EO Blog

“Oil and Water” was once again the central topic of an interesting academic discussion on Wednesday night in Tuscon, Arizona. EO President and Co-Founder David Poritz and Hugo Lucitante, co-subject of the documentary film and representative of the Amazonian Cofán community attended the screening at the Loft Cinema and participated in a discussion that ranged from Lucitante’s experiences in his native Cofán village to the effectiveness of EO’s model of improving oil and gas development practice with voluntary standards.

Equitable Origin’s VP of Standards and Stakeholder Engagement Soledad Mills attended the BSR ’14 Conference last week to present on the panel “Changing the Conversation: Addressing Tough Issues through Proactive Transparency” along with Libby Annat, Ethical Trade and Sustainability Controller at Primark, and Daniel T. Bross, Senior Director of Global Citizenship at Microsoft. BSR is a global nonprofit dedicated working with companies through research, consulting and collaboration to develop sustainable business solutions for the future. BSR holds a yearly conference to bring together thought leaders at the intersections of business and sustainability to discuss their work and collaborate across a variety of issues.

EO Vice President of Standards and Stakeholder Engagement Soledad Mills (right) with NAFTA Office Representative in the Ministry of Economy of the Mexican Embassy in Canada Mario Rodríguez at the meeting in Ottawa.

EO VP of Standards and Stakeholder Engagement Soledad Mills joined business and government stakeholders in Ottawa, Canada last month to discuss social and environmental standards in the energy sector.

EO’s Director of Certificate Markets, Sarah Coulter, attended ISEAL’s Effectiveness Days workshop in London this week. The series of workshops was an opportunity for the ISEAL community and ISEAL member organizations to come together and share experiences in best practices in social and environmental standards. The ISEAL Alliance is a global membership association to strengthen social and environmental standards like Equitable Origin’s, which joined ISEAL in 2013 as an associate member, the first member in the oil and gas sector, and later became a full member in May 2014 after a rigorous review process.

On October 23rd and 24th Colombia’s National Agency for Hydrocarbons (ANH – Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos) co-hosted an event on the social and environmental challenges of hydrocarbon development in the Amazon. The event was part of the Initiative for Conservation in the Andean Amazon (ICAA) and was co-organized by Colombia’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, National Natural Parks of Colombia, the US Department of the Interior, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was held at the ANH offices in Bogotá.

Equitable Origin Chief Executive Officer Stephen Newton touted the virtues of transparent and good-faith engagement with communities as part of responsible oil and gas development at the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) technical conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

Equitable Origin President and co-founder David Poritz headed across the pond to Oxford, U.K. for the Emerge Conference last weekend, where he mingled with other “young professionals aspiring to drive transformational change.” He spoke on Sunday morning at the Developing and Enforcing Standards of Sustainable Business Practice track session, which explored certification as a means of promoting fair and responsible social and environmental practices and as a response to the growing movement of conscious consumption.

At the invitation of the school’s Eco-Reps program, EO President and co-founder David Poritz visited the University of Massachusetts, Amherst last week as part of Campus Sustainability Day last week. Following a screening of “Oil and Water” at the campus center, Poritz participated in a panel discussion on the university’s fossil fuel use, the Equitable Origin model for linking conscientious consumers to responsible producers, and the fossil fuel divestment movement on campus.

On October 15, 2014, at the headquarters of the Coordinator of the Indigenous Nationalities of the Amazon Basin – COICA (by its Spanish acronym) in Quito, Ecuador, Equitable Origin hosted a workshop and launch event for the online consultation tool and comment period on the EO100™ Standard.

Equitable Origin's Director of Communications Josh Garrett was at Harvard Business School (HBS) last weekend to attend the 2014 Energy Symposium. The symposium, organized by the HBS Energy and Environment Club, is an annual event that brings together leaders in technology, academia, business, investing, and corporate responsibility to discuss the latest trends in the energy world and how to move forward responsibly in a world of growing energy demand.