Future 500 Corporate Working Group
April 3-4, 2024 | Atlanta, Georgia
——— In Person ———
Logistics
Where: Atlanta, Georgia
When: April 3-4, 2024.
Day 1 begins with breakfast and ends with a seated multi-stakeholder dinner.
Day 2 begins with breakfast and ends at noon.
We’ll host a casual dinner at By George on April 2nd for those who are in town and wish to join. Please RSVP to bsteele@future500.org by March 27th if you would like to join us.
We’ll be hosting a networking dinner for our entire Working Group April 3rd at Alma Cocina.
Registration: Register here. Complimentary for Future 500 members.
Who: Future 500 Corporate Affinity Network (CAN) executives and other select corporate sustainability leaders. We cap attendance at 25 participants to ensure an intimate environment.
What: Future 500 has conducted our working groups for over twelve years. Our discussions are confidential, facilitated under the Chatham House Rule, and designed to illuminate important issue trends and best practices that inform business strategy and competitiveness on sustainability.
Our working group seeks to empower our delegates to speak up, teach others, respectfully disagree, and ask tough questions. Please bring your ideas and challenges, and come prepared to participate actively.
Dresscode: Business casual, with an emphasis on the casual.
Agenda
Confirmed Discussions Include:
1. Nature & Nature-Related Disclosures: Issue Landscape Briefing
In this session, we will engage with Dr. Helen Crowley, a natural systems expert based in London and the former Head of Sustainable Sourcing and Nature Initiatives for luxury goods maker Kering. We will explore how to understand and evaluate Nature’s importance to business, particularly biodiversity (the living part of Nature), which underpins our global economy. Dr. Crowey will share how current economic and financial paradigms, which have mostly externalized and undervalued the assets that Nature provides us in goods and services, have shifted massively over the last five years. Today, major efforts are underway to integrate nature’s value into economic paradigms that move from purely extractive to more regenerative approaches for business and investment.
While emerging regulation, litigation, and voluntary disclosure frameworks often take a risk-based approach, Dr. Crowley also sees a huge opportunity for companies and investors to transition to new paradigms that restore, regenerate, and build natural capital and business resilience. Some of the questions we may explore include:
Which bits of nature are important? Where do you start?
What really is required in terms of disclosure and reporting now, and how may that develop?
What would a transition to Nature positive look like - what does Nature positive even mean?
What does a business case for integrating Nature look like?
2. Permitting Reform to Enable the Energy Transition in Balance with Nature and People
To accelerate the energy transition, the world is investing in significant new infrastructure, which will impact global landscapes. However, such systems scale change is disruptive and provokes resistance across the political landscape. In the U.S., funders and advocates from left to right are using the regulatory system to block, stall, and oppose permitting projects, from existing fossil fuel and mining infrastructure to new solar and wind farms, hydrogen hubs, Carbon Capture and Storage, and critical mineral projects. Corporate and now civil society advocates are calling for permitting reform that enables the acceleration of project approvals while ensuring that ecological and social needs are met in advancing those projects.
In this session, we will dialogue with Larry Selzer, CEO of the Conservation Fund, one of the nation's leading conservation organizations with a history of working collaboratively with industry to advance economic and ecological objectives.
3. The Evolving ESG Landscape: How Might Investors’ Expectations of Companies Shift in the Coming Years?
The sustainable investing field grew nearly threefold to $6 Trillion from 2012 to 2022 before tapering globally in 2023. Such growth into the mainstream investing world has invited increased media and political scrutiny of the ESG sector, particularly in the U.S., which is challenging investing leaders' efforts to work with companies to advance social and environmental objectives that positively impact shareholder value. How might investors evolve their expectations of companies in the coming years?
In this session, we will engage with Lisa Woll, an impact investing leader with a historical perspective on the sustainable investing industry's evolution and what she anticipates will emerge in the coming years. Lisa is a consultant to organizations focused on sustainable investment and is the former CEO of The Forum for Sustainable Investment (US SIF).
4. The Role of Business in Ensuring Political Stability
As we approach another polarizing Presidential election, many anticipate the prospect of political violence once more in the U.S., especially as public trust in institutions that underpin a thriving democracy—media, government, the courts, academia, science, and business—continues to erode. Ultimately, unstable democracies threaten market stability and durable prosperity and are bad for business. Much is at stake for businesses and companies of all sizes as the U.S. faces political instability, and now is the time to prepare for possible risks. In addition, the business voice is also well-positioned to leverage its social, economic, political, and reputational influence to play a steadying force in response to political instability and violence at home and abroad. In this session, we will hear from an academic, an NGO thought leader, and a former elected official, who together will outline foundational corporate political responsibility principles and concrete actions companies can take to minimize risk, foster U.S. and global political stability, and encourage the rebuilding of civic trust.
Speakers:
Elizabeth Doty, Director, Corporate Political Responsibility Taskforce, The Erb Institute at the University of Michigan
Chip York, Director of Marketing & Communications, Business for America, and a former senior leader at Ketchum and The Coca-Cola Company.
Claudine Schneider is an International businesswoman, consultant, Emmy winner, and lecturer. A former Republican U.S. Congresswoman (R.I.), co-founder of the Congressional Competitiveness Caucus, and the Founder of Republicans for Integrity.