How World Wildlife Fund Partners with Companies on Climate Change Flashcards
Carter Roberts, President/CEO of World Wildlife Fund, shares what successful climate collaborations between companies and environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) look like in practice, and how ENGOs can help by sharing their expertise and even pushing companies to take bolder action on climate change.
WWF, you may recognize us by our panda logo. We are about 60-years-old. We operate in 100 countries in the world. We have 8,800 employees. Our work spans policy, corporate engagement, communications, trade issues, the creation of parks, strengthening of communities. At the end of the day, it’s all centered on keeping the most important places in the world intact, places that are fundamental for life on earth and also fundamental for people. And so think the Amazon, the Mekong, the coral reefs of the Pacific and more.
Early on, we looked at the places that we cherished and did a systematic evaluation of the greatest threats to those places, like the Amazon, like the Congo, like the Mekong River. And believe it or not, the biggest issue with climate change is unsustainable food production. And then we systematically tracked the biggest commodities that were affecting those places. And then for each commodity, we looked at who were the most influential players, from producers to traders, to retailers, to manufacturers. And we put together a top 10 list for each commodity and systematically built relationships with each and every one of those top 10 companies.
July 2022
10/03/2
One thing I’ve learned at HBS is that it’s important to think hard about your points of intervention, and how do you make the best use of scarce resources, and what you do so that you can have the greatest impact. And so it was a very systematic way of looking at things.
Twenty years ago, we created certification programs for pay pulp and paper, like FSC, for seafood, the Marine Stewardship Council. We’ve done the same for a number of commodities, and encouraged any company to sell certified products. On the other hand, we also worked with World Resources Institute and Carbon Disclosure Project to create science-based targets for climate change, which they’re now approaching 4,000 companies that have signed up to peer reviewed science-based targets to ensure that they’re doing their part against the Paris agreement.
And on the other end, the companies we work with and deeper partnerships are really those that are on among those top 10 by commodity. In our partnership with Walmart on Project Gigaton, we are systematically reaching 4,000 suppliers, and that number is growing.
We do not approach companies for money, although the money a company will spend on achieving the results is part of the equation. And corporate income is a very, very small part of our financial model.
We don’t take money in exchange for that, but if a company sets some huge goals on reducing their water use, and it involves acquiring capacity, hiring consultants, or if we’re going to help them out to hire in all kinds of scientists and bring all kinds of groups together, we will take money to help us execute on those things, but it’s a very small part of the equation.
So what is the funding model instead if you’re not getting on a fee for service basis? The funding model is activity based. If a company is going to commit to a set of targets, then it commits to what I call the engineering of how they’re going to accomplish those targets. More often than not the big money is what the company spends itself in its own operations, and those go into the billions and trillions of dollars when you add them all up. But beyond that, if there are things they need their partners to do, whether it’s us or any other NGO, and there are costs associated with that, then typically, the corporate foundation may make some grants to support those activities. And typically, those are not in support of just that company’s footprint, it’s in support of those multi-stakeholder platforms that I was talking about. It’s in support of moving whole industries in the right direction.
If you look at our business model, we have globally, 6 million due-paying members, which I think gives us the largest membership of any environmental group. And then beyond that, lots of other individuals engaged in our work. That’s the biggest source of revenue that we have. The second biggest source of revenue are big foundations. Think Packard, think Hewlett, think MacArthur, think the Moore Foundation and the Bezos Foundation. And then beyond that, we often receive funding through government institutions like USAID or their counterparts in other countries when there are big programs working with communities in the heart of the Congo or in the Amazon or elsewhere. And it’s part of overseas development assistance. And then as you work your way down through all of that and bequests and everything else, probably the smallest financial source of revenue for us is corporate contributions.
With regard to strengthening the role of government, do you also engage with companies on lobbying or campaign contribution strategies or other ways to actually strengthen those policies?
It is very clear that the ability of companies to make progress hinges in part on what they do themselves, but a lot of it hinges on governments putting in place the right regulatory framework, the right kind of enforcement. So we are a partner and a signatory to something called the AAA framework, which there are a number of other leading NGOs who are part of that.
A trade association was hatched in the offices of WWF, the idea for it, which was to bring together all the biggest buyers of renewable energy in the country, and to use the scale of their businesses to influence policy at a state level, to remove barriers to scaling up renewable energy, and increasingly to do the same at a federal level. And it is the biggest buyers of renewable energy -** The Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance. We did with Rocky Mountain Institute, World Resources Institute, and CDP**. We merged all of our efforts with the biggest companies, and it’s now one of the coolest trade associations on the hill.
Without reference to a particular company’s name, there is a rather large pulp and paper company that we’ve worked with in Southeast Asia for decades on reducing their impact on some of the world’s richest rainforest and setting targets for changing their business practices. And systematically, it seems like most of those agreements have not been honored. And so we have stepwise taken a number of other steps. One was to engage all of their biggest customers to make them aware of the destruction of rainforest and what they’ve done. We have in subsequent financing rounds, engaged quietly those major investors in the company. And then at a certain moment, we, and this is not typical for us, but after so many broken agreements, we hired a lab to analyze their product to identify exactly what kind of rainforests were embedded in their products, which included toilet paper.
We issued a report to all the major retailers in the United States. And we said to the retailers, we will issue a report three months from now that will include the names of retailers who carry toilet paper that is made of rainforest in Southeast Asia. And your name will not be included in this list if you remove that product from your shelves. And as a result of that, that company shut down that practice and removed that product from the market. But that is an extreme case of engagement.
What is the Climate Business Network? And what’s WWF’s role in that?
The Climate Business Network or CBN is an outgrowth of a former program we had that brought together companies who were making commitments on reducing their emissions. We currently have 24 partners at some of the biggest companies in the US, but it’s basically a platform for collaboration and peer learning. It’s at a bigger scale than the renewable energy platform that we created for collaboration and for learning. And we see it as a learning lab to create new impact initiatives like we did with science-based targets, or the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance. And now we’re creating a renewable thermal collaborative as well.
A final question that I’d like to ask on Climate Rising is to note that some of our listeners are considering dedicating their careers to businesses that focus somehow on climate change.
You can make a difference as long as you acquire the ability to connect the dots between sectors, because it is when you collaborate between scientists, government, the corporate sector, and with communities, that’s where the good stuff happens. That’s where the answer lies at that intersection. And we need more people who can do that and do that well.
One of my role models in my work is a fellow HBS grad named Hank Paulson, who started off his career at Goldman Sachs, joined the board of The Nature Conservancy, became chair of TNC. And then ultimately, as we all know, became secretary of treasury at a unique moment in time, and now engages with governments throughout Latin America and China on sustainability issues. Hank has that ability to know exactly how to connect the dots between regulators, between companies, with nonprofits and the like.
