Month: June 2023

In a drive for collective action towards creating equitable, transparent, and deforestation-free leather supply chains, the global non-profits Textile Exchange and Leather Working Group have launched the Deforestation-Free Call to Action for Leather. The Deforestation-Free Call to Action for Leather is a cross-sector initiative aimed at galvanizing action from brands to end the deforestation and conversion of natural ecosystems linked to leather sourcing. In doing so, it looks to protect wildlife habitat and biodiversity, preserve carbon stocks, and protect human rights.

Cattle rearing is considered to be one of the most significant drivers of deforestation. It is also a major contributor to the conversion of natural ecosystems such as grasslands and savannahs. While beef production is the primary reason for cattle farming, the leather industry has an important opportunity to drive change. Currently, the industry is at varying stages of tackling deforestation and conversion.

Leather is a key material in many of Tapestry’s brands’ iconic styles and designs – it’s undeniably an important part of the company’s business. Because of the importance of leather to Coach, kate spade and Stuart Weitzman, Tapestry is committed to supporting verified deforestation and conversion-free leather supply chains. The Textile Exchange’s Call to Action for Leather initiative advances the critical industry transformation that results in traceable deforestation and conversion-free hides becoming the market standard for the leather industry. Furthermore, this commitment aligns with work already underway at Tapestry, with likeminded brands and leading nonprofits, to support initiatives that minimize leather’s impact on natural resources.

Tapestry is already working towards this by aiming to achieve 95% traceability and mapping of raw materials to ensure a transparent and responsible supply chain by 2025.

Tapestry’s commitment to the Call to Action is complementary to the company’s existing approaches, goals, and workstreams related to responsible leather supply chains. Tapestry is proud to join other brands publicly committing to develop and adopt solutions to ensure that leather is not contributing to deforestation and land conversion. This collective action has the potential to spur industry transformation by aligning brands and the leather industry on a common roadmap for achieving this goal. 

The initiative sets meaningful expectations for brands and provides tools and guidance to support them. The guidance was created in consultation with WWF, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), and the Accountability Framework initiative (AFi).

The Deforestation-Free Call to Action for Leather is now open for brands to join. Early signatories making the commitment include adidas, American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. (AEO), AllSaints, Arezzo&Co, BMW Group, Capri Holdings, H&M Group, Icebug, Kering, Mango, Marks & Spencer, PUMA, Range Revolution, Reformation, Roots, R.M. Williams and Tapestry.

Cattle farming practices cannot be transformed overnight. Collaboration and alignment among the many stakeholders in the leather and beef industries are critical to driving change on the ground and delivering the outcomes of the Deforestation-Free Call to Action for Leather.

Tapestry encourages companies to learn more. Email the Textile Exchange: C2A@textileexchange.org or the Leather Working Group: chainofcustody@leatherworkinggroup.com

As published in Qualcomm’s 2022 Corporate Responsibility Report

Our Company’s success is rooted in the hard work and dedication of our workforce. We’re a diverse group of employees from varied backgrounds, experiences, perspectives and ideas. We strive to be a workplace that reflects the world in which we do business. Our diversity helps us increase our global awareness, create an authentic sense of belonging and accelerates our ability to innovate. We will continue building an inclusive and equitable environment where everyone feels inventive, welcome, respected, valued and part of the team.

To that end, we have created interim goals that we aim to achieve on our way to creating a more diverse workforce. By 2025, we are committed to:

Increase representation of women in leadership21 by 15 percent, from a 2020 base year.Increase representation of URM22 in leadership by 15 percent, from a 2020 base year.Increase overall representation of URM by 20 percent, from a 2020 base year.

In 2022, we remained on track to meet our interim goals, making important strides by diversifying our talent pipeline and increasing development opportunities for our employees from diverse and historically underrepresented communities. Our efforts also include expanding our global hiring and recruiting practices as well as readying our current employees for advancement through education, training, encouraging stretch assignments and mentorship. We will also continue to engage across Qualcomm — particularly with leaders, managers and our eight employee networks — to achieve our goals.

Our DEI Policy highlights our promise to sustain a work environment that is inclusive, respectful and free of harassment, discrimination and retaliation. The policy also highlights our efforts to cultivate innovators who have varying backgrounds, ideas and points of view.

We’re proud to be recognized as a leader in inclusion and diversity. Our commitment to DEI includes providing equitable pay to our employees, promoting employee development, celebrating various heritage months and special days with our employees and building and sustaining collaborations with external organizations to provide resources and best practices to support our employees.

To build global momentum in DEI, we expanded our presence in Asia-Pacific and India. This increased representation of our DEI team translated into several successes. In June 2022, we joined The Diversity Charter in Germany, a corporate initiative to promote employee diversity in companies and institutions. The program aims to promote the recognition, appreciation and integration of diversity into Germany’s business culture.

In October 2022, our Company proudly sponsored — and our employees and their family members marched in — the Taiwan Pride Parade hosted by the Taiwan Rainbow Civil Action Association in Taipei. This is the largest Pride event in the APAC region and is an extension of our Company’s decades-long support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning/queer and others (LGBTQ+) community across the globe.

DEI is also a key part of our internal processes, including the annual employee review process. We train our managers on job-related performance assessment and bias avoidance, broadly gather feedback from managers and co-workers for annual performance evaluations, calibrate ratings across managers and provide performance feedback to our employees. Our open-door policy encourages employees to ask questions or voice any concerns they may have regarding their performance assessment or their compensation. In line with our transparency and open philosophy, we also organize interactive panel discussions around the annual review process to offer recommendations on how employees can advocate for themselves and provide insights into how fairness and equity are ensured throughout the process. Employees are encouraged to join these discussions and actively participate with questions and comments.

“Our employees and their values in the workplace are important to Qualcomm. We see diversity as an opportunity to showcase the talent and individualism of our employees. Being part of this association is extremely important for us and a step in the right direction to promote diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the Company and the world.”

Christian Block, Senior Vice President and General Manager RF Front-End, Qualcomm RFFE Germany GmbH

Learn more in Qualcomm’s 2022 Corporate Responsibility Report

Originally published in GoDaddy’s 2022 Sustainability Report

Data Security and Privacy

We make it safer for entrepreneurs to follow their dreams online.

We take data protection, security and privacy extremely seriously. Our customers trust us with their dreams, and we work to maintain that trust every day. The current cybersecurity landscape is challenging, and we’re proud of our proactive efforts to deliver exceptional privacy and security. We are committed to transparency, protecting user data and keeping up with an evolving regulatory landscape.

At GoDaddy, we take a cross-functional, risk- based approach to both user privacy and web security. There are several key roles involved in this approach:

The Audit and Finance Committee has primary oversight responsibilities of cybersecurity risks and data privacy and security matters. The Audit and Finance Committee provides quarterly updates to the Board of Directors on matters presented to the Audit and Finance Committee by the Chief Information Security Officer 
 The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) oversees GoDaddy’s Information Security organization. The Information Security organization handles tasks such as security risk and assessment responsibilities, threat intelligence, incident response functions and product, enterprise and customer security. The CISO meets with the Audit and Finance Committee quarterly and provides updates to our entire Board at least annually. These updates include reviewing cybersecurity programs and risks, as well as discussing priorities, mitigation strategies, staffing and resources 
 Our Data Protection Office, which is run by our Privacy Officer, manages GoDaddy’s Global Privacy program. To ensure the Global Privacy program maintains a focus on privacy at the highest levels, it is verified each year through an independent assessment and is reviewed by the Audit and Finance Committee as part of the Company’s Enterprise Risk Management program 
 GoDaddy’s Trust Center Site houses all data protection, security and privacy resources in one easy location for our customers, offering them the resources necessary to help ensure that their information — and their customers’ information — is safe and compliant

Data Security

With the cyberthreat landscape growing and constantly evolving, we remain vigilant on securing data, avoiding breaches and addressing threats. These efforts span several areas:

Proactive Monitoring: We continuously check for vulnerabilities. To proactively prepare for new and emerging cybersecurity attack vectors, we research and monitor industry threats that could impact GoDaddy and our customers 
 Training and Internal Communications: All GoDaddy employees receive annual customer privacy and security training to preserve our high standards. We also send regular and timely alerts to employees to keep them updated on the latest security and privacy initiatives and activities at GoDaddy, as well as industry best practices 
 Intentional Development: Teams within GoDaddy’s information security organization collaborate to ensure security considerations are built into new products and services 
 Security Frameworks: We align with best practices by adhering to leading security frameworks, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS), WebTrust, International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 and System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2

Data Privacy

Trust and integrity form cornerstones of our customer relationships. To that end, we provide core privacy features to all our customers, and we do not sell customer information to third parties — ever.

Our Privacy Policy details our approach to protecting the personal data we collect, use, store and share. We care about the privacy of our customers and employees from around the world, which is why we apply a globally consistent approach to privacy and adhere to stringent privacy requirements, regardless of the location of our customers and employees. We remain committed to staying on top of evolving international regulations.

DATA PRIVACY CERTIFICATION 
In 2022, we refreshed our annual, independent TRUSTe LLC General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy program management validation for GoDaddy.

Privacy is an important component of all our products and services. We use the proactive Privacy by Design approach to ensure that privacy principles are considered during process design and throughout our entire engineering lifecycle. We assess opportunities to enhance data protection and to provide employees with supplemental education.

About This Report 
Unless otherwise noted, the GoDaddy 2022 Sustainability Report outlines our environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategies, activities, progress, metrics and performance for the fiscal year that ended on December 31, 2022. This report references the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards and includes select Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Standards metrics for the Internet Media and Services sector.

GoDaddy is committed to regular, transparent communication about our sustainability progress, and to that end, we will share updates on an ongoing basis through our website and will continue to publish an annual Sustainability Report.

To learn more, please read our 2022 Sustainability Report.

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Global production of fish and seafood has quadrupled over the past 50 years, with aquaculture—the practice of fish and seafood farming—now outpacing wild catch fishing. Against this backdrop, consumer tastes and preferences for fish products are also changing—desiring not only optimal taste, but also more ethical and sustainable means of production.

To capture this change in consumer demand, Nova Scotia-based salmon farm Sustainable Blue has pioneered a new method of farming that optimizes the quality and sustainability of the breeding and nurturing process. With the assistance of Rockwell Automation (NYSE: ROK) and its system integrator, Fairfield Control Systems, and Blue Tech Systems, Sustainable Blue has integrated an advanced control solution to improve the water treatment and purity across its network of farms.

The focus for Rockwell and Fairfield Control Systems was on developing a standardized control system able to handle extreme situations in an easily maintainable control environment.

The control solution processes more than 5,000 tons of water every hour, using a recirculation aquaculture system (RAS), where water is recycled and reused after filtration to minimize water use.

The Rockwell process control system provides closed-loop control of environmental variables for each system, such as the temperature, pH levels, oxygen levels, and water pressure, and provides alarms to ensure issues receive prompt response.

According to Dr. Jeremy Lee, who serves as both technical director of Blue Tech and CTO of Sustainable Blue, the solution is “a big benefit for us in terms of morale as our team is passionate about sustainability. It helps us attract customers who care about the welfare of the fish and the impact on the environment.”

Learn more about the Rockwell control systems are helping Sustainable Blue operate on a self-sustaining basis—a unique feature in the industry.