How to find business climate resilience without losing the game in the attempt?

March 2, 2023

How to find business climate resilience without losing the game in the attempt?

For some years now, concepts such as eco-anxiety have begun to be named, which refer to the anguish, stress, anger and uncertainty generated by the climate crisis, and which results in total paralysis and demotivation to seek change (D'Ambra, 2019). These and other sentiments associated with climate change generally refer to affected individuals, and not so much to organizations or companies, but let's not forget that, in the end, these are made up of people who have the potential to trigger action or, failing that, inaction; transformation or degradation.

Every action has its reaction. But any inaction can have irreversible consequences. And it is an overwhelming responsibility to know that we are part of a system that, in the constant search to influence it positively, we fall into the hopelessness that its enormous magnitude can cause. But what about the community? What is the perspective of chain actions with their inevitable chain reactions? What reach do organizations and companies have if we begin to understand them as a group of humans capable of transforming their individuality into magnified action? Let's look at it.

Let's imagine a game: companies exist to fulfill a goal that can commonly translate into the creation of a product or service. For this objective to be achieved, any company or individual must be involved that provides them, in the same way, with a service or product that allows them to move one more square to the final line of the board that says in large red letters 'my goal'.

If you're a company leader, are you wondering about your role on that board? If you look past those big red letters at the end of your On the way, you will be able to identify other, alien goals, other colors and other nouns: 'Things' in green; 'gain' in blue; 'product' in yellow. Little by little you are realizing that there are as many products and services behind it, as there are players. Where are you standing? How do you Relate with the other players? Whats unites to this board? How much tenable Is it the board? Are each player's actions detrimental for system health? Do your rules put the nature What provides resources to each player?

Acquiring a systemic perspective is essential to move towards a regenerative transition of natural resources, and involves action to overcome the first major impact of stress, stress, anxiety and demotivation generated by seeing, perhaps, your presence on the board is harmful to the game and its players.

(Before we continue reading, we must confess something: we resort to euphemism. In the previous paragraphs we were talking about your supply chain, but we needed a subtle way to invite you to this reading and to the much needed reflection that it entails. Let's put the game on the table: your board is the industry; your squares, your supply chain; and, of course, the players, are the links in that chain. Throughout the following sections, we seek to capture these links with a systemic perspective, evidencing the connectivity between them, action and reaction, as well as the imminent need to migrate to regenerative supply chains)

Ludo

Apart from having an objective, those who make up the supply chain of any given company or industry, have in common a dynamic of Upstream and Downstream: resources enter your operations, and products or services leave your operations, which will serve as resources for the next link, and thus the system is taking shape. This form, in our ideal It's circular; however, in the most common of cases, it is linear.

Let's start at the beginning, why a systemic thinking? At Toroto, we propose to approach most issues from this approach, defined as “[...] the perception of the real world in terms of totalities for analysis [compared to] the atomist approach, which only perceives parts of it and in a disjointed way” (García Deza, n.d.), that is, to move towards a certain form of planetary, economic, social, environmental and climate resilience, we need a comprehensive vision of any problem, where we understand that each part of the system comes to life, relevance and has a consequence with any another point in the network itself that makes up the system as a whole. Let's put it in terms of a board game: the players on our board are not isolated entities, they form a network where they interact with each other, whatever the red player does or does not do, affects the blue player indirectly or directly. So with absolutely everything that makes up a supply chain, a company, an industry and a system.

Now, perhaps the starting point of your board, as well as that of ours, is the Earth. From the Earth we obtain services ecosystemic which result in resources that in a simplified way we call raw material. In the past, we have approached the conservation and care of ecosystems as a benefit that we all perceive, but which generally falls on those who own land tenure, which for more than half of the territory in Mexico, means communal management of resources by the more than 29,441 ejidos and 2,344 agrarian communities present in the nation. Why are we talking about social property along with roads? Upstream and Downstream of a supply chain? This social property is a clear example of the systemic thinking put in place: without a democratic - and governance - process that ensures the care of the natural resources on which we all depend, there would be no such initial raw materials that give life to a product or service cycle. The social tenure of land and the care of natural resources, in a considerable portion of its cases, is a reflection of systemic thinking that understands nature as a network of non-material services, products and benefits that we obtain from caring for and protecting it.

Resource management and land work are the first square on the board, and it is essential that all players are aware of this, because everything starts here: industries, companies, services and products. The owners of the land are - indirectly or directly - the beginning of any supply chain, so if the land suffers, all players are irretrievably affected. This impacts so many levels of organization that the search for regenerative and resilient supply chains must be in everyone's interest: “doing more with less” in order to address the structural weaknesses currently found in conventional supply chain models (IBM, n.d.), where the links are mostly disconnected from each other, that is, completely alienated from a systemic logic of thought.

Migrating to regeneration involves searching dynamics that go beyond the linear norm with which we have understood the products and services of the market: those that are characterized by stages of extraction, transport, transformation or manufacturing, distribution, consumption and disposal, as opposed to when all the links in the chain decide return to some point in the chain, giving back more than they take.

“While a sustainable company simply seeks to reduce its ecological footprint, a regenerative company boldly seeks to increase its socio-ecological footprint” Radjou, 2020.

To be able to transform something, you must know its components. Until now we haven't described this famous board: is it a kind of Snakes and Ladders? Is it a maze? Is it a simple marathon? To tell the truth, there are as many boards as there are industries, sectors and even companies. However, you can't change what you don't know how to name, so there are strategies to map your supply chain from different angles, such as consulting service focused on Scope 3 emissions that you can buy with us in Toronto.

That said, let's dwell for a moment on the concept of indirect Scope 3 emissions (those indirect emissions that come from activities within an organization's supply chain) since they are a great resource for showing how relevant the actions - and inactions - of all the links in the chain are, and why systemic thinking is important. In a Past article we discuss how the execution (and publication of open access) a company's emissions inventory can positively impact access to quality information for calculating Scope 3 emissions from another organization with which a section of the supply chain is shared, and this is because The emissions Upstream of a company, they can be the Downstream Of others, and recognizing this connectivity and relationship between organizations, is an important step in properly reducing and mitigating them. What follows after this recognition is essential for the game: what to do? Whether your company or industry seems more like a maze than a marathon, or the other way around, finding the most intensive emission sources and mitigating their impact is a requirement to move to the next square. There are conventional ways to mitigate emissions that go hand in hand with an equally conventional supply chain, however, if our ultimate goal is a regenerative supply chain, so must our mitigation actions.

Las nature-based solutions Or the Insetting they are that answer we are looking for, since they point to the decarbonization of your supply chain. El Insetting it can be seen as the execution of a project within your operational power that mitigates your own emissions, such as when, for example, a company in the agri-food sector executes a regenerative agriculture project that positively impacts the resilience of the soil, and therefore, of the crops; or, if you are a beverage industry and you decide to implement nature-based solutions that help you to infiltrate more water into the aquifers you depend on. All the actions you're taking to improve your supply chain are directly benefiting you and the planet. This is a huge difference from a conventional supply chain.

We have already come a long way from land tenure to how an industry or company can move towards a regenerative transition. However, one major component is missing: the goal; that 'objective' in big red letters, the acclaimed “consumer”.

What a consumer does or doesn't do with your product or service is truly a coin in the air. There are centuries of academics on how to study, how to influence or how to modify your behavior. There are fashions, household names, absolute rejections and instant adoptions. But regardless of whether the final consumer accepts or rejects the product, the immovable reality is that in the end, short, medium or long term, they will seek to get rid of it. And that's where the game goes; still walk your chip along the board beyond your 'objective', wherever the socio-environmental footprint is hiding under tons of garbage.

Where we look back at the Earth, at the system, and we realize that we no longer recognize it. Where we think we've already won the game, but in reality we're only losing it. Taking responsibility for what happens with our product or service beyond consumption involves fracturing the system, and looking at ways to reintegrate that “waste” into a new resource.

Don't lose the game

Now, the above was nothing more than that introduction that a friend gives you about the game in question out of laziness to read the full instructions; however, this is when we get out of the euphemism and remind you that our planet, our supply chain, our waste, and what we do about it is not as simple as a board game, much less, can be improvised in the same way as if we were actually playing one. We don't lose a shift, or a game: we lose our planet, the ecosystems that sustain us, the enormous biodiversity they house and above all, we lose our peers.

Therefore, here are the instructions for the game:

Understand land tenure as a constant in the supply chain

Let's export the way land owners make decisions that seek the collective benefit of their resources rather than the individual benefit: making decisions with the majority in mind, not the minority, increases the likelihood that the action will not be detrimental to the system.
The most important thing: none of them, without them. Recognize that your processes, efficiencies and requirements can mean ecosystem and social stress for those who work the land. And without them, you have nothing.

Migrate to regenerative supply chains

Do more with less: rethink your processes, your designs, your growth, your decisions and your projects to reduce the resources required. If possible, return more than you consume.
Get involved in making sure that most of the links in your supply chain follow a regenerative logic. If you work with food, migrate to regenerative agriculture; if you work with water, invest in nature-based solutions that add to water infiltration; if you work with wood, look for forest restoration projects; if you work with textiles, look for ways to positively influence the sustainable cultivation of the raw material and the correct recycling of the garment when it reaches its useful life; in general, look for waste management services that reduce as much as possible the amount sent to landfills in a demonstrable way. If you have direct contact with agricultural suppliers, allocate economic incentives for their transfer to regenerative practices.
It's not bad to demand sustainability from your suppliers. As a player in the chain, being a catalyst for good practices will sooner or later increase the demand for more sustainable and regenerative links, in this way you not only influence your own chain, but that of others.

Bet on reducing your footprint, within your chain; bet on Insetting

1. Insetting is a great environmental practice and strategy that, rather than compensating for emissions that cannot be mitigated, allows them to be prevented from the start. This is achieved by allocating resources to key players in your supply chain to decarbonize your indirect and direct emissions from the start. Exploring investment options within your mapping can result in financial support for a renewable energy project, up to the creation of forest carbon capture projects within your operational limits.
2. Contact Toroto if you are interested in identifying the 'red spots' in your supply chain with a project that manages to prioritize the taking of actions to mitigate the impact of your chain. From emissions to water consumption, we believe that to change something, we must measure it.

Don't be afraid of the magnitude of the chain

Yes. You are presenting yourself with a great challenge. And we're not going to lie, mapping your supply chain is going to be an iterative project that will probably take years. The United States Environmental Protection Agency states that the measurement of indirect climate impact (such as Scope 3 emissions) can be a process that extends more than one reporting period: in the baseline year, you generally start with little quality information, outlining your skeleton, for year after year, refining the methodology and sources of information, iterating the process until you have a mapping that is as close to the reality of your chain (US EPA, 2016). Don't expect a 100% accurate answer from the start. Welcome uncertainty and iteration. It's for the good of your industry or company, and for those who enter and leave your supply chain.
Remember that systemic thinking is your best ally; the links in your supply chain are not isolated services or products, starting to understand the system as a network of connections that constantly interacts with its parts, instead of a line with simple exits of resources or waste, is possibly one of the most important rules in this game.

It facilitates the individual action of your End-consumer

Control what's in your hands. Getting involved with mitigating the socio-environmental footprint of your products or services can start from media awareness campaigns, to the design of long-lasting products, whose repair is affordable; it can be seen as increasing the content of recycled materials in your manufacturing or the implementation of a circular economy system. You can't control user behavior, but you can make it easier for your product or service to become less noticeable at the last moment.
Don't lose the game.
1. The problem is very big: annual emissions are measured in gigatonnes. Aquiferous reservoirs are contaminated. Indigenous peoples are expropriated of their land. We are in a recession. The Atacama Desert is flooded with garbage. Yes, fossil fuels are still in use. YES. But the game is lost when we lose hope.
2. Always remember, finally and in a very cold way: without them, there is nothing. Without healthy ecosystems, no amount of post-tax income will matter. If your supply chain, if your organization, if your product or service is not redesigned to ensure its resilience, it will not be able to overcome the great challenge in which we are involved.

Don't lose the game.

About the author:

María does environmental consulting in Toroto. She is a physical engineer at IBERO. He is fascinated by archeology, Mexico, the arts and laughing. He believes that together we can do everything.

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