In the printing world, we’re all familiar with terms like FSC, post-consumer waste, and carbon
neutral. The world of sustainability keeps expanding, and the vocabulary is expanding along
with it. Here are seven trending terms we expect printers and designers to hear more in years
to come, courtesy of CDP.
1. Adaptive capacity: The ability of systems, institutions, humans and other organisms to
adjust to potential damage, to take advantage of opportunities, or to respond to
consequences.
2. Biodiversity: The biological diversity of flora and fauna species on Earth, a complex web
of life that underpins the natural life processes on the planet. Human-caused
environmental damage reduces biodiversity, and creating a healthy, sustainable society
requires increasing biodiversity.
3. Nature-based solutions: Actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and
manage natural or modified terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine ecosystems,
which address social, economic and environmental challenges effectively and
adaptively, while simultaneously providing human wellbeing, ecosystem services and
resilience and biodiversity benefits.
4. Nature-positive: Behavior and actions which overall increase biodiversity and the
number of species in nature, as opposed to causing them to decline.
5. Net-zero: The overall balance between emitting and absorbing carbon in the
atmosphere. The outcome of limiting catastrophic climate change requires companies
and countries to become net-zero, and many policies are based on achieving that within
certain time frames.
6. Science-based targets: Provide a clearly-defined pathway for companies and financial
institutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in line with what the latest climate
science deems necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
7. Taxonomy: Sustainable finance taxonomies are one of the instruments that have been
developed to support the redirection of financial flows towards environmentally (and
socially) sustainable activities. According to the Bank for International Settlements,
sustainable finance taxonomies are “set[s] of criteria which can form the basis for an
evaluation of whether and to what extent a financial asset can support given
sustainability goals”. The central goal of taxonomies is driving capital allocation towards
sustainable activities, reducing greenwashing and enabling simpler comparison.
