Tag Archive for: corporate conservation

Going Native in Your Urban Garden

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Many corporate facilities are located in urban and industrial areas, where wildlife habitat tends to occur in small, isolated patches. In areas such as these, projects like native gardens are all the more important for the conservation of pollinators, birds, and other native animals.

Urban gardening with native species is suitable to a variety of settings, from urban corporate landscapes to home gardens. Like urban tree planting initiatives, native gardening projects provide multiple benefits for urban neighborhoods. They can help to revitalize urban neighborhoods by improving visual aesthetics and providing a place for people to reconnect with nature and with their neighbors. Urban gardens also contribute to cooler urban temperatures, produce oxygen, filter rainfall, and improve infiltration. In addition, urban gardens that include native plants can provide habitat for pollinators, songbirds, and other urban wildlife.

Not sure where to begin? Whether you’re starting from scratch with a new garden or revamping an existing garden at your facility, it will be easiest to first decide what your goals are for the garden. Do you want lots of colorful, delicate butterflies, or maybe zippy little hummingbirds? Try planting some colorful nectar-bearing flowering forbs, vines, and shrubs. Or maybe you’d rather attract birds that will fill your garden with their songs? You’ll want to plant shrubs that produce lots of berries and forbs that produce seeds, as well as trees for nesting if you have the room. Or perhaps you’d prefer to manage stormwater runoff with your garden—you could plant native vegetation that can tolerate occasional flooding to create a rain garden.

We’ve got a number of articles and other resources in our Knowledge Center to help you learn about native gardening – check out some of these to get you started:

If you’d like specific recommendations on how to design your urban garden for wildlife, don’t hesitate to contact us at WHC@wildlifehc.org.

Read more WHC blogs.

Bats and Birds Will Eat Your Mosquitos

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Hate mosquitos? You’re not alone! Although they are an important part of the ecosystem, too many mosquitos can create quite a nuisance. They buzz in your ear and leave red, itchy welts when they bite, and some even transmit diseases like West Nile Virus and malaria.

You wouldn’t know it from their cute faces, but these little brown bats are voracious insect predators, and can eat thousands of mosquitos in a single night. Source: USFWS.

You wouldn’t know it from their cute faces, but these little brown bats are voracious insect predators, and can eat thousands of mosquitos in a single night. Source: USFWS.

Luckily, nature has provided us with many natural mosquito predators to help keep them under control.

Bats in temperate areas of the world tend to be insectivorous, with voracious appetites for mosquitos and other flying insect pests. A single bat can eat about 1,200 insects an hour, and about 6,000-8,000 insects a night. Female bats that are nursing young may even eat up to their weight in insects nightly.

Insectivorous birds like purple martins, swallows, eastern kingbirds, and yellow warblers are also known for eating flying insects, including mosquitos, though to a lesser extent.

So if you have a problem with mosquitos and other flying pest insects, try enhancing your site’s habitat to attract these natural insect predators. You could install artificial structures that provide nesting and roosting habitat, such as nest boxes for birds and bat houses or other artificial roosts for bats. You should also make sure the surrounding habitat provides the resources and complexity needed by the species you want to attract, including plenty of native vegetation that will provide additional food sources and cover habitat. Not only will you contribute to conservation of these species, you’ll also be helping yourself!

It’s important to remember that none of these species will provide a singular solution to controlling mosquitos in all locations. Rather, attracting natural predators is an important step in long-term planning for reducing mosquito numbers in your area.

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Cooperative Work Among Companies Creates Ecological and Community Connectivity in Northwest Indiana

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On Thursday, January 21, about 15 volunteers from a diverse group of companies and conservation organizations, including WHC and members of the Indiana Coastal Cooperative Weed Management Group as well as the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, ExxonMobil, ArcelorMittal, PRAXAIR, the Coffee Creek Watershed Conservancy, and the Shirley Heinze Land Trust, joined up to tackle the removal of invasive species from upland areas at ExxonMobil’s Hammond Terminal.

It can be difficult to find larger tracts of dune and swale habitat in natural or even semi-natural conditions in Indiana’s coastal region because of heavy urban and industrial development. The 77-acre Hammond Terminal property includes a large amount of this critical Lake Michigan coastal habitat, so although former industrial uses left their mark on the site more than 50 years ago, it remains one of the most important tracts of shorebird habitat in the region and is key piece of the conservation and landscape connectivity puzzle.

The focus of invasive removal at last week’s workday was buckthorn, a non-native, invasive shrub that is a common invader in Midwestern forests, prairies, and oak savannas. The volunteers used a technique known as the “cut-stump method” in which the shrubs are cut down and herbicide applied to the stump to prevent regrowth. Also on the agenda was laying the ground for a new trail that will be used by East Chicago students and bird watching visitors.

During the workday, the group shared their common knowledge and experience of working on site and along the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, and learned that slag had been deposited on-site as far back as the 1940s and since then, a succession of native habitats developed throughout the site. The spread of invasive plants such as buckthorn, phragmites, purple loosestrife, and many others have impacted the ecological quality of this site over the past 10 years. Efforts to develop an ecological restoration partnership between the Indiana DNR, ExxonMobil, and BP have provided a unique regional example of how companies and natural resource agencies can work together to increase conservation in urban-industrial areas.

A volunteer applies Pathfinder herbicide to a buckthorn stump. The herbicide is dyed blue to help volunteers see which plants have already been treated.

A volunteer applies Pathfinder herbicide to a buckthorn stump. The herbicide is dyed blue to help volunteers see which plants have already been treated.

This cooperative workday at the Hammond Terminal is part of a larger ongoing collaborative effort, funded by Sustain Our Great Lakes Program and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to the Indiana DNR, to control invasive species and restore native habitats on public and private properties areas along the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal. Other companies involved in this invasive species control partnership include BP and Valero. WHC is also working with ExxonMobil, ArcelorMittal, PRAXAIR, and Kinder Morgan on developing invasive species control programs on their working facilities under a grant from the Indiana DNR Coastal Program and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). Working collaboratively like this helps companies enhance the conservation value of their projects by aligning them with broader goals for the region. It also helps teams learn from one another by providing opportunities to share information about what worked and what didn’t.

For more details on how your company can contribute to conservation efforts in your area, contact WHC for tailored help or check out our Project Guidances for guidelines on designing and implementing conservation and education projects.

Read more WHC blogs.

Unusual Places with Unexpected Partners: Welcoming All-Comers to Restore, Improve and Protect Nature

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I recently had the honor and pleasure of meeting Mary Robinson, the former and first woman president of Ireland, a global advocate for women and children and a leader in climate change justice. She was fresh from the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris and optimistic about the result. As we talked, she told me that the two forces that could make a huge difference in progress toward COP21 goals were women and business. She felt it essential to harness the passion and power of women who, in the developing world, will be hardest hit by a changing climate, and to harness the power of business to create passion and momentum toward the goal of keeping global temperature rise significantly beneath 2 degrees Celsius.

Her exhortation that business is an essential player in this issue echoes so many others who are beginning to understand that business has, for many reasons, a key role to play in protecting our planet.

Wildlife Habitat Council’s mission is to facilitate business playing this key role with respect to biodiversity and the conservation of nature. Our “big tent” approach welcomes all-comers who want to work with us to restore, improve or protect nature.

If a company wants to act to improve its lands for nature, we want to encourage and enable them to do so, whatever the scope of their aspirations. We do this by working with them to design strong and appropriate projects and recognize their efforts. When we evaluate projects, we evaluate their impacts on nature, employees and community.

Our unstated mission is to place upward pressure on industry to adopt better practices in their operations and on their lands. We do this not by advocacy, policy or litigation, but through “show and tell,” by working with the individuals on the ground who conceive of the projects, implement them, own them and transmit their successes up through the corporate chain. Once this is repeated across locations within a company, it can become embedded in the culture of the company and lead to fundamental changes in both culture and operations. Imagine if conservation programs on corporate lands become as common as recycling in corporate offices. That’s the goal.

In terms of conservation outcomes, there are some compelling reasons to work where others may fear to tread:

Every act of conservation matters. A tree planted in the ground at a corporate campus, a ready-mix facility, or a restored quarry can be as valuable as a tree planted in protected woodlands. Habitat destruction and fragmentation remain the leading causes of biodiversity loss across the world, and by doing acts of conservation along the entire urban-rural spectrum, in unusual places with unexpected partners, we help create a mosaic of nature that fills the spaces in between, provides connectivity and increases population resilience.

Opportunity knocks on corporate lands. Natural resources extraction carried out by business leads to restoration, which can in turn lead to opportunities for ecological enhancement. Site clean-up and remediation, mainly the responsibility of business, can result in quality conservation outcomes. Maintenance and operations on corporate campuses and manufacturing sites can be altered to benefit nature by changing landscape management regimes to increase native plants or altering the movement of goods and materials to break invasive species pathways. Every corporate property has the potential to contribute.

Not all communities are created equally. Not every community has a well-endowed park, a vibrant nature center or easy access to safe outdoor recreational activities. In under-served rural and urban settings, corporate lands can provide a lake to take a child fishing, a nature center to teach environmental basics, or a trail to encourage exercise and provide the physical and mental health benefits of being in the natural world. By recognizing high-quality access and education, we encourage other businesses to open their doors and become true members of the community.

Most everything we buy, eat, wear, drive, look at or listen to is made by a company in a facility somewhere with the potential to contribute to biodiversity in a large or small way. Our approach is to help this contribution happen, recognize it when it does, and hope that the recognition in turn contributes to the program’s longevity.

There are many roads along which we all try to better the world. In the environmental community, some groups advance the cause of a healthier environment through litigation, regulatory change and advocacy. Some promote the road of direct action while others advance the cause through education and public awareness. WHC’s road is, with apologies to Robert Frost, less traveled but engaging business in conservation can make all the difference.

Read more WHC blogs.

LS_field_Unimin - big bluestem

The Carbon-Sequestering Power of Soils

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This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about soil.

Earlier this year, scientists announced that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere had reached a record high of 400 parts per million (ppm), more than 120 ppm higher than pre-industrial carbon levels. It seems fitting, then, that I end this blog series with a post about the carbon-sequestering power of soils.

Carbon sequestration is the process by which carbon dioxide is moved from the atmosphere into a non-gaseous form, such as plant matter. Plants do this well, using sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and other compounds that ultimately turn into plant tissues. When more carbon is absorbed then released, the system is considered a carbon sink; the opposite, when a system releases more carbon than absorbs, is considered a carbon source.

When plants die, they decay and become part of the soil. Over time, this process allows soils to store large amounts of carbon and serve as carbon sinks, especially in soils where the decay of organic matter back into carbon dioxide is slow, such as colder regions and areas with low soil disturbance.

Prairie soils can be particularly good carbon sinks. Prairie grasses and wildflowers develop deep, extensive root systems; some prairie plants grow roots up to 15 feet deep! As these root systems decay, organic matter in the soil builds up relatively quickly. In fact, prairies can store more carbon underground than forests can store in trees aboveground.

Corporate conservation programs can help contribute to soil carbon sequestration in a number of ways. As mentioned above, planting native vegetation that is good at sequestering carbon, including trees and deep-rooted grasses and wildflowers, is a great way to do this. Teams can also manage existing habitats in ways that reduce soil disturbance and erosion, improve soil structure, and increase soil organic matter.

So the next time you hear about atmospheric carbon levels, consider how the soil under our feet is so closely linked to the air above our heads!

Read more WHC blogs.

6 Tricks for Better Species Identification

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Learning how to identify plants and animals–especially when you’re first starting out with a conservation project—can be seem pretty daunting at first. Once you get the hang of it, though, I promise it gets much easier! Here’s a list of six tricks I use all the time when I’m trying to identify wildlife in the field.

  1. First, get yourself some handy identification tools.

There are so many species, how could one possibly learn what they all look like?  Answer – you don’t.  Instead, you learn how to use tools like field guides that will help you figure out which species you’re looking at.  Field guides are generally designed to be small enough to carry around while also providing an identification tips for a group of species like birds.  There are also numerous apps for your smartphone that can supplement or replace field guides, like Audubon’s bird guide app and LeafSnap.

  1. Take photos!

Take photos of the animals and plants you see, especially if you aren’t sure what species it is.  You can then examine the photo in detail and zoom in on your computer’s monitor, and take as much time as you need to compare it to books and online guides.  You can also submit photos to a variety of experts online who can help with difficult identifications, such as BugGuide.net or a local naturalist.

  1. Get expert help in the field.

In addition to getting help with identifying species you photographed, it can also be advantageous to have one or more experts with you in the field while you are monitoring your project.  They can give you hands-on training in implementing a monitoring technique for your project as well as with in-the-field identification.

  1. Learn how to “break it down” into manageable parts.

One of the best ways to keep from feeling overwhelmed by everything going on with the way a species looks or sounds is learning how to “break down” each plant or animal into a bunch of manageable “parts” that will help you identify it. So if you’re trying to figure out which bird you’re seeing, you can break down the visual observation into things like relative size, bill length, bill shape, tail shape, colors on various parts of the body, and distinctive markings.  Animal songs and calls can be similarly broken down into things like pitch, rhythm, melody and harmonics, complexity, tone, timbre, and mnemonic association.

  1. Use all of your senses to observe plants and animals.

The most common way to identify plants and animals is by sight, of course but your other senses can help you too.  Many animals sing, call, or make other noises, and with some practice it can be easy to distinguish many of the common bird songs, frog and mammal calls, and such.  Some species have a distinctive smell, such the lemony odor released by lemon beebalm when its leaves are crushed, or that very distinctively noxious odor when a skunk sprays to protect itself.  Touch and taste can also be useful for helping identify certain plants, such as rough tree bark or minty-tasting leaves (taste should be used with lots of caution, however, as many wild plants can be poisonous!)

  1. Consider your location.

Remember, species occur within specific ranges and habitat types.  The species you might find when you’re out on your company’s land will therefore depend a great deal on where you are in the world and what habitat you’re looking at.  You wouldn’t find a tropical marsh bird in a temperate desert, now would you?

I hope these tricks give you the confidence you need to go out there and try your hand at species ID!

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Caribou Who?

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With the winter holidays fast approaching, I thought it would be fun to write about caribou, which most people know by their other name—reindeer.

Reindeer live in the northern latitudes of North America, Europe, and Asia. They are divided into several subspecies, based upon habitat (woodland or tundra) and location.

Reindeer are pretty unique, for several reasons. For starters, they are the only species of mammal that can see ultraviolet light. How cool is that? It helps reindeer to better see things like white fur (like Arctic wolves) in the glowing white of the Arctic region that they might otherwise miss.

Their eating habits also make them pretty distinctive. They are the only large mammal able to eat lichen because of specialized gut flora that helps them metabolize it.

Reindeer moss is a type of lichen and is a favorite food for reindeer. Source: Wacker Chemical Corporation

Reindeer moss is a type of lichen and is a favorite food for reindeer. Source: Wacker Chemical Corporation

Their reliance on lichen as a winter food source means they require plenty of undisturbed, lichen rich habitat, but unfortunately, climate change and other factors are causing this critical habitat to disappear all too quickly.

In most subspecies of reindeer, box sexes grow antlers, which is unique among deer. They also have the largest antlers relative to body size of all deer species. They can measure up to 51 inches long and 33 pounds! Male reindeer shed their antlers at the end of the mating season in early December, while females retain theirs throughout the winter until they give birth in the spring.

That’s right, folks – if the many depictions of Santa’s antlered reindeer are correct, that means Santa’s reindeer are all females. (I suppose it’s a good thing they all have gender-neutral names! Well, except for poor Rudolph.)

Observations of reindeer actually flying have yet to occur, though.

If you’d like to see reindeer in action, check out the Reindeer Cam at the Como Park Zoo & Observatory.

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Setting the New Standard: Aligning Conservation Goals with Existing Priorities

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This is the seventh in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

Last month’s blog post reflected how the world of conservation is awash in theories and stances on what is credible or not. It is also awash in objectives, priorities, plans and approaches. Every entity engaged with nature has a plan with a set of priorities, whether national or regional. Every state and territory in the U.S. has a State Wildlife Action Plan –  a blueprint for securing biodiversity in the future. The EU has a biodiversity strategy for 2020, as do many countries, including Australia, Japan and Kenya. Across the NGO landscape, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) promotes its priority conservation areas, IUCN frames its work around its Red List, and BirdLife International has its Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas. At a more local scale, biodiversity and the ecological health of watersheds, estuaries, sites of significant interest and other natural areas are all addressed with suites of priorities, many supported by science and most with attendant actions.  Many such plans have significant overlap, though none are universally adopted.

These plans highlight priorities, set targets and describe best practices towards meeting conservation goals. The most basic plans are informative only, while the best provide metrics, a clear picture of the desired end state, and a road map for implementation.

When Wildlife Habitat Council embarked on the re-design of its signature certification program and developed the soon-to-be-launched Conservation Certification, it took a different approach to ensure that the participants in its programs were implementing projects that met global conservation goals. Instead of creating more plans and priorities, it chose to align with existing plans and incentivize its participants to create explicit associations with them. We aligned with the wheel without reinventing it.

For WHC this approach makes a lot of sense for a variety of reasons.

WHC’s applicants – both members and not – are not conveniently located in a single conservation landscape. They cannot jointly adopt an initiative to recover a specific species, restore a regionally important ecosystem, or even focus on a single biome. To overlay a conservation priority that would have meaning for all possible locations would require that the priority be so general as to be meaningless. Instead, by aligning with existing priorities, WHC’s projects become part of the mosaic of efforts being done to advance landscape-scale conservation across the globe.

Also, having worked at the intersection of nature and business for almost three decades, WHC knows that a corporate conservation goal will only be achieved if the implementation on the ground has local meaning and significance. A narrow and specific goal that brooks no localization and allows for no real innovation will have no ownership and no longevity.  Some of the strongest projects we recognize have deep meaning in their communities. By incentivizing alignments with regionally-appropriate conservation plans, WHC provides for the freedom for practitioners to find goals and priorities that are important to them, thus increasing the likelihood of success both in the near and long terms.

An additional benefit of alignments is the increase in the importance of partnerships. WHC has always valued partnerships with conservation groups that invest in on-the-ground work. By encouraging alignments with these same groups’ priorities, we increase the likelihood of successful, goal-focused partnerships.

Finally, one of the principles we adopted as we designed our new Conservation Certification was accessibility to allow projects of all shapes and sizes to receive recognition and to encourage building of successful projects. By eschewing the development of our own conservation priorities, we secure accessibility for our participants and double down on our mantra that every act of conservation matters.   This approach has been designed into Conservation Certification, and an applicant will be steered towards aligning their efforts from the design phase through project maintenance and monitoring.

Under WHC’s new Conservation Certification, a program being submitted for recognition must meet a number of mandatory requirements, as follows:

  1. Have a stated conservation or education objective
  2. Provide value or benefit to the natural community
  3. Have measured outcomes supported by documentation
  4. Exceed any pertinent regulatory requirements
  5. Be locally appropriate

These criteria introduce the concept of alignments with other conservation plans, as project owners will have to determine what is ecologically appropriate for the location and what objective would be meaningful within that context.  A national conservation strategy, like the President Obama’s Pollinator Health Task Force, will provide a certain level of alignment on a broad scale, while a more local plan will be more specific with direct references to locations, partners and even plant lists. We encourage our participants to seek out the plans that are meaningful to them.

Once the criteria have been met, the applicant will be asked, for each project, to state what initiative they are aligning their goals to and how their actions are supporting them. Incentives, in the form of higher points, will be given to projects designed with explicit alignments and executed to secure them.

By not developing our own priorities but instead aligning with existing ones and leveraging existing efforts, WHC is being efficient in its approach and true to its mission and values.

Read more WHC blogs.

Chestnut-trees

Setting the New Standard: Supported Approaches Empower Success

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This is the fifth in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

It is a widely-held belief that a clinical distance must be maintained between the certifier and the certified, that one body should be the keeper of the standard and the other should be the supplicant, seeking to reach the standard through heroic, unsupported efforts. It all sounds very mythical. Imagine Greek gods up on Mount Olympus watching the efforts of mere mortals below attempting to divine the gods’ intentions and meet their capricious requirements. Distance is thought to be an essential criterion for impartiality that is itself critical for credibility.

Certifying bodies world wide take different approaches. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) states that it is committed to being the world’s leading certification program for sustainable wild-capture seafood, but it does not issue certificates or assess fisheries against its own standards. Instead it allows independently accredited bodies to certify adherence to the standards it sets. MSC takes this approach to “maintain impartiality.” The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) takes the same approach, engaging third-party entities to oversee certification of adherence to its standards.

In contrast to MSC and FSC, The Fair Trade Program and USGBC’s LEED program embrace the applicant. Fair Trade’s model is externally audited, but certification is awarded by the standard-setting body. In contrast, LEED uses transparency, clear standards and external reviewers to ensure impartiality, but provides the applicant with the information needed to compile an application—a clear view of how their efforts will be recognized and what extra efforts are needed to achieve certain levels of recognition.

In previous blog posts I talked about why our design of a new standard for corporate conservation embraces scalability and transparency as critical to accessibility and broad adoption. This post sets out an argument that a supported approach is also essential. Bringing the gods down from the mountaintop to interact with the mortals below will aid broad adoption and can be done without compromising credibility. A supported approach is essential for accessibility. It can be protected through the radical transparency designed into the program.

The Global Reporting Initiative’s Learning Services Program issued a Starting Points paper called “GRI Sustainability Reporting: How valuable is the journey?” The paper explores the experiences of organizations of all types and sizes with GRI’s reporting process. It concludes that it is not easy for those reporting for the first time to understand what the GRI sustainability reporting process involves. It also concludes that the journey towards the reporting process is crucial to the final product. Preparing an application or a report towards recognition should not be the goal. Rather, the goal should be creating sustainable projects and processes to support the application and/or report.

Just like GRI, the Wildlife Habitat Council is as interested in the journey towards certification as in the final destination. With our new standard, WHC Conservation Certification, support will be offered at a number of different points along the journey. We believe that conservation and education programs are more sustainable through an approach that considers context, encourages flexibility and embeds efficiencies through actively sharing knowledge and encouraging cross-pollination within and across industry sectors about challenges, innovations and success stories.

At the beginning of the journey, WHC seeks to work with a potential applicant to ensure they are building the strongest possible program. The British Standards Institution developed a “Guidance for Community Sustainable Development” (BS8904). This  guidance could easily have been titled a “Guidance for Sustainable Corporate Conservation” given how close it hews to the decision tool WHC uses to engage the right people, at the right levels, from the right places in successful corporate conservation projects. This tool will be the first support mechanism on the journey to certification.  The WHC decision tool, like BS8904, considers context as a key to success. It involves the following steps: Agreement on a Goal, Engagement of Stakeholders, Definition of Issues, Identification of Resources, Selection of Options, Implementation of Projects, Evaluation of Results, and Learning from the Process.  Through this tool, WHC helps an applicant translate a corporate goal to a site-specific action and helps a corporate CSR professional translate sustainability objectives into meaningful projects.

Throughout the journey, WHC will provide guidance documents for a variety of types of conservation and education projects that an applicant can attempt. Each guidance document will contain information to allow the applicant to prepare a successful and meaningful project and prepare for certification. The guidance documents are not action plans. They do not elucidate the steps required, and adherence to them does not guarantee certification. The guidance will show the applicant what documents, data and descriptions are needed for to apply for Conservation Certification.

As the applicant completes projects and seeks to be recognized under the new standard, they will be supported throughout the application process with an online application tool that presents a series of questions walking an applicant through the activities they have implemented to improve their habitat, better manage wildlife species and educate a variety of audiences. Each applicant will have their own personal journey through the application process that will mirror their approach to project implementation but provide WHC with enough consistency and alignments to allow for effective evaluative reporting.

To ensure impartiality, WHC will separate the program support function from the certification function and govern the system to ensure that the two functions operate independently of one another. The transparency designed into the new Conservation Certification will highlight this separation and show how it is enforced.

WHC seeks to empower employees and others to implement meaningful conservation projects on corporate lands. It seeks to engage CSR professionals, Chief Sustainability Officers and EHS managers in using conservation and education to meet conservation goals that align with larger landscape efforts. Ultimately, it seeks to increase the amount of land being managed towards a conservation goal and the number of people engaged with that goal. In the world of Voluntary Sustainability Standards, WHC wants to empower, not enforce.

Read more WHC blogs.

Setting the New Standard: Transparency Matters

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This is the fourth in a series of monthly blog posts exploring the development of a new standard in corporate conservation certification.

In “Learning Through Disclosure,” an essay in Transparency in Global Environmental Governance, Graeme Auld and Lars Gulbrandsen show how two types of transparency—procedural transparency and outcome transparency—can impact the legitimacy of a recognition program. Procedural transparency focuses on governance and adjudication, providing a window into how a standard has been developed, who had a hand in developing the standard, and how the standard is defended. Outcome transparency shines a light on the activities being recognized. It holds certified entities to their stated practices and performance. When procedural transparency and outcome transparency overlap, an audience can understand the system in place for recognition and monitoring and view the level of compliance, and the standard can be considered legitimate.

There is enormous diversity in Voluntary Sustainability Standards (VSS) across the globe from what the standards seek to recognize to the methods through which they create and evaluate their recognitions. An alphabet soup of standards is applied to forestry, fisheries, agriculture, tourism, recreation, buildings, energy and municipal policies. Some of these standards are government initiatives –the EPA Energy Star program and the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) –others are private concerns developed by industry, civic institutions and academia. Some standards are complex and expensive,  others are simple and direct. Regardless of originating entity, objective, scope or market, the one thing that successful standards share is a commitment to transparency.

In the USA and beyond, the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program shares its standards freely and openly to allow anyone to build to LEED standards, whether they seek LEED recognition or not. It also provides potential applicants for certification with a clear picture of how their efforts will score, thus providing a procedural transparency that enhances accessibility, increases uptake of the program and secures the program’s legitimacy. On the other hand, the Director General for Energy, the body that oversees the EU RED, provides information about its program on request only. In addition, RED has unclear assessment criteria, no timeline for recognition, and no clear administrative procedures for post-recognition evaluation. RED is widely perceived as being opaque and unfair.

Currently, WHC provides a measure of procedural and outcome transparency through its website and in its publications. Its members are listed, its governing board is identified and contact details and bios for all staff members are available. All certified programs are listed on the the WHC Index and details of the certification cycle are provided.

When it launches its new standard later this year, WHC will commit to radical transparency in an effort to adopt the best practices of VSS, in order to provide audiences with full and complete disclosure of procedures and outcomes, and incentivize conservation at the highest possible levels.

WHC will provide clear explanations of its new criteria. For the new standard, WHC developed a suite of Project Guidance documents that form the core content of the certification process, i.e, the objectives and project characteristics needed to reach certain levels of recognition. These documents were developed through a multi-stakeholder process that will be fully explained upon launch of the new standard. The Project Guidance documents then evolved into a series of criteria against which a project will be scored. The scoring is being developed in partnership with The Conservation Fund, and a full report on the scoring model will also be available. To facilitate consistent scoring by reviewers, the criteria have been further developed into a series of questions an applicant will be asked to answer. These questions will be freely available.

WHC will provide a clear explanation of its review process. Along with the publication of the scoring model, WHC will also provide an explanation of how each application is reviewed and the measures instituted to ensure consistency and objectivity across the entire process. Governance of the review process will also be addressed to illustrate how the integrity of the process is protected. The ability of an applicant to communicate with a reviewer will be laid out clearly, and limitations set on such communications will also be elucidated.

WHC will provide a clear explanation of the certified projects and their final scores. Currently, WHC provides descriptions of all its certified programs on the Conservation Registry. This valuable tool allows audiences to see what projects are being done where and by whom. With the new standard, WHC is making a commitment to continue contributing to the Conservation Registry, but also plans to provide more evaluative measures of each program through improved data collection. Final design of this data collection is underway, and it is WHC’s hope that all certified programs will be listed along with their final score, the tier of recognition they have achieved, and the conservation outcomes they are focused on, as well as the associated educational efforts and the results of community and employee engagement.

WHC will provide a clear explanation of governance over the new standard. All NGOs have governance bodies. WHC’s Board of Directors ensures regulatory compliance, strategic clarity and ethical leadership. It does not govern programming or content. It will not govern the new standard. To ensure the new standard is governed appropriately–that change is managed, updates reflect changes in the conservation context and best practices, and stakeholders remain key informants—WHC will convene a steering committee specifically focused on governance of the new standard, made up of conservation and education experts, industry and business representatives and those knowledgeable about standards.

This new standard of certification will allow WHC to further its mission to recognize conservation efforts on private lands and encourage more conservation.By providing procedural and outcome transparency, WHC will achieve its recognition goal in a manner that is meaningful, defensible, and that will inspire others to engage in activities to restore habitats and improve biodiversity, while educating and engaging communities and employees.

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Tag Archive for: corporate conservation

How They Did It: Checking In with the Best Insect Hotels

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View the webinar

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What makes a great bug hotel? WHC wanted to find out through last year’s Insect Hotel Challenge, our first ever international design and build contest for bug hotels. We received 41 entries from across the US, Mexico, Brazil, and as far away as Uzbekistan. The entries were judged on creativity and ingenuity, the use of found materials and the awareness of the designers of the habitat benefit to insects.

In this webinar, hear from the teams behind the winning hotels on how they developed their creative structures and implementation plans.

You’ll learn:

  • The inspiration behind the creation of these award-winning bug hotels for native bees, lacewings, beetles, ladybugs, and other insects.
  • How these projects enhance partnerships and strengthen conservation programs and community engagement
  • Ideas for building a bug hotel of your own

Presenters:

  • Tatiana Gil, General Motors São Caetano do Sul, Brazil
  • Becky Azevedo, Technical Manager, Waste Management Guadalupe Landfill
  • Thelma Redick, Senior Director of Conservation Content and Partnerships, Wildlife Habitat Council

What is an Insect Hotel?

Need a primer on insect hotels? Learn the basics through our on-demand webinar: Build a Bug Palace – Learn How Easy, Inexpensive Insect Hotels Can Enhance Your Habitat.

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Saving Bats From Decline

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The Corporate Role in Preserving the Ecological and Economic Benefits of Bats
Sponsored by Ontario Power Generation

Bats are a unique group of animals with ecological, economical and cultural significance around the world. They are ubiquitous, with 1,300 species living on every continent but Antarctica. Insectivorous bats save agriculture billions of dollars through predation of a multitude of agricultural pests. Other bats eat fruit and nectar, acting as pollinators and spreading seeds of the fruit they eat, proving essential to the success of many food products like tequila and chocolate, consequently contributing to the global economy. With increased need, heightened interest and accessible technology, now is an opportune time for corporate landowners to engage in bat conservation projects.

To download this white paper, please fill out the form below.

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Rights-of-Way Partnerships and Alliances: Addressing the Risk of the Pollinator Declines and ESA Listings

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Rights-of-way offer unique conservation opportunities by connecting landscapes and providing a generally stable habitat protected from future development. The Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group, composed of multiple industries and unique partnerships, is working to support pollinators and other wildlife, inspired by the population declines in insect pollinator species and the potential listing of the monarch butterfly under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The group is currently working on a voluntary agreement to enhance and sustain monarch butterfly habitat, and in turn will receive regulatory assurances that no additional management activities will be required if the butterfly becomes listed.

During this webinar you’ll learn:
  • How ESA tools like Candidate Conservation Agreements with Assurances (CCAA) can be used to provide important conservation that may influence future ESA listing decisions
  • What is included in the National Monarch Butterfly CCAA for Energy and Transportation Lands
  • Ways partners can engage in the CCAA effort and benefits of participating now
Presenters: 
  • Iris Caldwell, Program Manager- Sustainable Landscapes, Energy Resources Center, University of Illinois at Chicago
  • Dan Salas, Senior Ecologist, Cardno 
  • Laurel Hill, Fish and Wildlife Biologist, Ecological Services, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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Enhancing Habitat Connectivity Through Corporate Conservation

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The Private Sector Role in Reconnecting Habitat for Ecosystem Health and Resiliency
Sponsored by Bruce Power

Healthy habitats are necessary for plants and animals to survive and thrive. One measure of the health of a habitat is the degree to which it is isolated from other habitats by land management practices or development, commonly referred to as fragmentation. Fragmentation is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity across the planet, as it can prevent species from moving to hunt, mate, disperse to new areas or escape predators. When corporate landowners engage in ecological connectivity initiatives to reduce fragmentation, they are contributing to landscape-scale efforts that have benefits beyond the corporate footprint and across the entire ecoregion.

To download this white paper, please fill out the form below.

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The Three “E”s to Success: Employees, Education and Engagement

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This webinar will offer insights into elements of success essential to strong projects: continual engagement with employees and strong partners; educational support to teach and gather data on your projects; and an understanding of the natural and human community in which you are interacting. Learn how to connect your employees with state-level conservation education resources to develop partnerships that meet your WHC Conservation Certification objectives. You’ll find out how you may use these resources to conduct education and outreach initiatives at your WHC-certified habitat and walk away with a ready-to-use toolkit to encourage engagement.

You’ll learn:

  • The ready-made lessons in Project Learning Tree (PLT) and how you can obtain them through online or in-person training.
  • How PLT has been applied to WHC habitat projects with great effectiveness.
  • How PLT supports conservation goals, as well as local, state and national education standards.
  • The many resources available to you to apply this flexible curriculum to formal education, training and community engagement, and awareness events.

Presenters:

  • Michelle Holyfield, Eastman
  • Jaclyn Stallard, Project Learning Tree
  • Misty Bowie, Texas Forestry Association

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Corporate Citizenship and STEM Education

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Creating a Pipeline of Proficiency for a Future Workforce
Sponsored by Freeport-McMoRan

Many companies today choose to use the environment as the integrating concept for STEM, providing learning opportunities through hands-on, outdoors and nature-based activities. These approaches—examples of which are outlined in this white paper—take advantage of the lands on which an operation is located,  understand community needs by providing place-based and relevant programs, and meet multiple corporate goals across the spectrum of corporate citizenship efforts.

To download this white paper, please fill out the form below.

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5 Innovative Approaches to Habitat Regeneration

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Gain greater competency in habitat restoration in a way that is easy to understand through this innovative approach to habitat regeneration success. Specifically, learn how to prioritize your land-management projects, from gathering baseline data to flora and fauna invasive species control to long-term protection and maintenance of your conservation investment. Our expert presenter will share critical steps to habitat regeneration, and how you can incorporate the latest technology and best management practices to ensure you accomplish your conservation goals every step along the continuum.

Join Gene as he shares his years of experience from real-world projects and case studies as you learn:

  • An easy-to-understand theory and step-by-step process behind planning a restoration/conservation project and why some steps may need to be addressed before others can succeed
  • The latest technology and how it can help you monitor from baseline analysis to each benchmark, helping to minimize efforts and save resources
  • How to mark your success at each stage of the often long-term process of habitat restoration
  • Tactics on how to demonstrate your success to others, retain project interest and build upon it

Presenter:

  • Gene Huntington, Ecological Landscape Architect and Partner at Steward Green, Accredited Professional for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design

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WHC Conservation Certification: A Conversation with Margaret O’Gorman

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WHC’s new certification program, Conservation Certification, sets the standard for corporate conservation actions, and produces quantitative benefits to corporations, communities and the environment.

During this interview-style webinar, Wildlife Habitat Council president, Margaret O’Gorman answers questions related to:

  • The development of the program by experts and stakeholders
  • Using Project Guidances to help structure and implement high quality conservation and education projects
  • Benefits, including online access, measurements and reporting
  • How it affects new and existing applications

The Conservation Certification application system will go live in early 2016. Be ready when it does!

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