We often take nature valuable products for granted such as clean water and timber. The questions is that how can we repay nature so we can continue to enjoy these benefits. While individuals like you and me are making efforts, big companies like Coca-Cola and Marriott are doing their parts as well. Coca-Cola has an expansive global program to protect and generate fresh water in unorthodox way. Marriott is thinking of a program that would help preserve forests in the Amazon.
Now the world’s coffee giant ventured into the world of ecosystem services with its longtime partner - Conservation International. Basically, they reward the coffee farmers who follows the best environmental and social practices so that Starbucks can help protect the land surrounding places where coffee is grown. You can read the entire press release here.
The following explains how the project works taken from CNN news:
Here’s how the project would work: Starbucks will finance Conservation International’s efforts to work with local partners and coffee growers to protect the landscapes around the coffee growing areas. The growers, on their own or in partnership with local governments, would agree to preserve forests as they are or to replant trees. They would then become eligible, in today’s world, to seek carbon credits from companies that are voluntarily offsetting their emissions. (Many companies now do so, among them Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) and News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500))