Markets for Change (MFC) is a market-focused environmental non government organisation that investigates and exposes the companies and products driving environmental destruction, creating the impetus for retailers to adopt environmentally and socially responsible procurement policies to help create an environmentally responsible market. While political solutions to the ever growing list of environmental and human rights issues facing us, change can seem increasingly hard to achieve. At Markets For Change we have an important piece of the answer: markets campaigning.
What is it?
We go direct to companies and consumers with a call for change instead of relying primarily on politicians to adopt and act on policies to combat climate change and forest destruction. The demand driving the destruction can be shifted.
Does it work?
We’ve had successes and hope for many more. If people and companies won’t buy the product, profitability and the underlying rationale for that exploitation vanish. The market fine tunes its requirements away from environmental damage. Sometimes politics follows by adopting the new norm. We did it with our work in the Japanese market on Ta Ann’s product that drove logging of Tasmania’s high conservation value forests. Now we are pressing Japan’s housing markets to remove from their supply chain the destruction of the forests of Sarawak, Malaysia. Stand by for our next round of exposure and market pressure. We’re doing it with our campaign to electricity retailers in Australia. To date no large forest furnaces – burning logged native forests to generate power – have been built here. Much effort has gone into persuading electricity suppliers that they don’t want to be implicated in the rampant forest destruction involved.
Everyone gets to do something
Markets campaigns are also powerful because we give you the tools to take action – when you want to, not limited to your voting opportunity just once every few years. A great way to counter that dispiriting sense of disempowerment in the face rampant wrongs. Our cup conscious cafes movement is generating enthusiasm, giving customers and cafes a way of taking personal action. Today when so many of us are feeling dismayed, we wanted to say that we simply have to get smarter and take all avenues to save our planet and treat its people kindly. Using markets to make change is an effective path that sits alongside political action.
MFC’s current focus
• Forest to Floor: highlighting how Japan’s housing construction industry is driving forest destruction and the dispossession of indigenous people in Sarawak
• Biomass: Working to make Australian renewables forest free by opposing forest furnaces
• Cup Conscious Cafe’s: Creating a sustainable approach to coffee culture by signing cafes up to a movement encouraging the use of re-uasble coffee cups as a way of mitigating the mountains of waste created from disposable coffee cups.
For the forests, and the future.