Tag Archives: global warming

MIT Sloan Management Review: Sustainability contributing to company profits

Through a global survey conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group, we sought to determine where exactly sustainability sits on the management agendas of the more than 2,800 companies.  It turns out that it’s prominent: more than two-thirds of companies have placed sustainability permanently on their management agenda.

Our study also found that two-thirds of companies see sustainability as necessary to being competitive in today’s marketplace, up from 55% a year earlier.  In addition, two thirds of respondents said management attention to, and investment in, sustainability has increased in the last year.

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Earth Day summit at MIT: Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirschberg wants edible cup

At MIT’s recent Sustainability Summit, held on Earth Day, close to 250 students, faculty and practitioners gathered from as close as Cambridge and as far away as Morocco. With the theme, “Mens et Manus: Bridging Thought and Action,” our event covered a wide range of issues such as reviving New England’s fishing economy, the water cost curve, building a regional food system, and the economic case for sustainability.

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Solving Climate Change with Crowdsourcing

Many people would say that one of the most important problems facing humanity today is global climate change. It is affected by all of our actions, and it will potentially affect every one of us. But even though many scientists, journalists, politicians, businesses, and consumers are talking about this problem, we aren’t even close to solving it.

Fortunately, at the same time that we have this potentially huge global problem, we also have the possibility of using a new kind of global problem solving approach. As examples like Wikipedia and Linux show, it’s now possible to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people around the world to work closely together at a scale that was never possible before in human history.

In the Climate CoLab project, we’re applying this approach to climate change. An online community of people from all over the world is already creating, analyzing, and discussing detailed proposals for how to address global climate change. For instance, last fall we had a global competition for proposals addressing the question: What international climate agreements should the world community make? Read More »