Would you be a leader in sustainability?

By joining Leading for sustainability you will learn key leadership and sustainability tools including Theory U and Systems Thinking. You will also graduate as a Lead Fellow and be a part of a global network and community of 2500+ sustainability leaders, all from a diverse selection of sectors and regions from around the world.

Lead is a non-profit organisation dedicated to building leadership capacity for sustainable development. Over the past 20 years, they have trained more than 2,500+ leaders (Lead Fellows) across 90 countries.

Tourism in the Global South: Landscapes & Development

V International Seminar Tourism and Spatial Planning, Centre for Geographical Studies, University of Lisbon,  Portugal, 24-25 January 2013

This conference intends to meet and discuss new research ideas on the tourism impacts in the Global South, focusing namely on the construction and transformation of landscapes through tourism, on issues of identity friction and cultural change, and on the responsibility of tourism on poverty reduction and sustainable development.

Cork: A Model of Sustainable Business

When it comes to the functional integrity of the biosphere, small things matter. Indeed, it is the small things in the global ecosystem that keep Homo sapiens and other forms of life alive. Ants produce soil. Bees pollinate a third of all the food we eat.

Similarly, it is the small daily purchases that we make day-in and day-out that add up to global market demand, and it is the characteristics of market demand that instigates—or helps reduce global ecological pressures. For example, the estimated ninety million tons of global warming pollution emitted every day does not come from just a few large sources but from contributions made by millions of emitters, large and small, each adding to a problem that has become nothing less than a planetary emergency.

EBRD promotes energy efficiency in Poland

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The EBRD is promoting energy efficiency in Poland with a €50 million loan to Bank BGZ and €35 million loan to Bank Millennium for on-lending to local small and medium enerprises (SMEs) undertaking sustainable energy investments.

The loans are part of the EBRD’s €150 million Poland Sustainable Energy Financing Facility (PolSEFF).



Majority owned by Rabobank, Bank BGZ is a leading bank in Poland with national outreach, focusing on small and medium companies both in big cities as well as in rural regions.
Bank Millennium, majority owned by Banco Comercial Português, is a universal bank providing a full range of lending, transaction and savings products to retail and business customers. Millennium will strengthen its focus on increasing its business in the SME segment in Poland.

The EBRD financing will support the banks in extending sustainable energy financing to SMEs operating in the manufacturing, services, retail, agri-business and other sectors.

Guilt By Contagion: Greece, Portugal, Ireland All Flashing Red

Image via Wikipedia

It’s, well, a trifecta of European bailout worries, this morning, according to the Financial Times, which runs with news about Greece, Portugal and Ireland’s sovereign debt woes on its home page, with the news of the hour being Portuguese finance minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos warning that the “risk is high” the country will have to turn to the international community for financial assistance.




Dos Santos said Portugal’s situation is not the same as that of Greece, but because of their membership in the EU, the countries are getting lumped together, as are their budget problems. “Markets look at these economies together because we are all in this together in the eurozone,” said Dos Santos, in a piece penned by David Oakley and Tony Barber.

How big is Europe's crisis?

Image via Wikipedia

This morning has felt a bit like a surreal dream.

On the one hand a couple of fairly substantial economies, Ireland and Portugal, are teetering on the brink of collapse.

A vision of Vera Duckworth
On the other, a raft of results from British businesses - ITV, Easyjet, Burberry, British Land - show that for big companies at least, recovery is real and not as anaemic as statistics for the whole economy imply.

The growth in advertising revenues at ITV, up 16% to £1.25bn in the first nine months of the year, is particularly striking. And if ITV's former chairman, Michael Grade, doesn't point out - and very publicly - that he left ITV in better shape than many have claimed, then I know nothing about the soap opera of the television industry.