Changing Climate Change

In FY ’09, we introduced Changing Climate Change, a enterprise-wide initiative aimed at fighting climate change. The initiative had four parts: operational initiatives designed to reduce our carbon footprint, incentives for employees to reduce their personal carbon footprints, $800,000 in grant funding to support nonprofits working on climate change, and renewable energy certificate purchases to offset the estimated carbon emissions we are unable to eliminate.

In April of 2009, we announced the winners of the grant funding in four categories:

• Threats to coffee-growing communities: The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (www.ciat.cgiar.org) and Catholic Relief Services (www.crs.org) will use the grant to map forecasts of the impacts of climate change in coffee-growing communities and help smallholder coffee farmers identify, evaluate and implement adaptation strategies.
• Transportation-related emissions: New England Transportation Institute (http://norwichvt.net), in partnership with the University of Vermont Transportation Research Center (http://www.uvm.edu/~transctr/), will conduct an in-depth analysis of transportation patterns in the rural Northeast to help inform policy-makers on the likely adoption and ultimate effect of different transportation strategies on greenhouse gas emissions levels.
• Building political will: Ceres (www.ceres.org) will mobilize its business and investor partners to make the economic case for bold U.S. climate and energy legislation in 2009. These leaders will take their message to legislators and the media.
• Empowering individual action: The National Parks Conservation Association (www.npca.org) will encourage and empower national park visitors to “Do Your Part” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Outreach will include dozens of national parks and their local communities, the web, and hundreds of schools.

We look forward to reporting on the other aspects of this initiative in our FY ’09 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.