What are three practical steps a company can take to tackle one of today's most pressing global problems? How can businesses realize clean, long-term growth opportunities by aligning today's actions with a net zero goal? Find answers in this month's Research+ newsletter. And don't forget to download our complimentary report on Academic Engagement: How Business & Business Schools Partner to Drive Sustainable Innovation!

This report is designed to help companies inform and accelerate the policies most urgently needed to support a stable global economy. The report sets guidelines for why and how companies can provide constructive influences on public policy. It details five core elements of responsible engagement and offers three practical steps a company can take, concurrently, to have a constructive influence on tackling one of today's most pressing global problems.
 

Companies are reducing their energy demand and scaling up their renewable energy use to meet sustainability goals and save money. Nearly 50% of Fortune 500 companies, and 60% of Fortune 100, have targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, buy renewable energy, and/or increase energy efficiency. To meet these goals, companies are looking to work with electric utilities, independent generators and regulators to get more renewable energy delivered through the grid.

Progress towards the Millenium Development Goals is monitored through a set of 21 measurable and time-bound targets and 60 indicators addressing extreme poverty and hunger, education, women's empowerment and gender equality, health, environmental sustainability and global partnership. This chart provides an assessment of progress on selected key targets relating to each Goal.

The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of the President, is charged with offering the President objective economic advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic policy. In this report you will find 15 economic facts about millennials that can be used to understand the largest generation in the U.S., representing one-third of the total U.S. population.

Sustainability-focused centers and institutes at top business schools play an important role in training future industry leaders to understand the value of the triple bottom line. They also work closely with the current generation of executives to find innovative opportunities at the convergence of market, social and environmental realities. This complimentary series of feature articles and Q&As looks closely at six different research centers and how they partner with industry.

Charlene Wall-Warren, Denise Petersen and Dirk Voeste from BASF discuss and provide insights into how BASF assessed and classified their portfolio of over 50,000 solutions. Watch to gain first-hand insights into how the portfolio segmentation results have been integrated into global, regional and business strategies and how the assessment will be used to drive innovation, align product solutions with market demands and create more sustainable solutions.

JWTIntelligence is a center for provocative thinking that focuses on identifying shifts in the global zeitgeist. Its latest report, The Future 100: Trends and Change to Watch in 2015 explores 11 categories including trends in culture, beauty, brands, food and drink, innovation, lifestyle, luxury, retail, sustainability, travel and technology.

Track 0 presents The Business Case for Adopting the Long-Term Goal for Net Zero Emissions report to support business decisions that enable the transition to a low carbon economy. By aligning today's actions with the net zero goal, businesses can realize clean, long-term growth opportunities.

The first of its kind, this study correlates the actual value of a clean, beautiful beach to how much that plays into a traveler's destination choice. JetBlue has partnered with The Ocean Foundation to try and show the economic value of clean beaches by directly tying the importance of nature to the airline's main economic measure — revenue per available seat mile (RASM).

The 250 companies included in the Forest 500 represent the major corporate powerbrokers with respect to tropical deforestation in the context of forest risk commodity supply chains. These companies operate across the globe and throughout the supply chain, from production to retail: collectively representing total revenues in excess of US$4.5 trillion.