How we work with business
WWF works constructively with progressive businesses, brings together stakeholders to find sustainable solutions within sectors, and campaigns for change.
Partnering business
Solutions-driven partnerships are the focus of WWF’s work with individual companies. We partner companies that demonstrate a real commitment to the principles of sustainable development. Where a significant change agenda is desired, business partners are not expected to commit to high levels of change from the outset, but are engaged to jointly work up a manageable change plan as part of ongoing partnership activities.
In short, WWF brings opportunities to help facilitate change and find solutions:
- support for integrated environmental and business strategies environmental insights around climate change, forestry, water, the marine environment, and species
- guidance on carbon management and natural resource use
- support for political dealings. Ministers, civil servants and Parliamentarians recognise WWF's expertise on a range of issues.
These are combined with communication and commercial support:
- credibility through associations with WWF as one of the most trusted brands
- innovative communications for engaging customers, investors and external audiences
- creative support for staff engagements including online and offline courses
- opportunities to sponsor events or programmes of work through licensing, affinity schemes and other cause-related marketing.
Marks & Spencer and HSBC are among the many companies that are partnering WWF in the UK. Over the last five years, for example, WWF’s Investing in Nature partnership with HSBC has made significant progress towards rejuvenating some of the world’s key rivers and wetlands. In the process we have influenced national policies on freshwater management in Brazil, China, Mexico and the US, as well as the UK. WWF has also provided input for HSBC’s responsible lending policies for project finance involving chemicals, forestry, fresh water, climate and energy. The success of this partnership has provided the platform for a further five-year programme, launched in 2007, which focuses on climate change.
Convening sectors
No single business can deliver all the solutions alone. WWF creates a space where industry, investors, consumer groups and political leaders can work together through complex international issues, identify barriers to business sectors becoming more sustainable and devise plans for system change.
Creating stewardship organisations with business, to drive change throughout a sector, has resulted in WWF setting up the Marine Stewardship Council with Unilever to oversee accreditation and set standards in the fishing industry. The WWF-UK Forest & Trade Network is also having a major impact on responsible timber procurement in this country. Its 46 members are estimated to account for 40% of forest products imported to the UK in 2006.
Our One Planet Business programme also demonstrates the power of bringing together interested parties.
One Planet Business brings together key stakeholders from high impact sectors - personal mobility, food, housing - to identify the changes required to achieve sustainability. One Planet Business Personal Mobility has already run with more than 30 organisations taking part, from investment banks to transport and fuel companies, government and consumer groups. Together with WWF, all parties ‘unpicked’ the barriers that could impede a shift to low-impact transport, and sought opportunities for change.
Campaigning for change
We campaign publicly to drive better business practices. For example:
WWF-UK's One in Five campaign challenges business to cut one in five flights. The campaign will help business to do so by encouraging greater use of low-carbon transport where appropriate and promoting the use of videoconferencing. We will also lobby the government to lead by example, by cutting its flights and introducing tax incentives for companies purchasing videoconference systems.
By demonstrating that the business sector is able to reduce its use of air transport while maintaining or even improving productivity, WWF will challenge the assumption that aviation expansion is necessary to maintain the competitiveness of British businesses – one of the key pillars of the government's pro-expansion argument.
Join WWF's One in Five Challenge. Watch a film exploring a new report and WWF's One in Five challenge
The Existing Homes Alliance, chaired by WWF-UK, is a coalition of housing and environmental organisations, businesses and government agencies that is calling for concerted action to reduce the environmental impact of the UK's existing homes.
Find out more.
To drive environmentally sensitive on-site activities and decarbonisation strategies in the oil and gas sector, WWF regularly challenges endeavours such as those surrounding the Arctic Refuge, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Sakhalin II and most recently, the Canadian oil sands. Unconventional energy projects can be particularly damaging to the local environment and present significant threats to climate security.