The Natural Step -

Beckers Sustainability Report 2012 – a case of linking strategy, sustainability principles and GRI reporting.

Anna Volckerts — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 04:01:39 -0400

The Beckers Group, a partner of The Natural Step since 2008, has recently released its first global sustainability report. We are pleased to share the report here and to provide comment on how the process leading to this report has used two different sustainability methods - the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines - to help the company define, measure and report progress. Read all about it in this pdf.

Sweden

Would you know a sustainable business if you saw one? (Free Webinar)

Neil McCallum — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:54:16 -0400

Start: Jul 3 2013 - 11:30am

End: Jul 3 2013 - 1:00pm

Timezone: Canada/Eastern

Please join us online Wednesday July 3, 2013 from 11:30am-13:30EST to share your views and expertise to help shape a benchmark for truly sustainable business performance.

This webinar is part of Towards a Gold Standard for Sustainable Business project, a collaborative initiative which aims to help consumers, businesses, investors, and employers support truly sustainable business practices through the decisions they make.

It features Bob Willard, Speaker and Author, The NEW Sustainability Advantage and Chad Park, Executive Director for The Natural Step Canada who co-wrote the recent GreenBiz article titled “A gold standard for a truly sustainable enterprises.” Hear the latest thoughts and updates from the numerous consultations that have been conducted in this project and of course, contribute your ideas to where this project is headed.

Working Towards a Gold Standard for Sustainable Business was sparked by the issue that as consumers and institutions increasingly factor social and environmental performance into decisions about what they buy, where they work and where they invest, the plethora of standards, labels and rankings about sustainable businesses risk confusing decision-makers and undermining trust.

Our belief is that a broadly-recognized “Gold Standard”, aligned with rigorous sustainability principles, could accelerate the sustainable business movement by driving innovation and providing clarity in the marketplace. Businesses with outstanding sustainability performance would be rewarded for their work.

European project proposal to develop zero-emission circular economy on Baltic Island

Scott Perret — Tue, 21 May 2013 10:36:17 -0400

Portions of this post are reprinted from presskontakt.se and from the Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation’s blog.

Shutterstock photo of Gotland, Sweden

Last month, the Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation and a consortium of scientists and sustainability practitioners, including The Natural Step and Natural Step partners in Finland, submitted a project proposal to study the island of Gotland as a Sweden in miniature, using it as a test case to create a circular, emission-free economy.

The proposal is designed to address the dual concerns of rising unemployment and pollution of the Baltic, resulting from the leakage of money and jobs from the import of fertilizers and the leakage of nutrients from the soil into the sea. Gotland is the largest island in the Baltic.

The Foundation is concerned that the ecology of the Baltic will collapse if phosphorous emissions are not brought under control. At the same time they feel that it is high time to address the risks associated with the potential depletion of phosphorus supplies that may give us as little as 30 years to change practices to recycling rather than mining as our main source of fertilizers.

During June, the EU Bonus Fund will decide if it will finance the project, which would investigate how a combination of fees, redistribution of fees and the latest nutrient recycling technology can create a zero-emission society. The project proposes that a systematic approach to emissions, based on the engineering concept of control technology, could result in a clean-output island.

The project will be a multi-disciplinary investigation looking at technical, economic and psychological aspects of emissions as well as looking into ways to apply the financial and regulatory feedback needed. A large conference is planned at the end of the project to pull together findings, demonstrate technology and approaches developed in the study and hopefully look at practical implementations.

 "If you can make an old invention like the diesel engine run clean, you  can make an even older invention, the national economy, run clean too," says inventor Anders Höglund, one of Sweden's leading experts on the control engineering of complex systems like engines, and inventor of the Flexible Emissions Fee Mechanism that will form part of the investigation.

One thing to be tried will be the possibility to levy a fee on phosphorus imports into the Island and to adjust he fee regularly to stimulate the local market and established businesses to respond. Says  Anders "most businesses have invested heavily in a "buy into the economy, emit out of the economy" approach. To have to pull out too fast will harm the bottom line. Our mechanism pushes development but only to a limit, that limit is the  speed with which competition and new technology work their magic".

How Would We Know A Sustainable Business If We Saw One?

Scott Perret — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:55:17 -0400

We already have all the knowledge we need to answer this question, and efforts are under way to do just that. Have a look at this clever response to Joel Makower's GreenBiz article "What Is Sustainability Anyway?", co-authored by The Natural Step Canada board member Bob Willard (the well-known author and sustainable business guru) and The Natural Step Canada executive director Chad Park.

A Strong Foundation for an Exciting Future

Isabella Oriani — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:45:28 -0400

At The Natural Step International, we are working hard to craft TNS 2.0 with an inspiring business and organizational strategic direction. We’re very excited as we look forward! At the same time, we celebrate the excellent work TNS offices, associates and partners are already doing around the world. This issue of Stepping Stones is dedicated to all the practitioners doing good work—within TNS and in the broader FSSD community. As we look towards the future, it is good to know we are resting on such a solid and valuable foundation.

Beyond Sustainability

Soon we will announce a subtle but powerful change to the way we talk about our mission. We want to make it clear that “sustainability” in itself is not the endgame. Rather, we think of sustainability as simply forming a set of baseline design constraints that we can all use to create exciting, positive futures together. Getting the design constraints right is of course critical, and this is where the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD, a.k.a. The Natural Step Framework) can help. But the goal is a great world, not a merely sustainable one—that’s something people can get excited about. And when we say it’s something we do together, that’s because we know that in complex systems the kind of shifts we hope to see can only happen through collaboration.

Strategies for Impact

One of our strategies is to foster sustainability mindsets. Another is to provide individual organizations with advisory services to help them craft and implement transformational change strategies that enable them to innovate, succeed, and co-create vibrant futures together. To maximize our impact in these areas, we will be working together with our membership to innovate, re-launch and expand globally our core sustainability literacy and advisory services programs.

We also envision a TNS participating in more initiatives with the potential to shift entire sectors towards using sustainability as a design constraint for achieving success, as we are currently with GISR and B-Labs.

New areas we are exploring include incubating and/or engaging in business ventures that have the FSSD and systems thinking baked into their DNA, as well as nurturing and disseminating innovations that foster sustainability mindsets or provide other solutions to sustainability challenges.

We continue to support the dream we share with many others of a strong FSSD community of change makers self-organizing to connect, share learning, tools and materials, and develop projects together, advancing society toward sustainability and beyond.

What It Will Take

To deliver all this, we aim for a TNS with a global culture embodying cultural and operational diversity, and with a global ´handprint´, through its offices, the work of its associates and its partner initiatives.

We have to work hard to walk our talk, continuously improving and reinforcing the culture and competencies we need in order to collaborate as a global team, to continue to be creative and innovative, deliver top quality services, be impact and evaluation driven, foster local innovation while keeping organizational consistency, and to be in dialogue with other change makers who are developing valuable tools and methodologies across the sustainability and social change fields.

Finally, building our vision of TNS will require investments; and TNSI is opening an intensive fundraising campaign in the weeks to come. As an NGO, we welcome donations. Can you support us directly, or help us in raising the necessary funds? Please contact me at isabella.oriani(at)thenaturalstep.org!

That’s a lot to do…but we embrace the challenge. After all, what is more exciting than building a thriving future together?

Shifting Systems Around The World

Scott Perret — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:35:10 -0400

Compiled by Scott Perret and Kelly Baxter

In this issue of Stepping Stones, we celebrate our Natural Step family by presenting a snapshot review of our latest projects.

With a network of offices, associates and strategic partners that spans the globe (13 countries and counting), sometimes it's hard to keep track of the full scope and rich detail of all the great work everyone in our TNS network is doing. From tackling sustainable beef to defining a gold standard for sustainable business, to translating strategic sustainable development for the indigenous Māori context, the breadth and depth of collaborative engagement our people have with all sectors of society is breathtaking.

We hope you'll enjoy this sampling from the field as much as we enjoyed assembling it for you!

TNS Sweden: factory, field, shop...and bed

On high street, a fashion brand has a look at its product life cycles. Out on the ranch, the Swedish beef industry rounds up the challenges of sustainable meat production. On the factory floor, the PVC industry continues to work toward its vision of PVC in a sustainable society. And after a long day of running around to all these places, our advisors sneak into a few choice hotels to see how sustainably they can be pampered. Read more...

TNS Canada: taking systems change to the next level

"How can we accelerate the shift towards sustainability and beyond, with much greater impact?" This is the question The Natural Step Canada has been asking itself for the past year. Its exciting answer is a blend of old and new strategies. Read more...

TNS Italy: innovation, product design and sexy shoes

The Natural Step Italy expands its business model, its reach and our imaginations about the possibilities for fresh approaches to change making by creating the first Italian B-Corp. Along the way, they develop unique software to facilitate the collaborative analysis and design of future-proof products, and engage 300 downstream suppliers of a luxury brand to co-create a prototype of every world-conscious fashionista's fantasy: a guilt-free luxury Italian shoe. Read more...

TNS New Zealand: a wealth of engagements

How can a western-born framework for strategic sustainable development translate to an indigenous Maori context? This is just one of the projects our New Zealand associates are working on to bring a systems perspective and strategic sustainability to every arena in their beautiful country. Read more...

TNS Netherlands: growing deep roots for impact

TNS Brazil: exploring possibilities in the Brazilian context

While experimenting with the creation of new offerings attuned to the local context, our Brazilian office delivers sustainability education to business school students, and works to build awareness for the need for strategic sustainable development in Brazilian communities. Read more...

TNS in Switzerland: building coalitions for international change

Along the shores of Lac Leman in Geneva, many of the world's largest international NGOs come together. Nestled into this unique ecosystem, The Natural Step in Switzerland is launching conversations. Read more...

A new TNS arises in Israel

After a period of dormancy in Israel, The Natural Step is re-launching with a dynamic, new team that is already building synergies with local design thinkers and Biomimicry practitioners, while making connections with the Israeli construction and high-tech industries. Read more...

In Finland, fresh skills and fresh collaborations

The Natural Step is now active in Finland, where our new affiliate office proposes a suite of offers to help build sustainable, resilient futures. Services include strategic sustainable development, ecological footprinting, service design for sustainability and resilience, training, facilitation, research and experimentation. Read more...

TNS in Portugal: making in-roads

Despite extremely challenging economic conditions in Portugal, our partner there is making progress in bringing sustainability to a variety of actors, using the FSSD to help companies and sectors embrace sustainability concepts and accelerate change. Read more...

Stories From The Global Practitioner Community

Scott Perret — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:30:27 -0400

Photo by Simon Egger, courtesy of Verein Symbiose

Around the world, practitioners of the Framework For Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD, a.k.a. The Natural Step Framework) --originally developed by The Natural Step—work freely with it for the greater good of the planet and human society, independently of any formal affiliation with our organization. This was made possible by our founder’s early refusal to patent the Framework as intellectual property, and his insistence that it remain in the public domain for the greater good.

These practitioners have traditionally lacked a cohesive community where they can connect, innovate, share knowledge, tools and materials, and develop projects together. In February of this year, The Natural Step kicked off an initiative to help foster the co-creation of just such a community (more information, including a video update).

We have barely begun to meet the members of this global, dynamic group of change makers, but already we find ourselves humbled and inspired by the range and caliber of the work they do, using the FSSD in ways that help society apply sustainability principles as design constraints to innovate toward a better world for all. We’ve also learned they are forming pockets of community wherever they go.

In this issue of Stepping Stones, we highlight three stories from this community, from Europe and Latin America.

Liechtenstein: Bringing a Country Together for a Connected, Sustainable Future

Can two young graduates of a Master’s program in Sustainable Leadership Toward Sustainability use the theories they’ve learned to lead an entire Alpine country through a change process toward sustainability and beyond? Don’t take too long to think about it, because they’ve already begun. And from the way they’re going about it, our bet is on “yes”! Read more…

Chile: Banding Together In The Land Of The Andes

After a period abroad, Pablo Villoch returns to his homeland armed with new sustainability skills and finds a small community of like-minded change makers. As their good work spreads, he learns he is exactly where he should be. Read more…

France: a new network fosters new community

In France, Natural Step associates band together with other FSSD practitioners to begin fostering a francophone community of actors interested in activating transformational change toward sustainability. Read more…

TNS Sweden: factory, field, shop…and bed

Scott Perret — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:25:10 -0400

Here is a snapshot update of some of the work that's been going on in The Natural Step Sweden office lately. It was originally posted as part of the Spring 2013 Stepping Stones Newsletter.

Our Swedish office gets a sharp, new leader while hosting ongoing collaborations for sustainability across a variety of sectors in Sweden and Europe. On high street, a fashion brand has a look at its product life cycles while the leather industry zeroes in on its processing chemicals. Out on the ranch, the Swedish beef industry rounds up the challenges of sustainable meat production. On the factory floor, the PVC industry continues to work toward its vision of PVC in a sustainable society, with support and coaching from The Natural Step. And after a long day of running around to all these places, our advisors sneak into a few choice hotels to see how sustainably they can be pampered.

Karin Schulz, Secretary General of Det Naturliga Steget

Introducing Sweden’s new Secretary General

The TNS community welcomes Karin Schulz, new Secretary General of Det Naturliga Steget (The Natural Step in Sweden). Karin has vast experience as a manager and consultant working with development and sustainability issues both on a national and international basis, and is now leading the Swedish team.

Filippa K and Sustainable Fashion

The Natural Step in Sweden is working with fashion brand Filippa K to provide advice on their sustainability strategies. Over the past few months, a Strategic Life Cycle Analysis (SLCA) process has been carried through to identify key sustainability challenges across the life cycle of one of the company’s main products. In addition to identifying the sustainability strengths and weaknesses of the product, the project has resulted in strengthened relationships with key suppliers, creative input for product development and a draft vision describing what sustainable fashion will look like for Filippa K.

This is just one part of Det Naturliga Steget’s on-going activities in the textile, apparel and fashion industry. Other work includes working with the leather treatment industry around chemical management and giving stakeholder input into the Roadmap Towards Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals – a joint industry initiative by a group of major apparel and footwear brands and retailers.

The Sustainable Beef Project | Framtidens Nötkött

Meat production in general is known to have a lot of sustainability challenges – especially in a world that needs to feed a growing population on a planet that is not growing. The value chain of beef production is complex and there is not yet a shared view of what sustainable beef production would look like. There is much that can be done today, but there are also barriers that limit progress. Tackling these barriers is the purpose of the Sustainable Beef Project.

Over the last year, Det Naturliga Steget gathered Swedish food sector actors from the farmer’s field to the kitchen tables and forks of consumers. Participants in the Sustainable Beef Project have worked with one another, academia and others to map out the value chain of Swedish beef production and its sustainability challenges. The result is a shared understanding of the frame within which beef production must happen and how purchasing guidelines can be used to promote the advance of sustainable beef production. Det Naturliga Steget is now engaging further actors to take the next step of this sector-wide change initiative – looking at the production of the beef imported to Sweden.

A key part of the project has been to backcast (beginning with the desired end in mind) from 9 billion people eating good food within the boundaries of the planet. For meat production this will most likely mean less volume and a sustainable production. It is also important to look at full sustainability to ensure that a solution to a given problem in one part of the chain will not create a new problem somewhere else. An example of this kind of unintended consequence would be to ‘reduce beef production’ for climate reasons but to ‘increase meat production’ that relies on feed crops humans could be eating, or to intensify production in a way that creates bad animal welfare conditions.

The Sustainable Beef group consists of the Antonia Ax:son Johnson’s Foundation, Axfood, Martin & Servera, Max Hamburgers and The Federation of Swedish Farmers (LRF). Det Naturliga Steget is convening and leading the group.

Swedish Welcome: Sustainable Hospitality

After nearly two years in the making, Swedish Welcome has now been launched – an advisory organisation devoted to promoting better guest experiences and sustainable development in the Swedish hospitality industry. Det Naturliga Steget has been working to help design this new initiative which builds a set of smart tools and processes that help promote both quality and sustainability.

Participating companies will be visited by a mystery guest, who secretly explores the guest experience from a sustainability perspective. In a follow-up meeting, the mystery guest (no longer a mystery) and managers look at how the guest experience can be improved together with improvements to overall sustainability. Underlying the whole operation is a system that details all of the aspects that make up a great and sustainable guest experience.

Behind the launch of Swedish Welcome are a set of authorities and four pilot regions who together represent one third of the Swedish tourism industry. Swedish Welcome is launched at a time when the Swedish tourism industry is gearing up to double in size by 2020 – from 250 billion SEK per annum to 500 billion.

VinylPlus

The Natural Step team in Stockholm is continuing its work to advise and act as a critical friend for the European PVC industry’s voluntary initiative on sustainable development – VinylPlus. The Natural Step has done a lot of work in the area of exploring what role PVC might have in a sustainable society and the challenges that have to be overcome to get there. The work started in the year 2000 and has involved working with individual companies, policy makers, public authorities and since 2010, industry associations.

In 2010, The Natural Step team in Sweden worked to help shape the PVC industry’s 10 year commitment through a series of industry workshops, a stakeholder consultation process and advisory work with the board of the initiative. That process led to the establishment of task forces consisting of industry and subject matter experts aimed at tackling the five sustainability challenges the programme has identified for itself. The Natural Step is now focused on supporting to those task forces and acting as a bridge between the industry and its stakeholders.

For more information on what’s going on in Sweden, please contact Kristoffer Lundholm: Kristoffer.Lundholm(at)thenaturalstep.org.

Sweden

TNS Canada: taking systems change to the next level

Scott Perret — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:18:06 -0400

Here is a snapshot update of some of the work that's been going on in The Natural Step Canada office lately. It was originally posted as part of the Spring 2013 Stepping Stones Newsletter.

“How can we accelerate the shift towards sustainability and beyond, with much greater impact?” This is the question The Natural Step Canada has been asking itself for the past year. Its exciting answer is a blend of old and new strategies. While continuing to offer deeply impactful and highly customized advisory services for individual organizations (like the development of “sustainability filters” to help teams at an engineering firm apply a sustainability lens to their design work), The Natural Step Canada is also stepping firmly into the arena of change making at higher and higher levels of the social, business and economic systems in which we all operate. Today, they are doing this by working with others to define what sustainable business would look like, impacting young leaders, and hosting conversations and capacity-building for collaboration—the primary skill required for influencing complex systems.

What Would a Sustainable Business Look Like if We Saw One?

In collaboration with a number of partners including B Lab, the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing, Green Living Enterprises, Corporate Knights, Interface, and Bob Willard, The Natural Step Canada is working on a project called “Toward a Gold Standard for Sustainable Business.”

The intention is to create a systemic intervention that helps reorient the way organizations consider their business performance—relative to the desired future state of sustainability, rather than relative to past “unsustainable” performance. Said another way, the true leaders in the sustainable business movement are driving innovation by articulating a sustainable vision for their businesses and monitoring performance relative to that vision—i.e., “how much closer to sustainability are we getting through our innovations and performance improvements?”

The long-term benefit of this approach is to help create more successful businesses, as well as clarity in the marketplace that allows observers to differentiate between businesses that meet rigorous social, environmental, accountability, and transparency standards and those that do not.

The recent emergence of the B Corp movement has created an opportunity to address this issue in a way that wasn’t possible before. We are therefore pleased to report TNS Canada is working with B Lab (the curator of the B Corp movement) to this end.

With this project unfolding over the course of 2013, The Natural Step aims to achieve three outcomes:

A revised B Impact Assessment (the rating system for B Corps) that is reflective of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development
An increased number of business leaders and other stakeholders voicing support for a new “Gold Standard for Sustainable Businesses.”
Emergence of new collaborative initiatives to advance a “Gold Standard for Sustainable Business.”

A Canadian team is undertaking the first step right now – a review of the B Impact Assessment through the lens of the FSSD. The second phase of the project will involve a series of consultations with a range of stakeholders to test our assumptions and raise awareness about the issues. The third phase will be to convene groups involved in the ranking and rating of sustainable business to share the lessons learned through the collaboration with B Lab and to explore the appetite for broader collaboration toward a Gold Standard for Sustainable Business.

For more information contact Chad Park: cpark(at)naturalstep.ca

Accelerate: Collaborating for Sustainability Conference

Change-makers throughout society are increasingly calling for greater collaboration to solve complex challenges, especially around sustainability issues. But there is precious little expertise in how to convene diverse groups and steward multi-stakeholder change processes. In response, The Natural Step Canada will host “Accelerate: Collaborating for Sustainability”, a two-day national conference in Guelph, Ontario, June 10 and 11, 2013, to convene sustainability practitioners and kindred spirits to learn on the “bleeding edge” together, share successes, and seed potential collaborative initiatives.

The conference will convene over 200 leaders and decision makers from large and small businesses, corporations, higher education, government, non-profits, social enterprises, social venture capital firms, and more in exploring how we can effectively collaborate to create a sustainable future. Click on the conference link to see the amazing line up of speakers and to register.

Booting Up Young Change Makers

To help empower young sustainability leaders, The Natural Step in Canada is running IMPACT Sustainability Champions Training for the second year now, in partnership with The Co-operators. IMPACT Champions is a national action program that provides training, networking and coaching to young change agents in cities across Canada who are keen to develop sustainability projects on their campuses and communities. Students participate in two intense days of sustainability training and are mentored by experts and leaders in the community for the duration of their projects. To date The Natural Step has trained over 200 young leaders in Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, Guelph, Toronto and Montreal. Students have launched hundreds of tangible sustainability projects in their communities.

For more information contact Josh Snider: jsnider(at)naturalstep.ca

Creating Sustainability Lens Tools at ISL Engineering and Land Services

The Natural Step in Canada has been working closely with ISL Engineering and Land Services for several years. ISL is a full-service consulting engineering firm based in Edmonton, Alberta Canada with nine offices around western Canada. ISL has a comprehensive sustainability strategy co-developed by staff and company leaders, the development of which was led by The Natural Step. The strategy is underpinned by the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) and is guided by six strategic sustainability goals.

One of these goals is around the provision of sustainable design solutions. To help meet this goal, The Natural Step has been collaborating with ISL engineers and designers to develop the tools (“sustainability filters”) and training that will enable them to assess the sustainability performance of various design options for a given project type to ensure that a robust and defensible sustainability perspective informs design choices. It is intended that yearly review of filter output will reveal patterns of practice and highlight opportunities for innovation, in support of ISL’s brand promise, Inspiring Sustainable Thinking.

To learn more about how The Natural Step creates tools to help teams apply a sustainability lens to their work, click here, or contact Sarah Brooks: sbrooks(at)naturalstep.ca.

TNS Netherlands: growing deep roots for impact

Scott Perret — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 07:17:35 -0400

Here is a snapshot update of some of the work that's been going on in The Natural Step Netherlands office lately. It was originally posted as part of the Spring 2013 Stepping Stones Newsletter.

The Natural Step Netherlands is cultivating deep roots in its local, regional and national communities by working with government and business on weaving sustainability into the heart of a number of initiatives, from sustainability awards for local businesses to community planning, youth engagement and housing. Ongoing work with the multi-national Philips Corporation on using sustainability as a design constraint for its innovation program has also kept our Dutch advisors busy.

Working With Eindhoven

In The Netherlands, The Natural Step/Flexible Platform has been working on several projects to help embed principles of sustainability within the City and Region of Eindhoven.

Sustainability Awards: The Natural Step helped the City of Eindhoven design the Entrepreneurs Engagement Award to engage original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the collective journey toward sustainability. This involved not only developing the criteria for the award, but also developing and launching a sustainability primer to help entrepreneurs and small business owners understand what sustainability really means, and to develop a digital platform for co-creation and knowledge sharing.
Nature and Sustainability Education: The Natural Step has helped the City of Eindhoven engage multiple stakeholders to look at sustainability education programs for youth, hosting a dialogue to identify the needs of the community, connect these needs to the city’s vision of sustainability and develop an engagement program that can be executed and managed by the city’s education coordinator.
Eindhoven 2018 - The Natural Step/Flexible Platform participated in this national project to create a bid book for Eindhoven to be positioned as the Cultural Capital of Europe in a major European competition. The Natural Step helped to integrate sustainability into the Innovative 'Proeftuinen' Projects by answering the question: If the province of Brabant wants to connect culture to innovation and sustainability, what would this look like and how do we organize ourselves to make this event a starting point of cultural change toward sustainability? The bid book included a full set of strategic sustainability goals, that will function as a lighthouse for the developments of this € 140 milion program.

The Natural Step has been working with the Municipality of Sudwest Fryslan to help them integrate the FSSD into sustainable community planning. This involved a series of visioning workshops and a train-the-trainers program to build the capacity of municipal staff to move toward their sustainability vision.

Philips – The Natural Step has been helping Philips, a global innovation leader, ensure that its innovation program moves the company toward sustainability.

Collective Housing Corporations Eindhoven

The Natural Step has been helping the Collective Housing Corporations answer the question: What does sustainable living in Eindhoven look like in 2040 and how do we, as housing corporations, effectively work together in achieving this? The Natural Step has helped the housing corporations co-create a successful collaboration process, deliver a visioning and roadmap workshop and checks in on a monthly basis with project teams to discuss challenges, opportunities and information needs. Next steps involve executing the strategies in Eindhoven's neighbourhoods.

For more information on The Natural Step in the Netherlands, please contact Berend Aanraad: berend.aanraad(at)thenaturalstep.org