School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences

The planet is going through a mass extinction event brought on by human influence: biodiversity elimination, habitat destruction, climate change, and many other cascading effects. The toll on nature is already unconscionable, yet this is already effecting human populations as well, and will only exponentially increase in the coming years. It won’t just be our children experiencing this crisis, it is us, now. It is already happening. Arguably a primary reason for these environmental issues falls to environmental externalities in our economic systems.

The only way to fundamentally address this is through a systemic introduction of labeling or reporting the environmental costs of products and services. Externalities are the hidden costs, or the costs not calculated in the production or use of a good or service. Through a lack of transparency, intentional obfuscation, and willful or pure ignorance, we as a species profoundly lack knowledge on how the products and services we consume affect the world around us. In fact, of 1000 global primary production sectors, none generate the profit needed to cover their cost in natural capital (TruCost, 2013).

The only way we can even have a chance to mitigate our impact is to be provided that data before we spend our money. As such, products and services must report their impacts on the environment through a standardized metric or grade on a label or report that is easy to understand and will capture information on biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution and waste. The only way for this to effectively take hold and maintain transparency is through governmental legislation and the associated infrastructure to provide a method for businesses to make such a calculation.

This paper describes the effort to design such policy, provide it to legislators and pass it. Most ideally, this would be integrated into a larger systemic bill designed to economically shape the country in a sustainable way. As such, this initiative is being proposed as an amendment to be added to House Resolution 109, the “Green New Deal.” Assimilating this as a specific initiative within the GND, which is currently more or less a framework of mission statements, provides a more solid groundwork for a successful legislative effort. The underlying concept is to enable the consumer with needed and usable information. There is no true guarantee of a “happy ending,” but at its core, it will help to hold businesses accountable and ultimately empower the common consumer to make informed choices, from whence the fate of our planet can at least be decided honestly.

This report is concerned primarily with explaining the deliverables that our team, the Sustainable Saguaros, developed for the Kim Center for Social Balance (The Kim Center), as a requirement for graduation from the Master of Sustainability Solutions program at Arizona State University. As a growing non-profit organization, the Kim Center for Social Balance has a vision for integrated gender equity in workplaces nationwide but lacks the bandwidth to advance its strategy forward. The requested deliverables are: (1) a set of sector analyses for municipal government, healthcare, construction, and finance, (2) a summary of the gender-related reporting requirements for three reporting standards, and (3) a strategic action plan to improve the Kim Center’s board governance and engagement. Our sector analyses revealed common themes associated with gender-specific challenges in the workplace and identified sector-specific challenges that should be addressed in ways that are tailored to the sector. We developed the sector analyses by conducting extensive research into the current state of each sector as it pertains to gender equity, and then identifying challenges to women in the workplace. While we attempted to assess the state of each sector beyond the gender binary, consistent or reliable data was not readily available in most cases. We see this as an area where the Kim Center could help organizations improve in recognizing and supporting employees across the gender spectrum. The summary of reporting standards revealed that the existing gender-related requirements for the most well-established reporting standards are highly inconsistent. The gender-related reporting requirements for GRI, SASB, and NASDAQ did not have any significant overlap. The information required by these standards is routinely collected by US companies as part of their EEOC compliance, but may not be legal to collect in other countries. The strategic action plan for the Kim Center’s Board of Directors was formulated by analyzing the board’s bylaws, a survey conducted with current board members, and an internal non-profit assessment that was answered by their Executive Director. Using these resources, our team identified gaps in board governance that must be addressed in order to build the internal capacity for the Kim Center to operate effectively. From there, our team developed a case for improving board governance and outlined specific recommendations to strengthen the Kim Center’s board alignment and responsibilities.