The Regional Centre for Climate Change and Decision-Making was launched earlier this year (19 March) in Montevideo, Uruguay, where it will have its headquarters and where it is organising its first training event for policymakers.

The centre is a joint initiative by the Panama-based Avina Foundation, which promotes sustainable development in Latin America, and UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Its programmes will be implemented through an interagency partnership of ten universities and academic foundations from five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.

During the first two years of the four-year initiative, UNESCO will provide a total of US$150,000 and the Avina Foundation a further US$80,000 for the centre’s operation, Ramiro Fernández, energy and climate change director for Latin America at the foundation tells SciDev.Net.

The first training event to take place in Uruguay — chosen to run the initiative because of the interest shown by its government in tackling climate change and the progress in its climate-change adaptation plans — will consist of a symposium and workshop in October with senior representatives and decision-makers.

Attendees will hear from scholars, leaders and decision-makers from various countries, disciplines and economic sectors and discuss the latest trends in and knowledge about decision-making and climate change, says Denise Gorfinkiel, responsible officer for climate change at the UNESCO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean.

After that, the centre will provide national and regional training courses tailored to specific local needs to help put the latest development concepts and science into practice, says Gorfinkiel.

The national training courses, which will be overseen by the new centre but coordinated by local institutions, are due to be held in the first quarter of 2014, adds Fernández.

“In the medium term, this joint effort will also generate a regional public good, resulting from a regional network of academic, political, economic and civil actors able to support decision-making on scientific and managerial issues related to sustainable development,” Gorfinkiel says.

As a result of the project, Fernández envisions the generation of “a critical mass of decision-makers who incorporate the complexity of climate change in their everyday decisions and develop new management tools”.

Agustín Giménez, the national coordinator of the Agroclimate and Information Systems Unit at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Uruguay, welcomes the initiative as a high-impact tool for governments and the private sector in the region.

But he says that its impact will depend on the quality and applicability of the knowledge imparted.

Currently, the centre appears to have an academic focus, Giménez says, adding that “its remit should be broader, integrating institutions with different approaches in terms of research, development and innovation in climate change, impacts and adaptation”.

To effectively contribute to decision-making, he says, it should also involve national centres of research in other areas, such as agriculture.

Source: http://www.scidev.net/en/climate-change-and-energy/news/south-american-climate-change-think-tank-launched.html?utm_source=link&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=en_news

The Social Progress Index, which ranked 50 countries by their social and environmental performance, was designed by Professor Porter and The Social Progress Imperative working in collaboration with economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and leading international organisations in social entrepreneurship, business, philanthropy, and academia including Cisco, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL), Skoll Foundation, Fundación Avina, and Compartamos Banco.

“The ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 and the challenges in Mexico over the last decade, have illustrated the shortcomings of economic growth as a proxy for social progress”, said Professor Porter. “In both business and economic development, our understanding of success has been incomplete.

“Previous efforts to go beyond economic measurement alone have laid important groundwork, but we need a more holistic, comprehensive, and rigorous approach. The Social Progress Index is an attempt to address these gaps and opportunities.

“Social progress depends on the policy choices, investments, and implementation capabilities of multiple stakeholders – government, civil society, and business. Action needs to be catalysed at country level. By informing and motivating those stakeholders to work together and develop a more holistic approach to development, I am confident that social progress will accelerate.”

No countries score in the top half for all 12 components of the Social Progress Index which are Nutrition and Basic Medical Care; Air, Water and Sanitation; Shelter; Personal Safety; Access to Basic Knowledge; Access to Information and Communication; Health and Wellness; Ecosystem Sustainability; Personal Rights; Access to Higher Education; Personal Freedom and Choice; and Equity and Inclusion.

Some of the key findings from the Social Progress Index include:

- Scores on the health and wellness component show no correlation to spending on health as a percent of GDP for the 16 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in the Index. This poses particular challenges for countries that spend the most on healthcare. The United States, for example, leads OECD nations in total spending per capita on healthcare, but ranks only 11th of the 16 OECD countries in the Social Progress Index on health and wellness.

- Spain: 10th overall, and 11th in terms of GDP ranks 22nd for Personal Freedom and Choice.

- Britain (2nd) and Sweden (1st) perform highly on the Social Progress Index when compared to their performance on the United Nations Human Development Index because they perform consistently across the three dimensions of social progress – basic needs, foundations of wellbeing and opportunity – whereas the United States is weaker on foundations of wellbeing and Germany and France are weaker o opportuninty. Nearly all rich countries perform poorly on ecosystem sustainability—especially large countries with abundant natural resources like Australia (46th), Canada (47th), and the United States (48th).

“The Social Progress Index shows that countries with similar levels of GDP can have very different levels of social progress,” said Michael Green, Executive Director of the Social Progress Imperative. “We expect some surprising transfers of knowledge in the next few years, as standout performers – among government, civil society, and business – document and share their approaches.”

“At Deloitte, we believe that business plays a fundamental role in shaping and creating the society of the future. We will only resolve the big issues we face today, globally and regionally, through government, business and civil society working together in new and innovative ways to design and deliver solutions that create a sustainable and prosperous future for all” said Heather Hancock, Managing Director at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited. “We believe the Social Progress Index will make it easier for business to understand where and how it can get involved, helping to prioritise social investment decisions, and galvanise collective action.”

“The Social Progress Index is designed to help all of us make better decisions,” said Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation and a director of the Social Progress Imperative. “This elegant tool makes essential information available to those driving change from the front lines and raises our collective responsibility for results that add up.”

“The Social Progress Index is the first project of the Social Progress Imperative as part of a wider set of initiatives to guide the investment and policy decisions of governments, the private sector, and civil society to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

About the Social Progress Imperative

The Social Progress Imperative’s mission is to advance global human wellbeing, by combining national social performance and capacity indicators with solutions-oriented outreach to sector leaders, and grassroots champions, who together can effect large-scale change. The Social Progress Imperative counts organisations including Cisco, Deloitte, Skoll Foundation, Compartamos Banco, and Fundación Avina as financial supporters.

Social progress is defined as the capacity of a society to meet the basic human needs of its citizens, establish the building blocks that allow citizens to improve their lives, and create the conditions for individuals and communities to meet their full potential.

For more information, please contact:

Jonathan Caleb-Landy +44 (0)20 7759 1030 jcaleblandy@fenton.com

Download full report here

The nomination form and the Prize regulation are available at http://www.gulbenkian.pt/index.php?section=25&artId=803&langId=2

Initially, the government program led to the creation of protected areas and indigenous lands, now constituting about 40 percent of the Brazil’s Amazon, combined with significant advances in command and control efforts. Most notably, there was a sharp increase of enforcement to stop illegal activities. In addition, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and Imazon launched monitoring systems, using near real-time satellite images to track deforestation. And finally, Brazil decided to suspend credit to all landowners if they do not stop illegal deforestation. This set of measures made it possible for Brazil to reduce annual deforestation from 19,600 square kilometers (the average for 1996-2005) to about 6,300 square kilometers (average for 2009 to 2012). This represents a more than 80 percent reduction of deforestation, with avoided emissions of CO2 equivalent to approximately 2.2 gigatons—the greatest reduction achieved by humankind. To put this into perspective, 2.2 gigatons is comparable to the emissions resulting from fuel burning in 2008 from India and China combined, according to the IEA. 

How do we maintain these tremendous gains and move towards ending deforestation by 2020? The next wave of this effort is to have local initiatives to combat deforestation while transforming the land use from extensive to intensive. For example, agricultural expansion is an example of an extensive driver, while mining and mineral processing is an example of an intensive driver. One promising initiative is the Green Municipalities Program, launched in 2011 by State of Pará in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. Pará, with a huge territory of more than 1.25 million square kilometers (three times the size of California) already has lost 21 percent of its forests. 

The key to the Green Municipalities Program’s approach is to have dialogue with all stakeholders, especially ranchers and loggers, clear goals and indicators, and a broad political coalition. The long-term goal is that of net zero deforestation in Pará by 2020, with milestones along the way. For example, deforestation in Pará should be below 1,200 square kilometers by 2016. This means that not only by 2020 do we expect zero illegal deforestation, but that all legal deforestation from that point on is to be compensated for with reforestation. So far the results are promising: deforestation in Pará reached 1,700 square kilometers in 2012, the lowest in history. Moreover, rural property registration (defining property boundaries) has skyrocketed from less than 600 properties in 2009 to more than 64,000 in 2012. Now almost 40 percent of Para’s rural properties can be easily monitored using satellite images, which can also track all rural production.

Of course, there are still many challenges ahead. On the economic side, it is critical to attract investments to move forward with the intensification of land use. For example, the Brazilian pilot initiative on low-carbon agriculture needs to be scaled up, along with forest management and reforestation. Moreover, potential payments for environmental services such as REDD are very welcome. But on the other hand, hydroelectric projects underway can catalyze massive migration and land use speculation—reigniting strong drivers of deforestation. Ultimately, however, Brazil’s international commitment to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by at least 80 percent by 2020 is critical to keeping the country on the right track. We have made great progress thus far, but there is still more work to be done.

The mayors elected in Belo Horizonte, Cuiaba, Curitiba, Manaus, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Natal and Fortaleza (Brasilia did not hold elections) committed publicly to adopting the goals suggested by Avina’s allies, including implementing a transparent management culture that is open to social participation, investing in public access and grading the sports policy.

Avina brought together its three ally networks and was an active participant in conceiving the initiative and mobilizing support for the effort through local events, which ultimately led to the candidates getting on board.

Fundación Avina in Brazil gave the financial support needed to bring the networks and consultants together and helped design the strategies around the public events held in the 12 World Cup host cities.

January 30, 2013 – The Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative (CGSGI), the Skoll Foundation, Fundación Avina, and Fair Trade USA recently hosted a daylong event aimed at making global supply chains more sustainable. President Bill Clinton joined thirty-seven leaders from the business, farming, academic, NGO and philanthropic communities to address key challenges around global poverty and environmental degradation, market failures and growing economic disparity. Together they generated ideas for strengthening supply chains in ways that benefit businesses, workers and the environment, while improving the lives of impoverished farming communities around the world.

President Clinton challenged participants to find creative solutions to these pressing problems, highlighting the role that Fair Trade can play.

In response, leaders from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR), Whole Foods Market, Reunion Island Coffee, Alter Eco and Honest Tea committed to increasing their support of Fair Trade coffee, tea, cocoa and produce. Global non-governmental organizations committed to investing in Fair Trade farmers with capital and training, while participating foundations pledged increased funding for impact evaluation, consumer education and farmer capacity building.

“For more than a decade, Fair Trade has been a key part of GMCR’s sustainable sourcing strategy because it helps us provide high quality coffee to our consumers and a higher quality of life for coffee farmers,” said Brian P. Kelley, President and CEO of GMCR. “We continue to strengthen our commitment to Fair Trade through our breadth of products, projects in coffee-growing communities, and consumer awareness campaigns.”

While celebrating the successful history of Fair Trade in alleviating poverty and contributing to sustainable supply chains, the group recognized that there’s far more work to be done. Over two billion people still live on less than two dollars per day. Current marketplace trends, especially the unprecedented demand for agricultural commodities, present a unique opportunity to link more farmers with more companies, unleashing benefits to farming communities at a scale not seen before.

“We believe the best solutions will come from partnering with organizations across the supply chain,” said Frank Giustra, Chairman, Director and Founder of the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative,

Our region is paying the price for the dictatorial regimes we endured in the past: the authoritarian political culture is having an astonishing impact on the decline of the social order and the collapse of justice in the democratic system. Exactly the same as during the time of the military governments, Latin America is now witnessing a huge number of deaths and disappearances due to organized crime: youth gangs involved in arms trafficking and employing various methods of extortion and intimidation; hired killers from the world of drug trafficking who become dangerous destroyers of public safety; and, with people trafficking, the return of new forms of slavery.

Organized crime moves millions of dollars and is mixed up with foreign capital, the sources of which – known to be easily accessible – have been penetrated in different ways and different categories by the criminal underworld. The unstable politics and economies of Latin America are unable to confront this international and almost uncontrollable phenomenon efficiently.

These globalized criminal organizations are not only involved in trafficking drugs, arms or human beings. They have also managed to infiltrate every sector of society by setting up ghost companies that may even be legally constituted and participate in public tenders.

The methods used by the criminals enjoy illegal advantages in the market, allowing them to impose their blood law which claims thousands of innocent victims every year. In politics they find a convenient setting for the satisfaction of mutual interests, enabling the mafia culture to replace the state itself in many of its functions by buying off high-ranking officers in the police, the armed forces and the courts, for example. State structures all over the continent are being corroded by the disguised social anomie of the criminal gangs.

This issue of The Americas Political Folio argues that organized crime is growing at a dizzying speed and its consequences will probably be irreparable. The relative success of democracy and the rights-based system is at the same time being tarnished by anomalous situations such as the impact of various murky businesses linked to indiscriminate terror, where civil society is left to its fate as respect for human rights begins to disappear. Thus, values and morality gradually dissolve and cease to be a legitimate standard of behavior. They are being extinguished by the force of crime, which is elevated to the seat of honor and admired for its audacity and abundant wealth, becoming the model to be imitated because of how easy it is to deploy a series of systematic violations against the law and public safety.

The socio-political web of crime

The mafias – especially drug trafficking as the one with the greatest threatening influence – have a web-like structure: a system of connections that is also linked to the contraband arms trade, terrorism, people trafficking, kidnapping and corruption, together with the trafficking of influence. This dense web of interests has incorporated into its activities the social symbolism of fellow men, but far from showing solidarity with the poorest, or playing the role of Robin Hood, what predominates is the use of people as tools.

The immediate result is an extremely cynical exploitation of social ties whereby the only thing valued is untrammeled pleasure and direct access to wealth. Criminal gangs turn human beings into tools that can be used and thrown away, manipulating them with the sole objective of obtaining easy money from illicit activities. Organized crime will never represent an effort to help the poor or a survival strategy, or indeed a way to redistribute wealth in society. Quite simply, it constitutes egotistical behavior leading to the ruin of institutions and the constant devaluation of life, because money and unbridled appetites will always take precedence over fellow feeling and the state.

The mafia bosses have different forms of cheaper and more effective labor at their disposal, taking advantage of the absence of state mechanisms to support excluded groups lacking in opportunities. This is compounded by the mediocre and ineffectual attitudes of governments and economic policies that have been unable to put in place the conditions required to overcome poverty and protect their young human resources in the short, medium and long term.

When the mafias operate, they do so using business strategies with a good knowledge of the type of market in which they are going to act. They do not hire professionals but people with no future of any sort who have nothing to lose. It would be naive to think that organized crime works by offering opportunities to young technicians and professionals. On the contrary, its influence is so negative that it recruits people who are willing to kill, to die, to be humiliated and to undermine any type of control, laws or formal institutions. In its different forms of organization, the criminal underworld is a genuine school for scoundrels and for those groups who have no fear of disappearing from the social system.

Criminal organizations are only interested in professionals or people with a high level of education if they can make use of them, and specifically if the professionals can facilitate contacts with the top echelons of power. Organized crime also seeks the privileges that come with being at the top: within the state and as part of a society’s hegemonic elites.

The illegal cocaine trade, for example, gains in importance from the economic power it generates. The battle being waged against it by Latin American countries is not leading to effective control, despite their efforts. No-one can explain how is it possible that the highly sophisticated technology and espionage services deployed by the United States are able to track alleged terrorists drinking tea (including filming them), but unable to spot the light aircraft and trucks plying the routes chosen by the traffickers to bring people and arms out of US territory and sell them in exchange for cocaine base paste, despite all the comings and goings of experts who propose to eradicate drug trafficking. In short, the criminal gangs are being protected and democratic civil society does not know how to act when corruption reaches the nerve centers of political power.

Furthermore, organized crime is now completely globalized because it can communicate online, and is even able to shift from one territory to another and develop better synergies. The mafia move around as they see fit, without respecting the sovereignty of any state. Indeed, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala and El Salvador are the most vulnerable countries, as the criminal underworld has managed to infiltrate national and local politics, the business world, the military, the police, the security sector and the judicial system.

Neither can we ignore the fact that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other armed resistance groups seemingly influenced by socialism or communism have totally abandoned their utopias of radical social change and justice as a result of their close ties with drug trafficking and organized crime. Enjoying the associated advantages of their arms and money, these groups provide support and protection for such illicit trades that move millions of dollars. White-collar crime also finances various election campaigns and is able to participate legally in public tenders, with the aim of laundering its ill-gotten gains.

The profits and power of organized crime are immense, in both industrialized and developing countries. According to the United Nations, the annual revenues of transnational criminal organizations around the world are likely to total about a billion dollars, a figure equivalent to the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of all low-income countries, with a population of 3 billion. These estimates include profits from the trafficking of drugs and nuclear materials, as well as other services controlled by the mafia such as prostitution and gambling. What these figures do not adequately reflect, however, is the magnitude of the investments regularly made by the criminal underworld in legitimate commercial businesses, or their control of the means of production in many areas of the formal economy.

In Venezuela, the narco-mafias are alleged to have tried to use the Banco Latino and another 19 of the country’s banks to launder their money in 1994. At the time, the financial system was controlled by the family of Pedro Tinoco, who was president of the Central Bank of Venezuela under the government of former president Carlos Andrés Pérez and played a key role in designing the structural adjustment program that was applied from 1989 onwards. This program proposed to liberalize all sectors of the economy as fully as possible, promote the widespread privatization of state enterprises, and thus modernize Venezuela. However, the effects of the alleged links between politicians and organized criminals involved in drug trafficking generated new types of patrimonialism; in other words, they used state structures to make illicit profits at the cost of undermining the institutionality of the political system.

As part of organized crime at the global level, the drug cartels have created a symbiotic relationship between the economy and political structures. Therefore, in Latin America and in the rest of the world, the relationship between the criminals and the banking system has enabled the underworld to subtly make its mark on certain macroeconomic policy trends, as many political authorities have had links with some trafficking cartels.

In another context, it is conservatively estimated that the banking system in the United States allows organized crime to launder about 100 billion dollars per year. In some cases, they even used the biggest banks in Manhattan. Various studies highlight the role played by the major investment firms in New York and the currency and gold traders linked to Wall Street, who likewise have an interest in laundering the cartels’ money. This suggests that the patrimonialism practiced by public institutions to benefit private interests and the abuse of power extends to the very heart of those countries where the idea of a solid democracy has long reigned. This is an illusion, because the organized mafias have been eroding every corner of the democratic system, promoting various murky businesses in a globalized environment.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculates that the offshore assets of suspect corporations and individuals amount to US$5.5 billion, a figure equivalent to 25 per cent of total global income. Furthermore, the ill-gotten wealth that certain Third World elites have deposited in foreign bank accounts is likely to amount to US$600 billion. A third of this money is thought to be held in Switzerland.

Conclusion

Organized crime represents a threat to regional security throughout Latin America. It must be acknowledged, however, that poor countries are making efforts to combat global crime, despite a series of ideological differences. Coordinating international security policies is the only viable way to dismantle the various criminal networks.

Preventive measures within Latin America may allow the region’s countries to distance themselves from the usual anti-terrorism and counter-narcotics programs of the United States, which is accustomed to making its support conditional in order to ensure that its decisions and objectives in its own national interest take precedence over the multilateral interests of the region as a whole. The criminals, however, are those who benefit most from this unilateral policy stance on the part of the region’s most powerful country.

The problem arises with the evidence that those paying the price in terms of their dead citizens are the countries of the south, especially if we consider the violence that results from trafficking with immigrants forced to carry drugs, rampant corruption and the moral degradation of the whole of society when faced with complete anomie and fear.

The Union of South American Nations (Unión de Naciones Suramericanas – UNASUR) is trying to find some ways to respond by mobilizing the armed forces on all the borders of its member countries. Although certain shortcomings persist, these shared views of the best way to combat the many criminal networks in the region are praiseworthy.

It is essential to continue to hold dialogue with the European Union, setting aside differences in ideological and political positions to inflict a real defeat on the most powerful mafias. Otherwise, a series of lost wars will continue because, as each day goes by, the businesses and influences of organized crime are multiplying rapidly and infecting all the structures of the state like an epidemic. In short, crime is transforming the heart of society, allowing cynicism – together with access to dirty money – to dominate as a new set of symbols in which the law of the strongest, the most corrupt and the most hardened criminals triumphs.

The figures

Within organized crime, “trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation accounts for the highest proportion of people trafficking in statistical terms: 76% of the victims of this crime worldwide are recruited for prostitution, according to United Nations figures. At the global level, this black market moves more than 32 billion dollars a year. It is the illicit trade that moves the third highest amount of money, after drug trafficking and arms trafficking, according to statistics from the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR).” Source: http://ciperchile.cl/2012/09/06/red-de-%E2%80%9Ctrata-de-personas%E2%80%9D-para-la-prostitucion-opero

The quote

“I don’t see a God of life anywhere, I only see blind people adorning their crimes with God.” Elías Canetti, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1981

Communication, contributions, suggestions and comments to: franco.gamboa@aya.yale.edu

Civil society organizations and research institutions that form part of the Amazonian Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information (RAISG) today launched the atlas Amazonia under pressure. Like the other products produced by RAISG (available at raisg.socioambiental.org), the main objective of the publication is to move beyond fragmented views of Amazonia and provide a panorama of the pressures and threats experienced by the region as a whole.

The analysis of deforestations shows that between 2000 and 2010 around 240,000 km² of Amazonian rainforest was destroyed, representing double the amount of rainforest cover in Ecuador, or the entire landmass of the United Kingdom. The atlas warns that should the threats identified in projects for roads (highways or combined transport routes), oil and gas drilling, mining and hydroelectric plants become pressures in the near future, up to a half of the currently standing Amazonian rainforest may vanish.

“If all the overlapping economic interests become a reality over the next few years, Amazonia will become a savannah with islands of forest,” says RAISG’s general coordinator, Beto Ricardo, from Instituto Socioambiental (Brazil).

The pressures and threats faced by Amazonia show that the forest landscapes, socio-environmental diversity and fresh water are being replaced by degraded landscapes, open savannahs that are drier and much less diverse. We can observe an arc of deforestation spanning from Brazil to Bolivia, an area of pressure on water resources, oil drilling in Andean Amazonia and an outer ring of mining.

The Atlas covers a set of six pressures and threats to Amazonia over the last decade – roads, oil and gas, hydroelectric plants, mining, deforestation and hot spots – analyzed according to five different kinds of territorial unit: Amazonia, the Amazon river basin in each country, Protected Natural Areas, River Basins and Indigenous Lands. These analyses are made in 55 maps, 61 tables, 23 graphs, 16 boxes and 73 photographs. All this information and analysis is organized in theme-based chapters, running to a total of 68 pages.

This time round it was not possible to include the analysis of other related topics such as illegal mining, logging and farming, due to the lack of quality information capable of being transferred to a map for all the countries of Amazonia. When these factors are included, the overall situation is likely to be even worse.

This publication represents a contribution from civil society to the democratic debate on the pressures now being faced by the Amazon, particularly on the question of deforestation, which is now being evaluated by various national governments and at intergovernmental level in the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO).

The Amazonia presented in this publication is a region of high socio-environmental diversity undergoing rapid change. It covers a total of 7.8 million km2, around 12 macro-basins and 158 sub-basins, administrated by 4969 municipalities, 68 departments/states/provinces in eight countries: Bolivia (6.2%), Brazil (64.3%), Colombia (6.2%), Ecuador (1.5%), Guyana (2.8%), Peru (10.1%), Suriname (2.1%) and Venezuela (5.8%), as well as French Guiana (1.1%). Amazonia is home to around 33 million people, including 385 indigenous peoples, some of them living in ‘isolation.’ There are 610 PNAs and 2344 ILs, occupying 45% of Amazonia’s land surface, not including the owners of small, medium and large rural properties, companies of various kinds, and research and development institutions, as well as religious and civil society organizations.

RAISG, a regional initiative promoting access to information and mapping future challenges

Since its foundation RAISG’s main objective has been to stimulate and facilitate cooperation between institutions that already work with georeferenced socio-environmental information in the eight countries of Amazonia and in French Guyana. Today the network has 11 associated institutions (http://raisg.socioambiental.org/instituciones). RAISG’s proposal is to create a stimulating environment for long-term, accumulative and decentralized development, which enables the compilation, construction and publication of information and analyses on the contemporary dynamic of (Pan)Amazonia.

The aim of this atlas is to consolidate a wide-ranging and inclusive regional overview that extends beyond Brazilian Amazonia to include the Andean environment and Guyanese Amazonia. It is a historic attempt to analyze the question of deforestation across Amazonia using a standardized methodology.

The work behind the publication required various face-to-face meetings in São Paulo, Lima, Belém, Bogotá and Quito from 2009 to the present and was supported by institutions such as the Norwegian Rainforest Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Avina Foundation and the Skoll Foundation.

One of the main challenges for the institutions involved in RAISG will be to calculate the total deforestation up to 2000, the year taken as the baseline for the first edition of Amazonia under pressure.

Currently RAISG is developing a work plan for 2013-2015, which includes: frameworks for maintaining, updating, developing, divulging and analyzing the data on pressures and threats, expanding work themes, establishing cooperation agreements with other networks to generate products in conjunction and creating sub-regional networks.

Data available via web services

The data obtained by the network’s institutions for this publication can be accessed via web services (http://raisg.sociambiental.org/gisweb).

Download here the spanish version of the Atlas.

Migrants who choose to proceed even in the face of these risks increasingly are forced to seek the assistance of intermediaries known as polleros, or “coyotes.” Those who are unable to afford a coyote are more likely to be abused or kidnapped, and held for ransom along the way. While there is little consensus on the numbers, Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights estimates that about 20,000 migrants are kidnapped each year by criminal organizations.

In Transnational Crime in Mexico and Central America: Its Evolution and Role in International Migration, Steven Dudley, the co-director of InSight Crime, traces the rise of Mexican criminal organizations and Central American gangs over recent decades and examines how these criminal groups impact migrants moving northward. The report reviews the origins and growth of the main illicit networks operating in Mexico and Central America, then outlines the little that is known about how criminal groups profit from, and in some cases facilitate, the flow of migrants northward.

Today’s report marks the second in a series of Study Group reports examining insecurity in the region. The first report, Border Insecurity in Central America’s Northern Triangle, examines the perennial problem of lawlessness along the borders of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Within the next few weeks, the Study Group will release a third report, examining how democratic transitions in Mexico and Central America have tested the limits of their governing institutions.

The Study Group’s website, www.migrationpolicy.org/regionalstudygroup, showcases the initiative’s research to date, mission statement, and selected background readings. We invite you to check it out, now and in the months to come, as we publish more works in the lead-up to our final report in spring 2013.

Source: Migration Policy Institute

Citi, Fundación Avina and Fundación La Nación held their 3rd micro entrepreneur and microfinance award ceremony, for which this year there were 189 micro entrepreneurs from 12 provinces and presented by 25 microfinance institutions considered. Because of their particular achievements on their enterprise’s sustainability, multiplying impact and environmental consciousness, seven micro entrepreneurs and their respective microfinance institutions were rewarded.

A complex global problem

When people are faced with various acts of violence, doubts and intense fears about what the future will bring, the question that immediately arises is how to find a rational explanation for a series of excesses, defending what is called a moral and historical conscience. In the international arena, this conscience has become an object of reflection to question specific situations such as the major genocides and, above all, the injustices throughout history in which a high human cost could in no way justify the tragedies of two world wars in the 20th century, let alone exculpate several political regimes that take a reason of State to such an extreme that moral conscience vanishes as the search for political hegemony alone prevails.

The abuse of power, the out-of-control domination that subjugates the weakest and the blind imposition of a political will that defends the pain of thousands of people, again raise the issue of the state in which our conscience regarding good and evil finds itself in the 21^st century. Today, market forces, the consumer culture and the characteristics of modernity, which tend to focus on the search for inexhaustible pleasure, constantly transmit different messages in which the borders defining the space between evil and benevolence and vice-versa can easily be modified.

For all these reasons, this issue of The Americas Political Folio will analyze the genealogy of moral conscience in a complex world, taking up the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who puts forward answers that even today continue to foment debate about who determines good and evil in mankind’s behavior, and how.

The discussion centers on how to establish the truth about the psychology of morals, Christianity and the prevailing religious beliefs in our western culture. Nietzsche considered Christianity to be the source of resentment in which values around good and evil are transfigured, bringing the morals of the strongest into confrontation with the morals of the weakest.

From this point of view, the ideal of the good would be identified with the will of the powerful and their behavior in society. Their aspirations and actions, their drive to conquer and exercise power to the full would clearly demonstrate the vital energy of the good, a sort of vocation that raises itself without constraint over and above the calculated prejudices that seek to destroy the creative will of power.

Tensions between the strongest and the weakest

The tensions between good and evil have always been expressed as an interminable war between values considered supreme, against those ambitions that could be identified as the factors that encourage evil and the suffering of the weak. As the subjugated found themselves unable to confront the powerful, they resorted to the development of an alternative spirit, built around resentment, fostering the values of unselfishness, the beatitudes and sacrifice related to loving one’s neighbor, condemning the wicked behavior of those in power, using defense mechanisms, coming together and sanctioning the values of the masses which extol the good, understood as the rejection of the will to power and the acceptance of another world where kindness, pain and self-denial become a set of virtues.

Thus, Nietzsche studies the psychology of conscience, which is not the voice of God in man but quite the opposite: it is the instinctive repression of traditions and culture that are imposed upon the individual. The will to power which comes to constitute the Superman is that vital human energy capable of challenging society’s repressive and authoritarian institutions, because this will is replete with the elemental spirits that foster in man the forces that will liberate his creative impulse in different dimensions. In the powerful, this vital energy is said to manifest itself through violence, the bloodthirsty persecution and destruction of weaker beings which, at one time in history, was considered normal.

Today, the theories formulated on the will to power manifest themselves in an international setting in which the hegemonic countries reproduce inequality, imposing various means of domination that globalization transmits as though these were situations it is impossible to change. The strength of the most powerful relativizes the values of good and evil, while contemporary morality still submits to visions of confrontation. This calls for reflection on how contemporary institutions and states can prevent the perpetuation of inequality, with the objective of enabling us all to benefit from an international environment that is more equitable and moving toward the full expression of world peace.

Religious believers may have invented another world as a supplementary solution to the morals defended by the powerful. However, beyond good as the ideal of perfection, they invented religion and a metaphysics hostile to a sensuality that brims over with passion, licentiousness and the conquering force. Thus, the aesthetic ideal appeared as a figure that was priestly but decadent and harmful to the establishment of the Superman: the hero who personifies the dynamism of the will to power.

The genealogy of morals indicates how the resentment of the weak very subtly becomes the source of the values of the good. This source is said to be merely the religious believers’ thirst for vengeance. The ultimate aim would be to abandon the natural qualities that existed at a historical beginning, a time when the strong man represented all that was good, while the peculiar qualities of the simple man represented the bad. Transvaluation was the organization of vengeance to categorize as evil all that was good, powerful and full of life. The goodness of weakness and impotence was transferred to a supposed nobility of the man of low status, indigent and sick.

These ideas are a set of anti-political positions expressed by Nietzsche which also constitute a criticism of democracy, since religious morals would adhere to a defensive strategy to enable the weakest to resist the onslaughts of powerful elites. Today, we might say that the mass consumer society on a global scale has destroyed the dreams of the Superman imagined by Nietzsche.

The idea of the resentment that defends the morals of the good, coupled with those at the bottom of the heap and the spirit of loving one’s neighbor, which claims a virtue that sets aside selfishness and the audacity to satisfy one’s individual interest, now represents democratic conformism, while one is able to access consumer goods, the universal vote and the era of confusion thanks to the media and propaganda. The rebellion of the weak has its modern expression in the defense of the values of equality and the achievement of basic services, the means to survive and a set of religious beliefs that constantly question the privileges of the elites and the strongest in democratic societies.

In this case, envy would function as a strategic attitude on the part of the weak, at the bottom of which is a rancorous desire to wrest more rights from the powerful. The morals of the weak seek recognition for merit but tied to values such as kindness and the sense of shared sacrifice.

The reign of jealousy leads any human being towards acceptance of the morals of the weak, to the extreme of provoking maliciousness. The lower classes, and the masses as a whole, always wish to be considered victims, exacerbating the politics of envy as a sort of rancor to usurp from the powerful that which the masses cannot obtain by their own efforts. The objective is to bring about the failure of the elites, competitors and those individuals who stray beyond moral conscience. According to Nietzsche’s theory, we will always be unequal because values with regard to good and evil constantly reinforce an unbridgeable distance between human beings, between the powerful and the weak.

Nowadays, not only is it essential to question all types of repression – open or hidden – in both free and totalitarian societies, but also to cease to think that life is a sort of latent war or a frenetic competition for more money, prestige, influence, pleasure, etc. Today, as in other eras, it is also possible to construct a valid sentiment around solidarity, because the purpose of human life is not solely to submit to power relations. In any case, a re-reading of Nietzsche brings various questions up to date: To what extent is it possible to abandon moral conscience in order to give priority to our individual autonomy and full self-determination? Should we be learning and teaching in school a set of values that enable young people to develop their most creative impulses but, at the same time, their most destructive and aggressive instincts?

How is moral conscience capable of exacerbating feelings of guilt? Many people do not appreciate values, and neither do they have the capacity to discern what is best. The feeling of guilt, encouraged by various religions and staunchly defended by Christianity, seems to serve to create an unjust self-flagellation, trying to make people themselves feel guilty and sinful, breaking with freedoms in order, finally, to set up controls, sanctions and penalties which are the death of democracies and any free individuality alike.

Rethinking the Nietzschean debate in the 21^st century implies reflecting that transvaluation also operates through memory and the crushing sense of guilt. In the words of the German philosopher, “What men call memory is the feeling of being able to control the future,” because lessons learned must be transmitted from morals if they are always to be remembered. Although the purpose is to try to discipline human beings who must submit to social norms, lessons learned are transformed into pain and punishment, giving in to the impositions and rules of society, authority, and the force of the majority in democracy. At the same time, forgetting is a permanent pain that only works to the benefit of self-control and self-annulment of the vital instinct of the will to power. The feeling of bad conscience comes from the sense of guilt which, deep down, came about as though it were a debt: the debt that individuals owe to society and the debt that the powerful owe to the weak.

Envy, together with the feeling of bad conscience, would represent a threat to society when they spread like the poison of the mediocre whose sole desire is to satisfy their personal interests. In order to rebuild values, the only antidote lies in combating any form of bad conscience that proliferates in the collective, thanks to the religious prejudices and false lessons spread by priests, many of whom exploit memory as a strategy to intimidate people and reproduce the sense of guilt.

In search of a moral sense

The genealogy of morals reintroduces a concern that is to some extent Socratic, when Nietzsche states that “we who know are unknown to ourselves; we ourselves are unknown to ourselves.” The possibility of an interior knowledge is immediately connected to the whole range of values current in a given society, or, in other words, to the historical burden of what is considered good or evil, and then serves to judge our intentions, to stimulate or constrain our will which, ultimately, is the site of those ideas we have built about ourselves as a destiny that is good/bad, satisfactory/unsatisfactory, happy/unhappy. Knowledge of the interior path that invites us to think about the consequences of human conduct should lead to an in-depth discussion about present-day morality and implacable criticism of the myths and fears transmitted by the past.

From this perspective, rationality does not exist. Instead, human existence is taken to be a comedy. Therefore, when the genealogy of concepts of good and evil is traced, various entanglements, confusions and distortions appear with regard to what possibilities exist for resolving the dilemma of whether to give free reign to all our passions, worship the forces of the free spirit and try everything, or to practice a self-constraint that reigns in our instincts with the aim of safeguarding our soul’s destiny. In fact, morals take the form of a set of meanings that end by becoming the core of religions and the concern to find a spiritual design and aspiration that operates within the human conscience.

These views undoubtedly express an anti-democratic position in Nietzsche which rejects any abuse of the masses because they condemn every act by the strongest. The effects of this abuse reveal a hazy scenario that deforms values and the nature of vital energy. Value is not the usefulness of things, and neither is it an adjective to identify or rate any human action; instead, it is the distance and the irreconcilable clash between two concepts of morals: the one defended by the strong, who try to appropriate the qualities of the world, encouraging the creation and reproduction of religion as a means to legitimate their privileged position, and the other based on the expression of the weak and the lower orders in society.

Finally, we also need to relativize those ideas that hold that power should always be identified with flourishing health and a strong physical constitution, with what is boundless, war and adventure. The opposite manifests itself in impotence, the spiritual and resentment throughout universal history. The problem lies not in praising the rich in spirit, but in rejecting the impulse of the weakest to take revenge on the powerful and criticizing the temptations of superiority that the powerful wish to disseminate to scorn the weak.

Values should help us to build a habitable world. Our modern life can become a homeless place, in which we are suspended in material comforts but often do not feel ourselves at home because habitability and an ethical sense of direction are lacking.

The technology-driven world in which poverty persists as a global phenomenon lacks the conditions of habitability it should provide when millions are dying of hunger and violence is a way of life. Values ought to arrange the world and make it habitable. Justice, freedom, equality, non-discrimination or beauty make our world livable and human, a world in which it is worth living. Those who believe in values and live their lives according to what they believe are the leaders of human changes, with the commitment that it is not worth leaving this world out of indifference, pragmatism and nihilism.

We need to accommodate our beliefs to new values in such a way as to make universal justice a real possibility, and to be free without believing ourselves to be invincible heroes but rather merely ethical beings aware of our own perfectibility.

The figures

We are all equal and we are all different and A single race: the human race appear to be merely slogans in the dream of a world without inequalities. The reality is that 40% of humanity lives on less than US$2 a day, while a single European cow receives a subsidy of US$5 a day. 2011 Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). http://hdr.undp.org.

The quote

“What is called free will is nothing more than the sense of superiority over those who have to obey”. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond good and evil.

Communication, contributions, suggestions and comments to: franco.gamboa@aya.yale.edu

The goal of the Latin America Impact Economy Innovations Fund (IEIF) is to catalyze collective action and regional market development that will accelerate these market driven solutions for advancing social goals.

Submission deadline: Novembre 30, 2012, 11:59pm EST

More information here

This approach, which brings together privatesector companies, government agencies and the nonprofit network, is emerging in areas as diverse as agriculture, commerce and information technology.

Washington-based TechnoServe is one of the nonprofit groups that has been using charitable funding to provide technical and financial support.

It recently launched a programme, called Impulsa Tu Empresa, or Boost Your Business, aimed at helping enterprises in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and even Burkina Faso.

Supported by the Argidius Foundation, it is targeting businesses with annual sales of between $500,000 and $2m, particularly those that make products with added value, as well as service businesses located primarily in urban areas.

“We seek to help business models that stimulate longterm economic growth. But one of the difficulties is that, when it comes to Latin America, launching a business in Chile is completely different to launching one in Colombia or Guatemala,” says Bruce McNamer, TechnoServe president and CEO.

Mr McNamer says venture-capital models are being adapted in order to facilitate access to funding. Organisations such as TechnoServe, he says, are well positioned to work as a bridge between a wide range of public privatesector partners and local entrepreneurs.

In one example, the group is working with Cargill in Venezuela and Foco Sustentable, an entrepreneur development group, on a business plan competition to help entrepreneurs in the seven regions where Cargill operates.

TechnoServe and its local partners work with the potential entrepreneurs to develop effective business plans and Cargill offers them opportunities to participate in its supply chain. “There’s a legacy in certain groups in the region of distrust towards large corporations and toward the financial markets,” he says.

“But, having a missionbased institution bringing together corporations and other market-based mechanisms in order to service the poor can bring all parties together.”

The concept of impact investing – which assesses the social and environmental impact of investments – is familiar to Endeavor, the New York-based non-profit group which has perfected its own form of “high impact” entrepreneurship through mentoring and development programmes in emerging markets for more than 15 years.

But the group’s own funding models have also evolved.

Earlier this year, it launched Endeavor Catalyst, a passive co-investment vehicle, that has raised $10m in donations and invested  $6m in six initiatives in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Turkey. Catalyst considers ventures on the same terms as lead investors would, but it does not take a board seat and it abstains from shareholders’ votes.

When a liquidity event, such as an initial public offering, generates cash returns, 20 per cent is allocated to Endeavor’s growth and sustainability.

The remaining portion replenishes Catalyst, which in turn reinvests in more entrepreneurs.

“Catalyst is an instrument to help us turbocharge our resources,” says Baily Kempner, director of sustainability initiatives at Endeavor Global.

“On one side, it is a vote of confidence in the entrepreneurs, as this passive investment helps them build momentum, while at the same time our other mentoring programmes are helping their companies thrive.

“The donors can see that each dollar goes directly to the entrepreneur and, in time, their money will get back to them in compounded form.”

The system may also be attractive to other nonprofit groups, Ms Kempner says, as it may help diminish their dependence on external funding sources, such as donations.

“Many non-profit organisations live hand to mouth based on donations, and that’s a rough way to live,” she says.

“If more of them could achieve self-sustainability and raise capital within the very same demographic they are supporting, that would be very exciting.”

The approach is spreading.

In Brazil, a survey conducted last year by the Avina Foundation, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and Potencia Ventures, with 140 social enterprises, found that more than 60 per cent of them already operated as conventional businesses and did not rely on donations.

Anamaria Schindler in the leadership team for Latin America at Ashoka, says: “We may be on the verge of a change in paradigm, moving further away from a cultural legacy in Latin America that has viewed social welfare and development chiefly as the responsibility of relief organisations rather than private individuals”.

‘The donors can see that each dollar goes directly to the entrepreneur’

PDF Version Financial Times – Presscuttings II

Philanthropy is certainly not absent from the region. And corporate giving is becoming increasingly prevalent. In Brazil, for example, prompted by a range of government mandates, large corporate foundations have been established by companies such as Natura, one of the region’s largest cosmetics makers.

However, compared with countries such as the US or some European nations, philanthropy in Latin America – particularly private giving – is generally under-developed.

While individuals such as Mexico’s Carlos Slim stand out, the tradition of wealthy entrepreneurs setting up organisations through which to make charitable grants has yet to be established.

“The American-style individual – someone who pulls themselves up by their bootstraps and sets up a foundation to give away their millions – is a very specific tradition, and it doesn’t really exist here,” says Sean McKaughan, chief executive of the Avina Foundation.

Moreover, legal codes, which often make it difficult for foundations to give money outside their country of origin, are one of the reasons the Avina Foundation remains among the very few regional foundations in Latin America. “Only two countries allow a national foundation to make grants across borders – Panama and Uruguay,” says Mr McKaughan. In many countries, burdensome procedures for securing tax-exempt status and the paucity of foundations and other grant-making organisations mean the community of non-profit groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is not as robust as it is in other parts of the world.

Instead, many see great potential for change in the work of social entrepreneurs – companies approaching business with “triple bottom lines” of financial, social and environmental performance, and enterprises that are part of the region’s fledgling benefit corporation (or B Corp) community.

“There’s a real emergence of this new movement, says Lee Davis cofounder of NESsT, a non-profit group that promotes social enterprise in emerging markets and that is this month hosting the Social World Enterprise Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Part of the reason those working to advance human development and protect the natural environment are turning to business models may lie in the weakness of philanthropy in the region and the structural, historical and cultural barriers that obstruct the expansion of donor institutions and non-profit organisations.

However, a historically weak philanthropic sector is just one of many forces behind the growth of marketbased approaches to social and environmental problems in the region. First, despite rapid economic growth and an expanding middle class, extreme wealth disparities persist with many people still living in poverty and in need of basic services such as clean water, low-cost housing, healthcare and education.

These are services that many believe can be delivered using marketbased models adapted to low-income communities or supplemented by Continued on Page 2

Continued from Page 1 philanthropic or development funding.

In Lima, the Peruvian capital, for example, Juan Carlos Aguilar Macizo – one of the fellows at Ashoka, a non-profit group that supports social entrepreneurs – is piloting an innovative system of waste management that can be installed at one-third of the cost of traditional water and waste systems while also reducing urban water consumption.

The model is based on modest investments from the local community, who finance 40 per cent of the project costs – something Mr Aguilar believes will make the systems more sustainable since, as investors rather than passive recipients of “free” water, communities will have greater incentives to use and maintain the systems.

With many Latin American countries still developing basic social services, plenty of opportunities exist for social entrepreneurs to come up with these kinds of ideas.

“They don’t want to just recreate the old systems of the west,” says Raj Kumar, president of Devex, an online recruiting and information hub for the global development community.

“They’re leapfrogging the developed world, so Latin American countries are in a sweet spot for business models that make money but also have a social impact.”

For Dane Smith, managing director at FSG, a nonprofit consulting firm, this ties in with what he sees as a growing number of companies in the region that want to tackle social and environmental problems, not through charitable donations, but by adapting their business models to include low-income customers or bring small enterprises into their supply chains.

“In some ways this is an easier jump for companies in Latin America than for the US and Europe,” he says. “Because they recognise that in their economies, a substantial part of the market opportunity is going to be people from lower socio-economic classes.

When it comes to environmental issues, another factor driving the growth of social entrepreneurship is awareness of the importance of biodiversity, natural materials and ecosystems, not only to communities but also to businesses.

“You have a region that’s focused on natural resources and needs sustainable development of those natural resources,” says Bart Houlahan, cofounder of B Lab, a US nonprofit group that harnesses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems and whose B Corp certification system is being replicated in several Latin American countries.

The rapid spread of ideas – such as B Corps, which must place the same emphasis on delivering social and environmental returns as generating profit – is helped by the fact that Spanish and Portuguese are the region’s predominant languages, allowing innovations to cross borders more easily.

Moreover, global institutions have recognised the potential return on their development investments of funding social enterprise rather than initiating aiddriven programmes. Across the region, organisations such as the United States Agency for International Development and the Inter-American Development Bank have launched initiatives to promote the spread of social entrepreneurship and impact investments (those designed to help solve a social or environmental problem while also generating a financial return).

The extent to which social entrepreneurship is being embraced varies from country to country. Mr Davis highlights Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Peru as among those at the forefront of the movement.

In Chile, for example, government ministries and universities have created startup incubators.

“And Peru is high on the list in working with rural innovators that are setting up social entrepreneurship in agriculture,” he says.

Given the growing interest in this kind of approach, social entrepreneurship may even have the potential to reinvigorate the philanthropic sector as donors become more interested in working in partnership with business.

Of course, as in any region, philanthropy will always have a role in Latin America. Problems such as human rights violations or drug abuse are tough to tackle through marketbased models.

However, the question for savvy philanthropists is whether, in tackling many of the problems they hope to help solve, they could get more from their dollars by supporting entrepreneurs with smart ideas rather than by simply handing out charitable cheques.

PDF Version Financial Times – Presscuttings

http://climaterealityproject.org/24hours/

“Impact requires scale and global reach; by extending the B Corp movement into emerging markets in South America, India, Asia, and Africa, the B Corp movement will have dramatic impact on the development of more inclusive and sustainable economies,” said Andrew Kassoy, B Lab Co-founder.

As part of the launch, B Lab formally announced their first international partnership, working with Sistema B to build the B Corp movement in South America. Together they will build a founding class of 100 South American B Corps by the end of 2013.  B Lab also commits to expand the community to other regions of the world, with the goal of having B Corps in 20 countries on six continents, and of reaching a total of 750 Certified B Corps globally.

“Quarterly shareholder value should not be the only benchmark by which we judge corporations. It’s worth investing in something with a slightly longer time horizon,” said President Clinton at Resource 2012 at Oxford University.

Certified B Corporations are a new type of corporation which uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. To grow outside the U.S., B Lab will establish partnerships with organizations that have regional presence and expertise and leverage financial and technical support provided by the Inter American Development Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, Halloran Philanthropies, Prudential Foundation, Linklaters, the Ford Foundation, Fundación Avina, InnovaChile CORFO and Deloitte LLP.

B Lab: is a nonprofit organization dedicated to using the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.  B Lab drives systemic change through three interrelated initiatives: 1) building a community of Certified B Corporations to make it easier to tell the difference between “good companies” and just good marketing; 2) accelerating the growth of the impact investing asset class through use of B Lab’s GIIRS impact rating system by institutional investors; and 3) passing benefit corporation legislation in all fifty states.   For more information, see www.bcorporation.net.

About the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI): Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.

CGI’s Annual Meeting is held each September in New York City. CGI also convenes CGI America, a meeting focused on collaborative solutions to economic recovery in the United States, and CGI University (CGI U), which brings together undergraduate and graduate students to address pressing challenges in their community or around the world. For more information, visit clintonglobalinitiative.org.

SOURCE B Lab