Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler named to Forbes Sustainability Leaders List

🌍 What drives someone to leave Silicon Valley and build one of the world’s leading environmental newsrooms from scratch? For Rhett Ayers Butler, Mongabay’s founder and CEO, it all started with a life-changing encounter with a wild orangutan in the rainforests of Borneo. For 25 years, Rhett has steered Mongabay with one mission: to ensure credible, fact-based environmental information reaches the people who need it most — from policymakers to frontline communities. Under his leadership, Mongabay has grown into a global newsroom of 1,000 contributors across 80+ countries, producing reporting in seven languages, and making real-world impact: ✅ In Gabon, coverage of a local fight against a foreign logging company helped revoke the company’s permit. ✅ In Paraguay, investigations tied illegal deforestation to cattle and leather, influencing EU policy. ✅ In Peru, reporting on United Cacao’s practices led to government action, delisting from the London Stock Exchange, and protection of 100,000 hectares of rainforest. As Rhett told Forbes: “These aren’t abstract wins — they’re forests still standing.” 👉 Join us in celebrating this recognition — and help us keep this work going: https://lnkd.in/gEGEDrWz.

Thinking about your company’s nature journey? Start here. At Natcap, we've been working closely with many of the market leaders on nature. Their experiences are rich with practical insight about how to effectively get started on nature. For example, we often hear from sustainability leaders that building the internal business case for nature is the biggest barrier to getting started. In fact, in a recent survey we conducted, 40% of respondents cited internal persuasion as the biggest hurdle to building a nature strategy. If that sounds familiar, these seven lessons, drawn from real companies already making progress, will help. Read the full blog post here: https://lnkd.in/eMsCbWeF

How do game changing ideas shape the future of #sustainability? 🌱 As a Sustainability Manager for Engagement & Training, Annalena launches global initiatives that spark change. She turns daring ideas into action, advancing environmental efforts and creating platforms for others to do the same. With sustainability at the heart of her work, her story proves that when people are trusted to lead, they can drive lasting impact. 🙌 Ready to turn meaningful work into a purpose-driven reality? Let’s make it happen! ✨ #DareToMakeAnImpact #MoreThanJobs

eBay’s first sustainability lead to head NYU’s sustainable business program Amy Skoczlas Cole has more than three decades of nonprofit and corporate experience in tech, media, agriculture and land management. ✍ by Heather Clancy 🔗 https://buff.ly/8OGXQKI

How to communicate authentically about environmental efforts? It's great when companies want to do something good for the environment. It's less great when those efforts are blown out of proportion to their actual impact. A common practice, also known as greenwashing. Recently, we had the pleasure of working with a group of brave people from Dankort, who wanted to communicate authentically about their new concept: Dankort Øremærket. A donation-based initiative that contributes 1 øre to Den Danske Naturfond, every time someone pays with Dankort - adding up to more than 10 million kroner a year for the acquisition and development of more wild nature in Denmark. Sounds great, right? Well ... Rather than popping the champagne, we had to have some difficult conversations first: - Because how much would this really matter to the poor ecological condition of Danish nature? - Would it outweigh the negative impacts of the consumption enabled by every transaction? - And could it influence the consumption patterns of Dankort users for better (or worse)? Clearly, the dilemmas - and risks of hyperbole marketing - were many, even with something as seemingly innocent as donations. Luckily, the team at Dankort agreed to have our favorite anti-greenwashing wizz Tanja Gotthardsen onboarded, to establish collective sustainability literacy and challenge the concept further. Taking a systems view on Dankort Øremærket helped us create authentic communications, but also paved the way for the much bigger question of; "what Dankort can do to move from offsetting and treating symptoms to engaging with the root causes of our ecological crisis, such as overconsumption?" What will come of these conversations remains to be seen - but a big kudos to Dankort for their diligence so far. Please follow their example. In the mood for difficult conversations about the systems dynamics of your sustainability efforts? Feel free to reach out.

Keep it relevant In interviews with survey respondents, many voiced frustration with the scattergun approach their company had to sustainability. This often resulted in businesses “scattering their efforts across causes they don’t fully understand or influence”, says Alastair Colin-Jones, executive director of impact consultancy Mutual Value Labs. Beach clean-ups, wildlife sanctuaries and tree-planting initiatives might have been appealing during the sustainability boom. But they were generally peripheral to a company’s broader sustainability strategy, serving as a distraction from the real issue. Instead, companies should focus on solving problems that connect naturally to their business model, advises Colin-Jones. https://lnkd.in/ej65SaSG

🧩The sustainability puzzle has too many pieces for any one company to solve alone. 🤔 We've been thinking a lot about this lately. We're facing challenges that stretch across industries, borders, and generations. Climate change doesn't respect corporate boundaries. Neither does inequality, biodiversity loss, or resource scarcity. So why do we still approach these issues like solo acts? The most inspiring work we see today happens in the spaces between organisations. Those purpose-driven pockets where businesses drop their guard and NGOs roll up their sleeves together. These aren't the polished partnerships that look good in annual reports. We’re talking about the messy, complicated collaborations where everyone has to give up a little control to gain something bigger. Take Stella McCartney's work with conservation groups. Yes, it's strategic. But it's also deeply personal for a brand that has never used leather or fur. When they partner with organisations fighting deforestation, they're not just checking a sustainability box, they're acknowledging that their supply chain is woven into ecosystems they can't manage alone. What strikes us is how these partnerships flip traditional business thinking on it’s head. 🙃 Instead of asking "How can we get ahead?" the question becomes "How can we get better together?" 🤝 It's uncomfortable for companies used to controlling their narrative, but that discomfort often signals you're entering into something altogether more meaningful. We've watched partnerships fail when they're built only on what each organisation can gain. But when they start with what the world needs? That's when you see movement that surprises even the partners themselves. The businesses that understand this aren't just thinking about their next quarterly report. They're thinking about the world their customers' children will inherit. And they realise that the world won't be shaped by any single company's mission statement, it'll be shaped by how well we learn to work together. #SustainabilityPartnerships #CollaborativeImpact #SystemicChange #PurposeDrivenBusiness #CollectiveAction

Does #corporate #sustainability count for anything? Unsustainable: Measurement, Reporting, and the Limits of Corporate Sustainability by Matthew Archer (Maastricht University and alum of Department of Geography and Environment, LSE), published by New York University Press, critiques the frameworks used to measure corporate sustainability and exposes how market-driven reporting shirks environmental responsibility. This convincing and timely work highlights the difficulty of pinning down what sustainability means, and calls for more robust systems of holding corporations to account in the face of an escalating #ClimateCrisis, writes Evelyn Langford (The University of Manchester) in her #review. https://lnkd.in/eXVH9FPZ

I appreciated the deep and real conversations with fellow sustainability leaders at the One Podium Visionary 200 Sustainability Summit this week. I came away with some themes for practitioners: - Normalization of sustainability - We don't need more green jobs, we need to green all jobs. Or as one speaker put it "sustainability is not special. It's ok for people not to care, as long as they do their job" (that is, assuming sustainability has been integrated into their practice areas) - Educate before making the ask - One company's CFO said "Don't wait until you need something. Bring me along earlier". - Be focused- It may help to organize strategy into "swords and shields" - shields being those areas that are necessary (e.g. compliance) and swords being those areas where you want to lead. - Tactics that work - "Look at what's already happening across the business and needs some love." Jump on things that are growing. Pursue progress, not perfection. - Navigating the current context - This is a hard time for the field. It's even more important to be supportive of each other and to manage how much you give so you don't get burned out. The best advocacy the private sector can do is to drive market demand. Thank you to Paul Richardson for inviting me to lead a workshop on driving customer requests through the supply chain using partnerships. The discussion was engaging and helpful in sharing best practices. I enjoyed connecting with Lucas Joppa Kristen Siemen Jessica Thomas Moniqua Minter Lindsay Vignoles Brooke Skartvedt Guven Ashley Conrad Walter Natalie Lau Sunya Norman Rachel Hester and so many others. #visionary200 #sustainability #sustainabilityconferences #climatechange #supplychain

♻️ Sustainability sells... but audiences are getting harder to convince. Our research showed how conversations around greenwashing have evolved, with people increasingly quick to challenge vague claims, surface contradictions, and hold brands accountable in real time. The message is clear: good intentions aren’t enough — transparency is the new trust signal. 👉 Read the full blog to see how audiences are reshaping what credible sustainability looks like: https://lnkd.in/eSAkcPvn