In collaboration with leaders and experts from industry, government and civil society our teams are working on ‘Five Big Bets’ that have enormous potential to contribute to a clean and prosperous economy, as we collectively develop effective and scalable solutions to climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

We live in a time of great uncertainty, complexity, and unprecedented systemic challenges. Addressing complex sustainability challenges requires unprecedented collaboration and new ways of working across sectors and across scales.

The Canada Plastics Pact (CPP) is creating a circular economy in Canada in which plastic waste is kept in the economy and out of the environment. Canada Plastics Pact Partners are united, working together on achieving clear, actionable targets by the year 2025. 

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Corporate Knights Sustainable Cities Rankings

With our global economy in crisis, increasing food shortages in the developing world and reports of unprecedented ecosystem decline around the planet, it’s easy to feel disillusioned with the state of world. However, when we look closer to home there are indications that change is afoot.

Corporate Knights, an independent Canadian-based media company, conducts annual sustainability assessments of small, medium and large cities across the country. They choose indicators to measure the socio-ecological and economic wellbeing of cities by using publically available data and sending surveys out to municipal staff.

This year, in an effort to improve their rankings, they invited The Natural Step Canada (TNS) to participate on an advisory committee. As lead advisor, TNS researched how Corporate Knights could apply systems thinking and backcasting to help define success and strategically inform their indicator selection.

Sustainability and Economic Crisis

Albert Einstein once said, we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. The current global economic crisis is a perfect example of the need for a new way of thinking.

We can’t look at the global economic crisis without also looking at the challenges of the climate crisis, water scarcity, food shortages and extreme poverty. We need to step back and look at the whole system, realize that all these problems are in fact interconnected and that we can’t address our economic concerns in isolation from our social and environmental concerns. These crises are all symptoms of a larger global system that is out of balance. The need for sustainable development has never been greater.

Building Toward Sustainability, Literally

The Landmark Group of Builders is a residential construction company further comprised of seven individual companies with offices in Edmonton, Red Deer, and Calgary. In the fall of 2008, in collaboration with The Natural Step, Landmark embarked on a journey to identify their key sustainability challenges, key innovation goals to overcome those challenges, and to develop a road map for embedding sustainability into their business. TNS advisor Sarah Brooks commends Landmark for “taking a long term perspective in their strategic planning for sustainability.” She points out that by “benchmarking progress from full sustainability rather than compliance regulations, [The Landmark Group] are taking an approach that is rigorous enough to answer the question “how will we know when we’ve arrived there [at sustainability]?””

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