The Sustainability Imperative

This Advisor explores how sustainable farming practices can enhance climate resilience and food security in northwest India. It highlights the shift away from harmful methods like crop residue burning toward conservation agriculture techniques such as zero tillage. It also emphasizes the urgent need for policy support, public investment, and farmer-led adaptation strategies to ensure a sustainable and equitable agricultural future in the face of escalating climate change.

This issue of Amplify, the second in a two-part series, moves outside the company into nature and explores unifying efforts to address climate, community, and biodiversity. It also examines how a nature-centered approach can direct action that has meaning and impact.

Dan Salas and Caroline Hernandez illustrate how existing nature positive programs can be the best choice for companies at certain maturity levels in their nature engagements. Across the world, there are countless such programs, and the authors focus on a particularly successful approach: the Rights-of-Way as Habitat Working Group (ROWHWG) at the University of Illinois Chicago. This group of practitioners, academics, and corporations has developed and deployed the largest multi-stakeholder conservation agreement in the US.

Catherine Drumheller, Matthew Ling, and Laura Lawlor describe an approach for valuing the benefits of nature to ensure investments are made in the most economical and impactful ways. The authors identify six categories of benefits that can be realized from nature-based solutions, and those benefits are associated with indicators and criteria that provide a screening tool for project designers. This tool can be used to develop scores using standard ecosystem accounting principles and other methods to measure impacts on human and nature communities.

Charlie Briggs unifies science-based targets and reporting requirements to show that adopting such targets can satisfy current and pending reporting while allowing companies to use targets to take action, build institutional knowledge and capacity in nature, secure buy-in and funding for future nature-related needs, and enhance stakeholder relationships with credible targets that can be openly communicated. The article uses examples from business and other sectors to show the future-focused benefits of adopting science-based targets that contribute to business resilience.

Enrique Castro-Leon, Katrina Pugh, and Jose Zero take another approach to supporting business resilience. They believe we need a carbon-accounting system that is clear, credible, transparent — and can stretch along supply chains and be compared across businesses. Starting with US generally accepted accounting practices, the authors advocate for an approach based on the accrual method to provide a more accurate picture across time and promote the idea that carbon investments in impermanent solutions like forest planting should be accounted for just like a commodity with a value that changes depending on circumstances.

A net benefit for nature is central to the activities happening at Duke Farms in Hillsborough, New Jersey, USA, a campus-like setting in a peri-urban landscape. Margaret Waldock, Jonathan Wagar, and David Jeffrey Ringer describe how Duke Farms addressed greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and carbon sequestration using a science-based approach that supported the location’s strategic objectives with smart decision-making and an authentic discussion of trade-offs.

This Advisor introduces the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP), a key industry initiative supporting the European Green Deal. With a structured governance model and ongoing collaboration with the European Commission, the CNDCP drives the data center industry toward climate neutrality by 2030.