, bring disease that native species have no immunity to, or hybridize with native species. They have been shown to effect endangered species, accelerating their march towards extinction or extirpation.

Currently, with almost 900 certified programs worldwide, WHC’s corporate partners are implementing over 380 projects focused on invasive species. Many of these projects seek to identify, manage or eradicate invasive species on their lands, while others seek to mitigate the impact of invasive species on protected species. In most cases, the effort is site-specific and often species-specific. These activities are powerful and important.

Corporations, with their mosaics of landholdings, their international supply chains and their process-driven approaches to risk mitigation, can undertake even more powerful activities like implementing a systematic approach to preventing the spread of invasive species through the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP)process. HACCP is a planning approach to food safety.  It was adapted for use in natural resources management by the National Sea Grant Program and then by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to prevent the spread of invasive species.

HACCP planning identifies the risk of invasive species introduction or movement along pathways and provides for a consistent methodology to manage these pathways at critical points. Businesses that move goods and materials from extraction to processing to customers may have many pathways along which invasive species can move. By engaging in HACCP planning, business may be able to identify these pathways and reduce the spread of invasive species through simple operational changes. For example, at the Department of Defense, movement of military equipment was identified as a possible pathway for the spread of invasive species, so a new protocol for washing vehicles prior and subsequent to deployment has been implemented.

Protocols to impede the spread of invasive species are in place for shipping and manufacturing activities such as the movement of wood pallets, management of ballast water in ships, the makeup of packing materials and other aspects of international commerce. WHC’s corporate partners and any business engaged in the movement of materials can review their own processes using HACCP or another systematic planning approach, implement the protocols and make operational changes that will further impede the spread of invasive species.

Businesses that do not move goods and materials can also make a difference by enrolling their lands into a sentinel site program – an early-warning network alerting scientists to the spread of invasive species into new regions. By carrying out an intensive baseline inventory and supporting a robust monitoring program, corporate lands can not only add to the body of knowledge around the range and limits of some of the most damaging species, they can also engage community members and academic institutions in their efforts.

In short, there are three ways that corporate landholders can have a real impact on the global problem of invasive species:

  1. Through risk analysis and operational modification, they can impede the spread of species.
  2. Through enrollment in a sentinel program they can add to the body of knowledge around invasive species and their current reach.
  3. Through restoration of native habitat they can provide employees and community members with an image of what a healthy system looks like and support efforts to fund, implement and monitor invasive species prevention and eradication programs worldwide.

From the international perspective to the local view, corporations can play a critical role in this threat to our natural world.

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Retaining Simplicity in Recognizing Conservation

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Humans love to complicate things. We all know that if we eat natural foods and exercise, we increase our chances of being healthy. Yet this has not stopped the growth of an entire industry of diet plans, cookbooks, and personal trainers to help us build complicated paths towards healthier lives.

The conservation world has done much the same to the simple act of improving a habitat or an ecosystem. We know if we plant the right things, at the right time, in the right place and manage them in the right way, we will see a healthier habitat and an increase in biodiversity. Yet an entire industry has developed to measure and monetize these activities and their outcomes in complex and expensive ways that can, at times, diminish the power of simple conservation actions and elevate human-centered, human-made targets over natural ones. This introduced complexity may even cause budding conservationists to pull away, fearing their efforts may be viewed as worthless.

In this world where the challenges facing our natural resources are complex, when a connected planet creates impacts far from the source, and where multiple forces are acting on wildlife populations and ecosystems, it’s indeed important to develop comprehensive tools for measurement and planning—but let’s use these tools to complement and not devalue the simple act of human-scale habitat restoration or ecological enhancement.

A typical Wildlife Habitat Council habitat enhancement program undertaken by a team of employees at a member facility somewhere on this planet has three key aspects: it enhances the ecosystem, it engages employees in design and implementation, and it connects with communities through education or recreation activities. Such a program may improve ecosystem services, may be part of a larger landscape-scale effort, and may even implement a Conservation Business Plan objective contained within a consensus-defined logic model but that’s not mandatory.

At the Wildlife Habitat Council, a program is always counted toward the goals it sets for itself – will the habitat be better at the end, will the employees be glad they engaged in this project, and have community members learned about a conservation topic in their own backyards?

If we only counted the efforts of our members under complex systems like ecosystem service measurement, many would fail and would do so for two main reasons. The first is that they have not designed the project to improve ecosystem services and the second is that they don’t have the budget necessary to measure baseline services, let alone improvements to that baseline.

The Wildlife Habitat Council is currently examining what counts in an ecological and educational framework and what we count in our application system in an effort to enhance our certification program. As we progress through this examination, engaging world-renowned experts and launching conversations around a myriad of conservation topics, we must resist the siren call of complexity and focus instead on the innate simplicity contained in nature and the ability of the humblest act to make a positive difference.

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On Reading “The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist”

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Christine Bader, the author of “The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist,” built a career advancing human rights protection within the global business context. She started her work at BP where she helped develop BP’s human rights values and then worked on a UN initiative to start to normalize the concept of corporate responsibility in this important sphere. She defines herself as a “Corporate Idealist,” one who seeks to pursue pragmatic solutions within the corporate structure rather than advocate for disruptive change on the outside. The lessons she has learned, and shares in this fascinating book, are easily translatable into efforts to advance environmental protection within organizations whose main mission is not natural resources protection.

Many parallels can be drawn between Christine Bader’s efforts on behalf of human rights across the globe and the efforts of “Environmental Idealists,” many of whom may work with the Wildlife Habitat Council. Environmental Idealists promote best ecological practices on corporate lands, advance ecological reuse of contaminated properties and seek to instill in their peers a sense of urgency and action around the preservation and enhancement of nature within the corporate realm.

Three points made by the author will resonate with Environmental Idealists working on conservation within the corporate context.

1. The “business case” argument can be unhelpful but is necessary.

Bader presents an argument in her book that reliance on a “business case” as the only driver for good corporate behavior is a rationalization, not a justification – that the requirement to positively impact the bottom-line should not be the only reason to take steps to improve practices. She cites Sir Geoffrey Chandler, a former Shell executive who founded Amnesty International, who said ethical behavior should not need to be justified by financial reward and that expecting all management decisions to meet this “business case” is a poor guiding principle for decision making.

She does acknowledge that managers do have a business case to answer to. They are judged by decisions they take and outcomes they create that affect the bottom line. Their performance is measured in dollars and cents saved or generated. Therefore, it is in a Corporate Idealists’ best interest to understand and acknowledge the innate tensions between business and social/environmental goals.

At the Wildlife Habitat Council, members can make a bottom-line argument for engaging in their habitat restoration efforts–native planting reduces maintenance expenses; natural attenuation costs less money than constructed remediation solutions; exceeding permit expectations can reduce risk and increase predictability. In some cases, no business case is satisfied but other drivers like employee morale, community relations, or impact on biodiversity satisfy the need for a metric or KPI.

2. Distributed ownership is essential for success.

Corporate Idealists, in Bader’s book, understand that their success depends on engaging others in the effort. An Idealist knows her project has been adopted or institutionalized when someone from another function in the organization refers to it independently. Distributed ownership requires that a mandate for action is followed by a sales pitch to all the departments that will eventually be responsible for this action to be implemented and an encouragement to take ownership.

Distributed ownership can be seen in many of the Wildlife Habitat Council’s exemplary projects where leadership has bought into the idea of creating habitat enhancement projects, management supports the imperative with resources both human and financial, and employees deliver the results by creating a Wildlife Team focused on project implementation and community engagement. In fact, engaging community members and conservation and education partners can be the highest expression of distributed ownership as it takes ownership beyond the corporate org chart and into the neighborhood.

3. Incorporation into design and resource allocation is the “Holy Grail.”

According to Bader, topping any Corporate Idealists’ wish list is the incorporation of socially responsible projects into resource allocation and project approval processes. This incorporation suggests that these projects, while not focused on core mission areas, are institutionalized into operations and provides for more effective, meaningful outcomes compared to when the issues are bolted on following incidents beyond a corporation’s control. Likewise for environmental projects that seek to exceed expectation and go above and beyond requirements. If ecological values are incorporated at the design phase of any land-use activity and if resources are allocated to implementation, the conservation outcomes will be stronger and more meaningful to employees and community members. A simple act, like landscaping with native plants, can be seen as a departure from the normal approach to landscape management and, as such, becomes a heavy lift. But, once incorporated into plans, budgets, and resources, this departure seems less radical and becomes part of normal operations. For many Corporate Idealists, the biggest battles against the status quo are the internal battles against entrenched processes and perceptions.

This book is not a manifesto but more a recognition of the reality and an exploration of the challenges and opportunities to do good in a workplace that places value on those that do well.

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A Hands-On Approach to Building the STEM Workforce of Tomorrow

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STEM–the acronym deployed to cover the disciplines of science, engineering, technology and math–is a hot topic right now. Statistics and studies point to a deficit in appropriately trained STEM graduates to meet the workforce demands of the future although governments, institutions, and NGOs advance STEM training as having great social and economic benefit to individuals in both developed and developing nations. UNESCO cites proficiency in science and technology as a critical element in creating economic opportunity. In the EU, the European Roundtable of Industrialists has partnered with a network of 30 European Ministries of Education to advance STEM education to meet a predicted skills gap. In the USA, numerous NGOs and initiatives have received generous funding for research and programs designed to get kids, especially girls and students  from underserved communities, interested in science and aware of the sciences as a bridge to a good job. Formally through Conservation Certification, WHC and its corporate members take a novel, practical approach to advancing STEM education. We connect corporate lands to STEM education and create informal STEM teachers from corporate employees. More than 80% of WHC projects contain elements of education, ranging from activities that engage pre-K children to PhD research projects on habitat quality and endangered species.

Students in Scotland engage in hands-on learning at a wetland. Photo courtesy of ExxonMobil.

Students in Scotland engage in hands-on learning at a wetland. Photo courtesy of ExxonMobil.

One great example of how WHC’s corporate members address STEM education is an effort by CEMEX, a global building materials company. It has partnered with WHC in the USA in Florida to deliver education in six non-traditional classrooms located where it operates mines for a variety of aggregate materials. These classrooms welcome hundreds of children every year with curricula that allow them to develop problem solving skills through hands-on activities focused on science and technology. CEMEX’s 474 Sand Mine in Lake County, Florida, is a 1,400-acre site with a variety of wetland and upland habitats. The outdoor classroom at the facility welcomes students from elementary through high school and provides lessons that align with state education requirements in environmental education. Students learn biology through plant and animal identification and owl pellet dissection, chemistry by doing water quality testing, engineering by constructing bird boxes, and earth sciences by exploring the difference between rocks and minerals. The students discover by doing, they learn from education professionals and, in a manner unique to WHC-certified projects, from people employed in the science and engineering fields at CEMEX and elsewhere who act not only as teachers but also as mentors, modelling what an actual employee in the STEM fields does. CEMEX is a global company that recruits graduates with degrees in mining, materials, and across the spectrum of engineering disciplines. By investing in its six outdoor classrooms it invests in its own future workforce. STEM, as touted in the media and in many of the more prominent initiatives, suggests careers in white coats and clean rooms designing medicines or jobs in Silicon Valley rolling out the best new technology at feisty little startups. Just as much potential exists for careers requiring hard hats, safety vests, and the ability to drive big machinery. WHC members like CEMEX, Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., and Toyota need a STEM-educated workforce. Many of them recognize that using conservation projects on their lands as alternative classrooms offers students hands-on experiences that provide an unforgettable introduction to STEM as well as real-life models for the mining engineers, automotive designers, or materials scientists of tomorrow.

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Bringing Nature to the Human Workplace

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The board of the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) recently met at the 79th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Denver that brought together nearly 900 conservation professionals from state and federal agencies and non-profit organizations from across North America.

By embedding our board meeting in the conference, we were able to build new bridges to the agencies and non-profit conservation partners we’ve been working with for many years. By participating in meetings and discussions at the conference, our message and unique approach to delivering conservation within the corporate world was heard.

One of the focus areas of the conference was what the organizers termed the “human dimension”–the people who benefit from, are impacted by, and are potential supporters for natural resources conservation. While wildlife recreation is on the rise in the form of increased numbers of birdwatchers and wildlife photographers, sportsman numbers are in decline for a number of reasons, including a diminished interest in nature in the younger generation. A census of sportsmen found a 46% decline in waterfowl hunters since 1966 while a 2013 study by Kids Canada found that 70% of 13-20 year olds spend an hour or less per day outdoors. These trends are of concern to the conservation community for many reasons, especially when it comes to garnering support for their continued work.

To address these trends, the community of conservationists represented at the conference held panel discussions and plenary sessions about our changing world and their hopes to engage new populations and new generations in conservation, whether as hunters or fishermen or as hikers or birdwatchers.

One of the causes of the decline in numbers seen by the conservation community is increasing urbanization that leads to a growing physical and psychological distance between people and nature. As the distance grows, nature becomes different and separate from humanity. It becomes a destination to visit, requiring plans, driving directions, maps and possibly entry fees and licenses.

A great way to reduce this distance is to bring nature to people by giving people the opportunities to engage with nature at their workplace. Considering that the adult workforce spends more of their waking hours at their place of employment than in active or passive recreation activities, workplace nature programs present a simple and efficient way to bridge the nature gap and address the separation.

Workplace based conservation programs are at the core of what we do at WHC. With more than 800 conservation programs that connect people and nature at their place of work, WHC has identified the following factors that make good, successful nature programs at workplaces across the world:

  • Support at all levels: Employee-lead conservation projects can happen without support from management but these projects only truly thrive when leadership at the facility and at corporate HQ offer encouragement and recognition for the idea of habitat projects on their lands and also work to direct organizational resources and energies in support.
  • Employees should follow their conservation passions: When a conservation project aligns with the interests and passions of the team charged with implementation and monitoring, success will be automatic. But the converse is also true; if a wildlife team is interested in a specific conservation objective like building native bee habitat but management or conservation partners direct the efforts elsewhere, excitement around the project will wane, connections to it will weaken, and ownership of it will vanish.
  • Recognize early success: When a new wildlife team is formed and ready to start a project, it is important that the team sees success early. This will be a challenge if a complex project requiring delayed gratification is chosen for implementation–restoring a wetland can take decades, removing invasives can be a never-ending task, and creating habitat for rare and declining species depends on many external influences that are beyond the reach of the team charged with implementation. Planting a wildflower meadow brings colors and birds in the spring, a pollinator garden provides rewards by attracting butterflies and bees during the season and tree plantings can provide employees with instant gratification that grows along with the tree.

Other factors that build success and engage employees as environmental stewards include adding an element of competition (think photo contests and wellness challenges); paying attention to physical placement and aesthetics; providing interpretive materials in the form of signs of trail brochures; and creating well-organized events around the project that broaden involvement beyond the core team.

By engaging working adults in meaningful conservation activities where they spend much of their waking hours, we start to bridge the nature gap, halt the decline, and truly bring a human dimension back to nature.

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Connecting to Enhance WHC Certification

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In early February, the Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) convened an impressive group of stakeholders to kick-start the design phase of an enhanced certification program that, when launched, will incorporate contemporary conservation and education initiatives to ensure and incentivize the best conservation projects and education programs across WHC’s membership.

This meeting was attended by representatives from federal agencies including Interior, Agriculture, State, Education, Defense and EPA. Non-profit partners Pollinator Partnership, Defenders of Wildlife, The Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Monarch Watch also participated. Representing the WHC corporate membership were employees from ExxonMobil, Waste Management, Bridgestone, BP, and others.

A number of themes emerged from this meeting but every breakout group circled back to the theme of “connections” and the challenges and opportunities for making them happen. It seems that the unique nature of the conservation and education projects developed and delivered by the members of WHC offers many chances to connect. Here are some of the unique opportunities discussed at the meeting:

Connecting across boundaries: The desire to transcend boundaries—to work “across the fence”—surfaced throughout the day. In the US, that means connecting conservation work being conducted on private land with that being done on public lands, whether held by the state or federal government. On the global level, many WHC members have operations outside the borders of a single country and can use their global operations to impact wildlife and environmental health across these borders. WHC member PPG Industries’ work connecting monarch habitat on two of its properties in Mexico and Pennsylvania is a prime example of using projects in different countries to benefit a single species and connect education efforts in support of a species that is in serious decline across its range.

Connecting to Corporate STEM goals: Many of WHC’s members invest in STEM education to create the scientifically literate workforce necessary for their future operations. These investments support the work of large efforts advancing STEM on the national stage. Through their work with WHC, members can use their lands to promote STEM education by providing hands-on, relevant STEM opportunities to learners of all ages. For example, Waste Management’s El Sobrante Landfill and Wildlife Preserve in California provides an opportunity for children to learn the science of landfill operations and management of wildlife including rare and recovering species.

The Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) convened an impressive group of stakeholders to kick-start the design phase of an enhanced certification program.

The Wildlife Habitat Council (WHC) convened an impressive group of stakeholders to kick-start the design phase of an enhanced certification program.

Connecting within industry sectors: When the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA) wanted to connect its members with a common approach to biodiversity projects, it partnered with WHC to develop a biodiversity toolkit. This toolkit provides operators of ready mixed concrete production facilities with examples of projects that enhance biodiversity with little or no impact on operations. The toolkit gives the operator guidance on starting a project and working towards certification. By creating a common starting point for facilities across the country, and beyond, WHC creates connections within this industry sector.

Through these connections, and many more, WHC believes that its members’ efforts amount to an outcome that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Building on this stakeholder meeting, we will continue, over the next 12 months, to explore these connections further. We plan to take the conversation across the country and beyond and, with our government and NGO partners define, formalize and internalize these connections, translate them into actions and projects that any corporate member can implement on their property for high quality conservation and education outcomes.

For information, contact Margaret.

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