Last week International Paper (IP), a $26 billion company with over 60,000 employees worldwide, issued its 2011 sustainability report, full of goals the company has set for 2020.

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The people of India have a deep connection with mangoes. Every person claims to have at least one favorite kind but the Alphonso mango is undoubtedly the king. Anyone who has eaten it will attest that its distinctive flavor is hard to forget. However, the last couple of years have spelled trouble for mango farmers in India.

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Human-elephant conflict is rising in areas where farmland meets forest. Here’s one entrepreneur’s low-tech fix.

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Dr. Bronner’s, like its founder, Emanuel Bronner, is a story of a company’s great highs and the lowest of lows.

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This post has been entered in TckTckTck’s contest to send a blogger to cover the Rio+20 summit. If you like what you see, please promote via social networks. ReTweet, Like on Facebook and head over to TckTckTck’s Facebook page to give it a like there as well. Thanks! The real heroes of environmental and social change are [...]

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US company, Mera Gao Power’s low energy solar panels provide electricity in remote Indian villages. They aim to electrify 100,000 by 2016.

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A generation ago the economies in Latin America, Africa, India and China were stagnant and left billions in poverty and provided few opportunities for the vast majority of their citizens to build a better life. Fast forward to this decade, and the global financial landscape has drastically changed.

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In India, millets have formed the core of the everyday diet for millenia. However after the Green Revolution, subsidies for wheat and rice, and the food distribution system millets are slowly dying out.

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Bloomberg recently reported that India’s clean tech investments, “reached $10.3bn in 2011, some 52 percent higher than the $6.8bn invested in 2010. This was the highest growth figure of any significant economy in the world. There is plenty of room for further expansion – in 2011, India accounted for 4 percent of global investment in clean energy.” [...]

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January 30th 2012 is Gandhi’s 64th death anniversary and four days ago, India celebrated her Republic Day. It struck me that there are some sharp parallels between Gandhian philosophies and the sustainability movement.

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After a lot of debate, the Indian cabinet finally cleared the National Food Security Bill (NFSB) amidst doubts of whether this would really help create a hunger-free India. According to the Food Security Bill, India will need 60 – 61 million tons of grain to feed people who will be eligible for assistance. This means food [...]

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there is a way to both sequester carbon and grow more food in one fell swoop: composting. Soil is one of the biggest carbon pools on the planet with a few gigatons of carbon potential.

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A country’s air pollution index is a good measure of its recent economic growth. In South Asia, the winter has brought some major air pollution woes. Smog in some cities is so thick that it is wrecking havoc with mobility and air traffic. The burning of fossil fuels, biomass, as well as diesel transportation, factories, [...]

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Pepsico and its rival Coco-Cola have often been accused of over-exploitation of water in India. Both companies have been engaging in water footprint analysis to understand the problem, as well as stewardship activities. Pepsico recently announced that all their plants in India are water positive.  According to their reports, they were the first beverage company in India [...]

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India is poised to become a solar powerhouse, a possibility on its way to becoming a reality, with sunny prospects for the awakening subcontinent’s economic future. The Indian government has recognized the opportunity they have in a land where the sun shines more than 80 percent of all possible hours, and has set a goal [...]

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Six years ago, the Bombay High Court made a monumental decision and passed an order to stop the destruction of mangrove forests. This decision was made a little after the 2004 tsunami that struck the eastern Indian coast and badly affected Indonesia and Sri Lanka. During that period, officials discovered that areas that had healthy [...]

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In a store in my hometown of Ahmedabad, India, I was immediately charmed by the colorful display of intricate handcrafted embroidery on pillow covers, decorative wall-hangings and silk kurtas. The needlework was simple, yet elegant, distinctive – and yes, expensive. At first I hesitated over whether to spend so much on an embroidered piece I really liked. Then I read the price tag a bit more carefully and noticed that 65 percent of the proceeds went directly to the artisans, and the store itself was affiliated with SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association.

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CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development is one of the institutions that promotes sustainability in India. The Centre, which is based out of Delhi enables businesses to become more sustainable. It also offers guidance and resources to nudge Indian industries towards more inclusive growth and sustainable development. The Centre also has formulated the CII-ITC Sustainability Awards to [...]

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India has always boasted the longest rail network in the world.  That network is also the fourth most heavily used in the world, transporting over 6 billion passengers and 350 million tons of freight annually. Many cities, however, are in desperate need of a public transport overhaul and the sector is riddled with issues like [...]

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H&M has recently overtaken Walmart as the biggest buyer of organic cotton. The global market for organic cotton grew by 20% and H&M used more than 15,000 tonnes of it in 2010 – an increase of 77% compared to 2009. This is great news for organic cotton, but H&M needs to make many more improvements [...]

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I love reading about little innovations that make life easier for so many people with eco-friendly solutions. In the realm of water conservation, every drop is precious and rain water is one of the purest forms of water before it reaches the ground. It has long been used for non-potable uses and rain water harvesting [...]

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Along with peak oil, peak water is a phenomenon that is affecting the lives of millions of people worldwide. Water shortages are a very real and extremely scary predicament to a large majority of the world’s people. Such shortages have already started to cause civil wars, displacement and riots in several parts of the world. [...]

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There are not many watchdog organizations in India that look specifically at CSR. In America and the rest of the world, there are many ‘lists’ that regularly point out the companies that have the best CSR programs and initiatives. These range from Corporate Knight’s Global 100 to Ethisphere Institute’s Most Ethical Companies and Corporate Responsibility magazine’s 100 Best Corporate Citizens. While [...]

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By Darshan Goswami, M.S., P.E. The newest crop in India could be electricity from the sun. “Solar Farming” can help change India’s energy economy to clean and efficient renewable energy during the day when it is needed the most, create millions of jobs, and could help India achieve energy independence and better national security. Imagine [...]

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Making Mandatory CSR reporting in India has been an ongoing debate for almost a year now. With the recent cabinet reshuffle, newly appointed Corporate Affairs Ministers Mr. Veerappa Moily recently said that the new Companies Bill would make it mandatory for corporate to earmark part of their profit for CSR initiatives. Moily said that India [...]

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Asbestos pollution may be a waning issue in Europe and the US but it still remains a big problem in India. Richer nations like the UK and Germany banned asbestos decades ago after it was discovered that it leads to a condition called asbestosis which was first identified in 1906. Asbestos consists of six natural fibers about [...]

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India Inc. can finally breathe a sigh of relief because the government has ruled that CSR will not be made mandatory. Instead ‘flexible and directional guidelines’ will be issued. “There is no way the government wants to mandate it. If we make it mandatory there can be thousand and one ways to bypass it,” Corporate Affairs [...]

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Earlier this month, the Netherlands along with Iceland were hailed as great models of CSR. Co-Founder of cleaning company Method, Adam Lowry said that: “The Netherlands, very specifically, has been pursuing a “cradle to cradle” policy and building out the required infrastructure to support sustainability-minded projects like recapturing used materials from the waste stream to upcycle [...]

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Sustainability, CSR and banks are often not thought of in the same context. This is especially true in developing countries and something that is slowly changing. Recently, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) jointly invited banks and financial institutions to the National Conference on Non-Financial Reporting [...]

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India for the first time hosted World Environment Day this year and in keeping with the International Year of Forests, all the planned events have a focus on forest conservation. There is a week-long series of events across the country - walkathons, treeplanting and a green marketplace, films and art, and a seminar honoring the role [...]

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