WISER | WiserEarth | WiserBusiness | WiserEarth Partners | WISER Guidelines | WISER Platform
WiserBusiness will be an open source knowledge base upon which a global standard for responsible business behavior can be founded and cared for by the wider community. It will hone and standardize the criteria determining responsible business behavior, link customers’ social and environmental priorities directly to companies via consumer feedback and company evaluation mechanisms, and supply companies with the latest solutions.
WiserBusiness is in the planning stage—our aim is that this platform will:
- Encourage radical transparency as a new model for business.
- Provide businesses with the resources and guidance needed to implement responsible business practices.
- Create a space for industry members to share innovative techniques and learn from one another.
- Provide in depth evaluation of the impact of doing business on an industry-by-industry basis.
- Support partnerships between businesses and non-profits to find creative solutions to social and environmental challenges.
- Empower consumers by revealing the companies and the embodied values behind brands.
- Give consumers a mechanism for direct feedback to companies.
- Encourage a place-based economy.
- Reveal regional economic synergies, providing companies with a mechanism to streamline their resource inputs and waste streams.
- Contain a detailed taxonomy of socially and environmentally responsible business, and a listing of the following:
- Best practices: The methods, measures, and examples of responsible business by category and industry, and
- Industries: A framework for understanding social and environmental issues related to a particular industry, and
- Companies: A database of companies and their track record with respect to responsible business practices, and
- Organizations: A list of non-profits and government agencies working to promote responsible business and ecological practices.
Questions? Contact Peggy Duvette at duvette@naturalcapital.org
To create an enduring society; we will need a system of commerce and production where each and every act is inherently sustainable and restorative. Business will need to integrate economic, biologic, and human systems to create a sustainable method of commerce. As hard as we may try to become sustainable on a company-by-company level, we cannot fully succeed until the institutions surrounding commerce are redesigned Just as every act in an industrial society leads to environmental degradation, regardless of intention, we must design a system where the opposite is true, where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism.
— from Ecology of Commerce
