Key takeaways

• The new targets cover the seafood sector only.
• They offer companies a structured way to address ocean sustainability and align their operations with scientific thresholds.
• Expanding engagement beyond seafood, into shipping, logistics and manufacturing, will further strengthen business resilience and ocean health.

The Science Based Targets Network (SBTN) has launched the first-ever ocean science-based targets, focusing initially on the seafood sector. This milestone completes SBTN’s initial suite of nature-related targets, alongside those for land and freshwater, and provides a structured, scientific framework for companies to address their ocean impacts.

For sustainability teams facing growing regulatory and investor scrutiny, adopting these targets will signal a commitment to improve biodiversity while addressing risks to global supply chains.  

Why this matters 

Continued overfishing, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss threaten both marine ecosystems and business resilience. Seafood providers, pharmaceutical companies and many other industries source directly from the ocean, and marine transportation is essential for worldwide trade. More than 80% of global trade by volume is transported via maritime shipping.

Despite these material risks, there is a dearth of corporate ocean commitments — especially those that go beyond blue carbon (i.e., carbon stored in marine ecosystems) to include biodiversity. SBTN’s new targets provide a pathway to bridge that gap, offering companies a structured way to address ocean sustainability and align their operations with scientific thresholds, ensuring long-term viability while mitigating reputational and regulatory risks.

“With the first ocean science-based targets for seafood, companies now have a globally recognized framework to scale action across land, freshwater and ocean,” said Erin Billman, executive director of SBTN. “These targets help companies move beyond incremental change, strengthening marine ecosystems, supply chain resilience and long-term viability.” 

What’s included 

Developed under the leadership of World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International — with input from key industry stakeholders like Sustainable Fisheries Partnership and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council — the targets were piloted in 2024 by four companies with materiality in the ocean and seafood systems, including Danish aquaculture company Musholm A/S and Orkla Foods in Sweden.

Following a public consultation, SBTN refined its approach to cover three key goals for companies in the seafood and aquaculture sector:

• Avoid and reduce overexploitation: Ensure sustainable sourcing of wild-catch fisheries and reduce reliance on overexploited stocks.
• Protect structural habitats: Address the impact of seafood operations on critical marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs and seagrasses.
• Reduce risks to marine wildlife: Mitigating risks from fishing and aquaculture practices on vulnerable marine species.

Each target includes multiple pathways for action, ranging from direct operational changes to engagement in jurisdictional and ecosystem-based initiatives. For example, a company sourcing wild-catch seafood may set a target such as: “By 2030, we will reduce sourcing of Atlantic blue marlin by 13 percent compared to a 2025 baseline.” 

This ensures that overexploited stocks have time to recover while promoting sustainable practices.

An advance, but more is needed

The new targets represent a major step forward for corporate ocean action but only scratch the surface. Starting with fisheries makes sense. At the same time, many other industries also depend on healthy marine ecosystems. For example, pharmaceuticals and agriculture rely on marine resources, and marine-derived compounds are used in medicines and skincare. Fishmeal, meanwhile, is a key ingredient in animal feed. 

Ensuring that these sectors recognize their role in ocean stewardship will be key to long-term success.

The ocean is also an emerging source of sustainable materials, such as seaweed-based plastic alternatives that could transform packaging and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. If marine ecosystems continue to decline, new opportunities will be be lost, fueling materials shortages and increasing costs.

We’ve already seen how fragile supply chains are when ocean access is restricted. The Ever Given blockage in 2021 delayed $9.6 billion in goods per day when a container ship ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal, and Red Sea attacks by Houthi forces have forced costly rerouting since 2023. While these disruptions resulted from physical blockages, marine ecosystem collapse could create similar risks at a systemic level.

SBTN’s targets lay a strong foundation, and expanding engagement beyond seafood, into shipping, logistics and manufacturing will further strengthen business resilience and ocean health.

What’s next

Companies in the seafood and aquaculture sector can now begin setting their own ocean-related science-based targets. Early adopters will not only position themselves as sustainability leaders but also gain a head start in regulatory alignment and supply chain resilience.

But for ocean sustainability to be truly effective, other industries beyond seafood producers must be held accountable as well. There’s growing recognition that investors and industry leaders can play a critical role in expanding targets beyond fisheries and creating a clear business case for broader ocean stewardship. The economic risks of ignoring ocean sustainability — disrupted supply chains, increased insurance costs for marine transport, loss of biodiversity affecting raw material availability — are too significant to overlook.

For more information, or to express interest in setting seafood science-based targets, visit SBTN’s Ocean Hub page.

The post The first science-based targets for oceans are out. Here’s what you should know appeared first on Trellis.

Key takeaways:

• B Lab published the seventh edition of the Certified B Corp standard.
• The update raises the certification bar for companies with more than 1,000 employees or $350 million in sales.
• Certified companies will need to demonstrate improvements against baselines to keep their status.   

B Lab Global published a 683-page revision to the B Corp certification standards that requires companies to meet minimum performance thresholds across seven environmental, social and governance topics and commit to continuous improvement after certification.

The sweeping overhaul released April 8 was required under the nonprofit’s governance policy and comes after four years of consultation and more than 25,000 feedback comments. 

This seventh edition of the standard raises the bar for participation, as more large organizations seek the designation. It also integrates and recognizes methodologies used by other nonprofits focused on ESG frameworks including the Science Based Targets initiative, the Global Reporting Initiative and Fairtrade International. 

While most of the almost 10,000 Certified B Corp companies are small or midsize organizations, multinationals including food companies Bonduell and Danone, apparel designer Patagonia and cosmetics maker Natura & Co. have earned the certification.

“The goal here is to create a diverse movement of companies across size, industry, revenue and region to prove that stakeholder capitalism is not just profitable but preferable,” said Sarah Schwimmer, co-lead executive of B Lab.

Companies following the stakeholder capitalism model aren’t solely focused on shareholder value, they also recognize the interests of customers, employees, suppliers and communities.

No brushoff for equity and inclusion

The seven topic areas highlighted in the updated Certified B Corp guidelines, winnowed from nine topics in the original draft, include a required focus on justice, equity, diversity and inclusion — an area where many large and well-known U.S. corporations have walked back commitments in the past 12 months. Dropping this policy was never considered during the update process, Schwimmer said. 

“This is a moment for business leaders to step up and continue to hold strong to what business can and should look like,” she said.

Here are the areas where companies must pass minimum performance thresholds to earn Certified B Corp status under the revision:

• Purpose and stakeholder governance, including a well-defined mission statement and a structure that ensures all stakeholders have a voice in environmental and social performance.
• Climate action plan that supports emissions reductions in line with holding global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius; large companies must have validated science-based targets.
• Human rights strategy that includes processes for preventing negative impacts in their supply chain and taking action when abuses occur.
• Fair work policy that supports fair wages and incorporates worker feedback.
• Environmental stewardship practices, including a focus on using circular economy models to minimize negative impacts.
• Justice, diversity, equity and inclusion principles for both their own workplace and the communities in which they do business.
• Government affairs and collective action, which centers on how the company advocates for policies that create “positive social and economic outcomes”; large companies are required to share country-by-country tax reports.

“In the previous version, companies could achieve certification by overindexing in a few impact areas, potentially offsetting poor performance in others,” said Ashley Orgain, chief impact officer for household cleaning products company Seventh Generation, a Certified B Corp. “The revised standards now require companies to take meaningful action across all impact areas, encouraging a more holistic approach to social/environmental performance. We see this as a positive development for impact and for accountability.”

Extra requirements for large companies

The revision raises the certification bar for large multinational companies, a move made in response to growing calls for B Lab to be more selective in its certification process. 

The nonprofit has already made some concessions. For example, it revoked the B Corp status for ad agency Havas over complaints about its client relationship with fossil fuel behemoth Shell.

At issue for many critics is B Lab’s policy of allowing individual operating businesses of multinationals to certify rather than requiring the entire company to meet the requirements. “There’s a legitimate debate going on about the use of the B Corp logo,” Orgain said.

Dr. Bronner’s, which earned its first B Corp certification in 2015, said in February that it won’t renew its status when it expires in September because of this policy. This is the culmination of a multi-year campaign advocating for a revision. 

The company explained: “While some food, personal care and textile companies certified as B Corps do take responsibility and certify all major supply chains to credible eco-social certifications, including our esteemed partners at Patagonia, they are unfortunately a minority and this is not required by B Lab, most glaringly in the case of large multinational companies and their enormous supply chains.”

Dr. Bronner’s earned the highest B Corp certification rating to date in 2022, with a score of 206.7. Under the current system, the average score of companies completing a B Corp assessment is 50.9 – the minimum for certification is 80.

The revision published this week layers additional requirements for companies as they grow, based on the number of people they employ or revenue (whichever is larger). Companies with more than 1,000 workers and more than $350 million in sales must:

• Publish a time-bound plan to trace environmental and human rights impacts of their highest-raw materials
• Provide data about their gender wage gap
• Include environmental and social performance targets in executive incentives

Continuous improvement required

Current B Corps due to re-certify in 2025 may submit using the sixth version of the standards until June 30; they’ll need to move to the new ones in 2028.

Companies that have never certified under B Corp have until Dec. 31 to certify under the old requirements.

The cost to certify starts with a one-time fee of $150 for companies with less than $500,000 in revenue, along with a $2,000 annual membership. B Lab doesn’t publicly publish the cost for companies with $1 billion in revenue; it depends on the complexity of the business.

“We want as many companies as possible to come with us,” Schwimmer said. “We are giving them this transition period to adapt and learn.”

B Lab anticipates that adoption of the new standards will pick up first in Europe, where the B Corp certification assessment could be used as a framework for companies to comply with the European Union’s sustainability and ESG reporting mandate.

B Corp Certified companies will need to provide performance updates against their baseline during their certification period. Those disclosures will require third-party assurance. The details of that governance are still being finalized, Schwimmer said, and are likely to vary from region to region.

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As a partner at Beatrice Advisors, a multifamily office, I often see investors presume that, to move the needle on environmental impact, they must opt for private investments that wire impact into their ethos. This kind of investing approach can be described as having high “intentionality” – it’s deliberate, purposeful and offers measurable outcomes.

But whether you’re an individual investor, family office or institutional investor, a rational, well-built portfolio needs to include public securities (both equity and bonds), given their historic, attractive long-term returns and liquidity. Yet public securities are considered to have low “intentionality” because owning or not owning shares or bonds primarily affects a company’s cost of capital, capital markets access, and provides some signaling value, with limited ability to drive values-based goals at the company level. 

So are there ways to make investing in public markets more intentional – and to profit from and increasingly nudge green companies to alter the direction of “brown” ones?  

The ‘not in my portfolio’ approach

Let’s start with one unsettling aspect of the impact of investing passively in public securities via ESG metrics and screens: the companies you avoid in your portfolio continue their less beneficial behaviors regardless of your decision to invest. Choosing not to invest in high emitters of greenhouse gases doesn’t make them go away; they continue to exist, and emit GHGs, whether you invest in them or not.

Similarly, if a company sells its worst coal facility, it doesn’t decommission the mine; it sells it to a private operator outside of public markets scrutiny. In some ways, then, investing this way is “greenwashing” your portfolio. Instead of NIMBY, it’s NIMP – not in my portfolio. 

Proponents who subscribe to an ESG exclusionary investment approach will tell you doing so creates market pressure by reducing demand for problematic/offending companies’ shares, increasing their cost of capital and sends signals to management about investor priorities.

But companies can still access capital through other investors or private markets, resulting in a missed opportunity to influence corporate behavior through active ownership. There’s also the risk of pure virtue signaling, without meaningful impact. 

Here’s an example of how ESG exclusionary selection plays out. Consider Travelers Insurance, which produced approximately 2.4 tons of GHG emissions per $1 million of revenue in 2023 and building materials manufacturer Martin Marietta Materials, which emitted 1,430 tons per $1 million revenue. Where is the lowest hanging fruit if one sought to affect GHG emissions? 

If Travelers reduced GHG emissions to zero, it would be the equivalent of just a ~0.1% cut in the emissions of Martin Marietta. Yet prevailing public markets strategy would have you own Travelers and avoid Martin Marietta. It seems logical that the exclusionary ESG investment tends to make brown companies more brown, while green firms really can’t get much greener.

But research by George Serafeim of Harvard Business School, Kelly Shue of Yale School of Management and others suggests that thoughtful engagement with brown companies, backed by meaningful shareholder influence and clear accountability measures, can be more effective than exclusion strategies in driving climate and social progress.

Investing strategies to heighten impact intentionality 

To generate greater intentionality in historically passively-held positions in public securities, a more effective approach may be to invest in brown companies – particularly where there’s a prospect and plan for active influence. This can take the form of strategic engagement with companies via:

• Direct dialogue with management teams on social or climate priorities and implementation plans.
• Proxy voting to support sustainability-focused shareholder resolutions.
• Coalition building with other investors to increase leverage.
• Setting clear milestones and accountability measures for progress.
• Providing constructive feedback and industry best practices.

Effective engagement requires persistent, long-term commitment by you, or your advisors or managers, and should be backed by clear escalation strategies when companies fail to respond adequately. This approach allows investors to maintain economic exposure while actively pushing for positive change.

Another way to invest with more intentionality is to support businesses developing sustainable solutions, by investing in companies focused on renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency solutions, and clean transportation, and/or that cater to narrow wealth-gaps and lack of diverse leadership. If you’re a larger market participant, underwriter or anchor, you can also offer financing for transactional projects that align with your values-based goals.

How to get started

Depending on the size of your portfolio and the level of your involvement, you can work with nonprofits like As You Sow or the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility to leverage their engagement platforms and expertise. Collaborative shareholder initiatives  amplify individual or corporate investors’ influence through collective action. Plus you can access their research, voting recommendations and ready-made shareholder proposals. You can also use their networks to connect with other like-minded investors to share best practices and work with their proxy voting services to ensure your votes align with initiatives you agree with.

You can also hire managers that will engage with brown companies as part of their fund activities, or via a separately-managed account (typically with at least $1 million to invest), for a bespoke portfolio that drives shareholder engagement through your values-based objectives.

Public securities are a large and rational component of any investment portfolio. For investors seeking more intentional outcomes from their liquid investments, these strategies can make intentionality more of a dimmer than a light switch, with an ability to slide for more impact.

The post For effective green investing, go brown appeared first on Trellis.

Key takeaways:

• The pants stand out for their low price point and high percentage of recycled material.
• Brands, yarn and fabric makers, working with nonprofit Accelerating Circularity, collaborated to build a circular production system.
• The effort demonstrated that blending fiber from secondhand clothes with virgin cotton is technically feasible for denim at scale.

Wrangler’s latest jeans for Walmart are the first relatively inexpensive fashion product to feature a significant amount of recycled cotton from used clothes. The dark men’s jeans, which are also recyclable, debuted on March 7 and were the result of a collaboration with waste collectors, yarn spinners and denim makers to scratch-build a circular manufacturing system.

The $39.99 Accelerating Circularity jeans contain 26 percent recycled cotton, half from pre-owned garments and half from factory discards.

“That is the thing, that it can go to the mass market level,” said Dhruv Agarwal, vice president of innovation and research and development at Wrangler’s parent company, Kontoor Brands. “That is the signal we are sending — that we can do it.”

The jeans are double the price of other Wranglers at Walmart but remain less costly than others with recycled fibers. For example, in 2022 Levi’s Circular 501 jeans, costing more than $100 each, blended recycled Circulose material from waste textiles with organic cotton.

Although Wrangler made fewer than 2,000 of the new jeans for online sales only, circularity advocates see them as a sign of things to come.

“Wrangler’s Accelerating Circularity jean stands out by utilizing pre-existing waste, effectively giving materials a second life,” said Chana Rosenthal, founder of reDesign consulting in New York City and a former Ralph Lauren denim design director.

“This is a hero story,” said Lauren Fay, founder of the Seattle fashion sustainability consultancy BFG Lab. “I hope that Walmart and Wrangler have aggressive plans to scale this model that is not connected to the ROI on the jeans project,”

Source: Wrangler, Walmart

The effort is Kontoor Brands’ latest experiment to diversify sourcing and therefore reduce dependence on natural resources, including virgin cotton and water, according to Agarwal. However, further mainstreaming circular fashion requires driving down the costs of materials and processes that treat waste as a resource — which policies and advances in chemical recycling could accelerate, he added.

“You cannot just achieve 100 percent recycled; you basically start somewhere,” Agarwal said. “You need to see the economies of scale. You need to see the quality of the product. It’s a dynamic, continuous improvement process.”

Kontoor’s climate targets

Kontoor, which was spun off from VF Corporation in 2019, is based in Greensboro, North Carolina, where Wrangler jeans emerged in the late 1940s as a favorite among rodeo cowboys. Kontoor also runs the 136-year-old Lee and 3-year-old Rock & Republic denim brands.

Using more recycled materials is a small but important component of the corporation’s goal, approved by the Science Based Targets initiative, to shrink emissions by 46.2 percent by 2030 across Scopes 1, 2 and 3 over a 2019 baseline, according to Agarwal.

The company is developing a strategy for “circular pathways” of recycling, resale, upcycling, reuse and repair, according to Agarwal. Designing durable garments with circularity principles is another element. Among Kontoor’s other attempts to advance circularity:

• In 2023, a Circularity Working Group at Kontoor began embedding circular principles into product design standards. Designers and product developers also work together with procurement and sustainability staff to incorporate circular principles into garments.
• By 2023, Kontoor’s sourcing had reached 74 percent “preferred cotton,” which includes verified recycled cotton, toward a target of 100 percent for 2025.
• In 2022 and 2024, Kontoor sold Wrangler Reborn vintage and upcycled denim designs dating back to the 1950s.
• Kontoor participated in the Jeans ReDesign project of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which from 2019 to 2023 engaged scores of brands to design jeans for circularity. 
• Wrangler’s fall 2021 collection involved an early foray into chemical recycling that used “regenerated fiber” from Finnish company Infinited Fiber.

How to build a circular system

Kontoor has worked for several years with the nonprofit Accelerating Circularity, which led the partnership to craft the five-pocket Wrangler jeans. Creating a circular production system departed from the typical linear processes of growing a crop, then creating fibers, fabric and a garment that eventually gets thrown away. “We’re making a transformation, and transformation is hard,” said Karla Magruder, founder of Accelerating Circularity. 

That effort engaged companies across the apparel value chain. Together, the partners determined how to ensure that the final garment could be recycled, by blending 99 percent cotton with only 1 percent elastane. They settled on mix of mostly virgin cotton, plus waste split between factory clippings and pre-worn “post-consumer” knits, Magruder said.

Magruder likened the process of sourcing waste material — from South America, India and the U.S. — to growing and harvesting a crop for fiber. “This is our feedstock,” she said. “But this isn’t a commodity yet, so we’re having to gather it from scratch and then pre-process it.”

Secondhand clothing trader Bank & Vogue collected used clothes, and Martex gathered the production scrap. Tons of the material was then shipped to Giotex and Estopas, which shredded and recycled it into rough fibers. After that, yarn manufacturer Parkdale Mills spun both the recycled fibers and the virgin cotton into yarn. Cone Denim wove that into denim on production-scale equipment, according to Magruder. Wrangler’s cutting and sewing happened in Mexico.

Accelerating Circularity’s North American pilot projects have recycled 23 metric tons of waste cotton. The organization plans to recycle another 325 metric tons under its commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action.

What sustainability pros can learn from this project

For Agarwal, working intimately with partners across the value chain illuminated the power of collaboration to change entrenched systems.

That’s important, because the apparel industry struggles with scaling circular production partly because the business case is unclear, according to consultant Rosenthal. “Wrangler’s successful partnership model provides a blueprint for overcoming these obstacles, proving it can be done. But we need robust financial analysis that demonstrates the economic benefits for industry-wide replication.”

Says Magruder: “I want the people who are making products to take something away from this. The sustainability people believe in this already.”

The post How Wrangler created affordable “circular” jeans for Walmart appeared first on Trellis.

Mast Reforestation, a post-wildfire restoration company, has developed a novel carbon credit that retires more quickly than traditional reforestation credits and offers a co-benefit of replanting forests on scorched landscapes. For sustainability professionals seeking to offset their company’s hardest-to-cut carbon emissions, the company’s first tranche of carbon removal credits will become available this month on puro.earth. 

Mast is working with a Montana landowner to bury charred trees on 900 acres of burned forestland in an oxygen-free landfill using a technology known as biomass carbon removal and storage. It plans to replant the landscape with native seedlings produced by the nurseries it owns, Cal Forest Nurseries in Etna, California, and Silvaseed, in Roy, Washington.

“We’re taking some of those [burned] logs and burying them underground, which locks away carbon and generates a carbon credit on a shorter timeline that allows a corporation to retire it as early as next February, while also financing reforestation as part of that,” said Brady Paron, director of carbon market partnerships at Mast Reforestation. 

What buyers want

Mast fashioned its carbon credit in direct response to what buyers said they wanted, said Micah Kirscher, strategist at Redwood Communications and a Mast spokesperson: “Something with the benefits of a nature-based solution and the feel-good aspect of contributing to post-wildfire restoration, but with the tangible benefits of a carbon credit that retires more quickly and at a more affordable price than many other comparable options.”    

The company recently raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by the venture capital firm Pulse Fund, which specializes in climate tech investments. It has also secured a pre-issuance project rating from carbon ratings agency BeZero for the Montana pilot of BBBe, meaning that there is a “moderate likelihood” that one credit will achieve one metric ton of emissions reduction. 

The project should generate about 30,000 metric tons of carbon removal credits by 2026, the company estimates, and it is seeking corporate buyers for those credits. The new funding round will enable it to generate an initial 5,000 metric tons of credits on 100 acres to prove the technology.

Mast does not plan to sell carbon credits for the reforestation part of the scheme, which it calls a “co-benefit,” Paron said, even though that’s how the company got its start: “We view the biomass burial project as an evolution in our learnings and a tool to accelerate reforestation. He calls it “a good complement” to Mast’s core work, which focuses on scaling reforestation in North America.

Regenerating burned forests

With wildfires growing in intensity, they now burn at least twice as much tree cover as they did two decades ago.  Last year, they scorched 8.9 million acres in the U.S., an area roughly equivalent in size to Vermont and Connecticut combined. 

Leaving burned trees exposed further damages the ecosystem from soil erosion and secondary mortality events, such as beetle outbreaks. Burned trees also continue to emit carbon long after flames subside and can pose a future fire risk.

In the past, forests may have been able to naturally regenerate after wildfires, but the current megafires have changed that.  “In high severity burns, management is almost always necessary to restore the natural regeneration processes,” Ricky Satomi, forestry and natural resources advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, said in an email.  Key native species, like conifers, that grow from seeds dropped from live cones must be replanted after severe burns.

Government funding for such replanting is shrinking as the Trump administration slashes Forest Service jobs and threatens to reclaim billions disbursed through the Inflation Reduction Act for forest management and wildfire mitigation. Financing reforestation with voluntary forest carbon credits takes a long time and is tricky because many seedlings don’t take hold.

“Tree seedlings are having a really tough time surviving in these hot, post-fire environments,” said Matt Hurteau, a biology professor and director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico. Hurteau’s research pinpoints to the square meter where in post-wildfire landscapes seedlings are most likely to survive — information that is essential to any reforestation effort.

Details to figure out

Mast’s vertical integration, plus its “ability to work on the ground with the community,” attracted the new investment, Tenzin Seldon, the founder and managing partner at Pulse Fund, told Trellis. (Other biomass burial companies are doing similar work, including InterEarth in Australia and Carbon Sequestration in Texas.)

Mast has signed a second deal in Idaho. The pilot still has key technical details that need to be worked out, including data collection to measure the emissions associated with tree burial and design features of the burial plots, such as cap materials, temperature and humidity controls and monitoring.

 “Mast will become a clear commercial choice and a clear private-public partnership choice for governments as well,” said Seldon.

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