The Network for Business Sustainability, housed within the Ivey Business School at Western University in London, Ontario, convened a panel last Fall to identify the 8 Sustainability Challenges for Canadian Business in 2014. The results of the panel deliberations have just been published. According to this panel, the critical sustainability issues facing business in Canada this year are:

• How can businesses act for tomorrow today?
• How can companies design resilient sustainability programs that can survive leadership changes, economic downturns, political shifts and other setbacks?
• How can companies most effectively engage with activist groups and NGOs on controversial issues?
• How can companies combat consumer apathy to build active support for sustainability initiatives?
• How can firms create a pragmatic connection between sustainability and innovation?
• How can firms improve overall performance by embedding sustainability throughout their value chains?
• What are the appropriate metrics for sustainable development in a natural resource, export-based and growing economy such as Canada’s?
• What are the best ways for businesses to incorporate Aboriginal perspectives on sustainability, and include Aboriginal communities in discussion of projects that affect their interests?

The organizations participating in this NBS process are:

• 3M
• BC Hydro
• Canadian Pacific
• the Co-operators
• Environment Canada
• Holcim
• Industry Canada
• International Institute for Sustainable Development
• Loyalty One
• the Pembina Institute
• Suncor Energy
• Target
• TD
• Teck
• Tembec
• The Home Depot
• Tim Hortons
• Unilever, and
• Westport Innovations

GallonDaily finds some of the issues selected to be quite interesting and perhaps illustrative of other challenges within the Canadian business community. We will be providing our discussion of the NBS panel comments in the February 2014 issue of Gallon Environment Letter. Meanwhile we invite our readers’ comments by using the link below. Note that we may publish a selection of the comments from our readers that we find to be the most interesting.

The brief NBS report is available at http://nbs.net/knowledge/simplifying-complexity-the-8-sustainability-challenges-for-canadian-business-in-2014/