Frame

Metaphors that serve to structure our experience and understanding of the complex world around us. Made famous by professor George Lakoff. More information: www.rockridgeinstitute.org

Flat Organization

An organization with few layers of management in the hope of achieving organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Flat organizations or hierarchies often use a more team-based approach that is more flexible and responsive.

Fiduciary Responsibility

The moral, and sometimes legal, responsibility one party has to another in relationship to specific duties, such as those held by investment advisors or trustees.

Feebate

Any system that taxes socially undesirable activities and products and uses the money to support more desirable ones. For example, transportation taxes for gasoline or tolls often support public transportation that has less environmental impact and eases traffic congestion.

Externalities

Externalities are effects of services, products, or production on third parties who were not involved in the buyer/seller relationship. Externalities occur when a third party incurs unintended consequences from the market behaviors of others. Externalities can be either negative (pollution, waste clean-up fees that a community must bear, rather than the generator of the waste), […]

Equator Principles

Developed in 2002 by a group of banks, these guidelines are a framework for addressing environmental and social risks in project financing. The purpose of the principles is to screen projects for adverse environmental or human affects in order to safeguard communities and natural habitats. Financial institutions who sign-on to the principles agree not to […]

Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA)

A method of tracking and rating the risks associated with a product and the emissions associated with its manufacturing.

Entrepreneur

A person who assumes a lot of personal, financial, or business risk to pursue a market opportunity that does not yet exist.

Emissions Trading

An approach used by governmental regulatory agencies, private trading systems (such as the CCX), and private companies to reduce air pollution by providing economic incentives to reduce net emissions. Limits or “caps” are set and groups that foresee exceeding these caps may purchase credits from groups that have not the exceeded their emissions levels.

Ecotistical

A term coined by David Crawford of the Manitoba Product Stewardship Corporation, writing in GreenBiz.com referring to: Characteristic of those having inflated the truthfulness about their own environmental accomplishments Characteristic of having an exaggerated sense of environmental importance An environmental disregard of others