Stemming World Hunger

Karuturi Global is a genuine change agent, committed to sustainability.  Its stated mission is: "To emerge as an integrated agri-products company servicing the world market through unmatched product, cost and quality advantages.” Today Karuturi Global is a large producer of cut roses, with an 8% share of the floriculture market. The company has businesses in Ethiopia, Kenya and India, producing around 555 million cut roses per year.

However Karuturi Global is now taking up agribusiness as its next ambition. It wishes to be recognized as a genuine change agent for global growth, prosperity, and cultural and economic transformation - to do whatever it can to help alleviate worldwide and African food shortages. Thus Karuturi was among the first foreign firms to acquire land from the Ethiopian and Kenyan governments – more than 300,000 hectares – to grow and produce maize, vegetables, grains, corn, palm oil, and sugarcane.

In Ethiopia, Karuturi Global's social welfare contributions have included distributing wool blankets to the poor and elderly in 2007 and 2008, contributing $75,000 towards the drinking water supply in Holetta and providing free food every week for two years to 100 needy people.

In Kenya, the company has provided healthcare services to locals, food to drought victims and infrastructure to the local police. Karuturi Global affirms that, "Our labour welfare measures in Kenya are having a positive impact on the lives of our Kenyan workers, their families and communities. Taking cue from the success of these measures, we are working on implementing the same in Ethiopia. We plan to provide schools, hospitals, housing and bus facilities to our workers in Ethiopia, along with our social welfare initiatives."

Karuturi also applies eco-friendly policies in its production chain, including using indigenous greenhouses, in-house power generation from biomass, rainwater harvesting, and environment-friendly fertilizers and chemicals. 

According to Karuturi Global, "Every small change counts. ... We do our utmost to conserve the environment and to ensure that our people and our communities grow with us."

Belu Water = Clean Water

Founded in the United Kingdom in 2002, the mission of bottled water company Belu is: "With the Earth running out of many of its natural resources, the great challenge of our generation is to create a sustainable balance between the needs of people and the resources of the planet. Belu Water was launched as a social enterprise to demonstrate the potential for businesses to take a leading role in developing such a sustainable future.

Belu has done this by creating the UK’s most eco-friendly brand of bottled water and thereby setting a new benchmark for the performance of the entire drinks industry.

Belu’s environmental and charitable efforts include:
- Creating the world’s first carbon neutral bottled water
- Using caps that are "PVC free," for safety we want to avoid phthalates getting into our water
- Committing all our profits to clean water projects through The Belu Foundation (Registered Charity: 1136687)
- Choosing not to import or export our water, this way we further reduce our environmental impact
- Developing a 500ml bottle made from 50% recycled plastic that is 100% recyclable, a new UK first !"
 
Indeed, Belu uses "bio-bottles" made from corn, which look like ordinary plastic bottles but are compostable. What's more, the company minimizes its environmental footprint by using clean electricity and locally sourced water, reducing waste and promoting PVC-free packaging. A non-profit organization, Belu donates every penny of its profits to fund clean water projects. For instance, it built a 12-meter long waste collector that removes one tonne of waste from the River Thames each week.
 
According to Belu, every bottle of Belu bought in the UK provides clean water for one person for one month.

Creating Passion for the Value of Science

Daria Lopez-Alegria is an astrophysicist with a passion for stimulating dialogue about science and its impact on society. She is an entrepreneur and policy strategist whose out-of-the-box thinking associated with her work building connections among various global communities—scientists, academics, business executives and civic leaders—has spread the word, and helped the corporate and public worlds reach a common understanding of the tangled issues of technology innovation, sustainability and prosperity.
Daria is the founder of the S3 Initiative (space, science, society), a series of “learning exchanges” built to advance knowledge by demystifying science and turning new perspectives into opportunities by building connections and shared experience among the people who make policy, development and investment decisions that take into account the long-term benefit of society.

Through her S3 communiqués, called “Scientifically Yours”, Daria puts science on everyone’s doorstep. “Science impacts us every day, everywhere—yet a poverty of understanding or a fear of complexity holds us back. Are we fully informed when we cast our referendum votes to authorize use of new energy technologies or approve economic development with environmental impact? Can we converse about the intersection of science and faith? Or help a child understand what ‘carbon footprint’ means?” she asks.

Through the S3 Initiative and her consultancies, Space Bridges and Science Bridges, Daria inspires passion for discovery. She shares the joy of science, highlighting festivals, fairs, exhibits, conferences and lectures worldwide so more people can experience science and space first hand, and also organizes and produces some special events to that end. Through all of these she “builds the case for investing in science education to train our children and future generations in the rigorous and creative processes of exploration,” she says.

This once local, now international community aims to expand the exchange by sharing even more information and making ever-more connections worldwide. Daria believes wholeheartedly that: “By creating opportunities for exchange, we can expand perspective and create passion for the value of science.”

Growing with the Chinese Mainland Sustainably

Many of the communities that the company CLP serves are in urgent need of power to support their economic and social development. Bringing affordable energy on a long-term and sustainable basis means that CLP must work with coal as it is the dominant fuel of choice in the Asia-Pacific region, but the company intends to do so responsibly. CLP also works with cleaner sources of energy such as gas, renewables and nuclear when it is practical to do so.

Founded in Hong Kong over a century ago, CLP is a leading power company in the Asia-Pacific region. CLP is committed to providing energy solutions in a financially, socially and environmentally responsible manner.

CLP’s investments on the mainland epitomize its approach to powering Asia responsibly. Supporting the Chinese government’s goal of reducing the carbon intensity of its economy, CLP has been actively pursuing clean energy opportunities on the mainland. From a small hydro project in Guangdong province started in 1997, the company’s portfolio today includes wind, nuclear, hydro and biomass. Where CLP works with coal, it uses more efficient and cleaner technology. The company’s goal is to maintain a balanced portfolio that allows it to produce power in an affordable manner, while meeting the promise of decarbonizing its generation portfolio by 75% by 2050.

In addition to commercial investments, community investments also play a role in supporting sustainable growth on the mainland. Recognizing the importance of preparing the next generation of leaders for complex challenges, CLP has been supporting a number of education initiatives in China.

In November 2009, the company established the CLP-Tsinghua University Clean Energy Education Fund to support students with financial difficulties at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University and to support research programs on clean energy. Through these efforts, the Fund aims to contribute to the mainland’s electricity sector by developing a pool of experts in clean energy.

At the basic-education level, CLP also runs a Young Power Program to promote environmental awareness and social responsibility through activity-based thematic learning, and has been contributing to the establishment of 11 Hope Schools with the goal of raising the literacy level and improving the learning conditions for rural children in Guizhou and Sichuan.

CLP recognizes that sustainable growth requires collective action and will continue to raise awareness about the importance of sustainability and to exchange information so that a low-carbon future becomes a reality in China.

Article originally published in the November 2010 edition of Sustain, the magazine of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Seeking Huge Improvements in Energy Efficiency

The GreenTouch association was formed "to find new approaches for energy efficiency and to invent radical new technologies that will be at the heart of sustainable networks in the decades to come." Concretely, the group "aims to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today." The networks specifically targeted are the Internet and those that support communications, commerce and entertainment. GreenTouch is also an excellent example of a successful partnership involving different types of establishments, in this case academia, industry, government and non-profit research institutes, working together in a common goal. What's more, the founding organizations hail from across the globe and include AT&T, China Mobile, Samsung, MIT Research Laboratory for Electronics, France Telecom, Swisscom, Portugal Telecom, and the University of Melbourne's Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society. Recognizing that today's networks are geared to performance and not to energy efficiency and that their entire architecture and design must be changed to be optimized for both, the GreenTouch Initiative has been launched "to invent the technologies that can achieve sustainable networks" for the future.