Companies commonly issue sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. This study seeks to understand worldviews of corporate sustainability, or the corporate message conveyed regarding what sustainability or CSR is and how to enact it. Content analysis of corporate sustainability reports is used to position each company report within stages of corporate sustainability. Results reveal that there are multiple coexisting worldviews of corporate sustainability, but the most dominant worldview is focused on the business case for sustainability, a position anchored in the weak sustainability paradigm. We contend that the business case and weak sustainability advanced in corporate sustainability reports and by the Global Reporting Initiative are poor representations of sustainability. Ecological embeddedness, or a locally responsive strategy that is sensitive to local ecosystems, may hold the key to improved ecological sensemaking, which in turn could lead to more mature levels of corporate sustainability worldviews that support strong sustainability and are rooted in environmental science. This must be supported by government regulation.

SummaryOur knowledge of Glomeromycotan fungi rests largely on studies of cultured isolates. However, these isolates probably comprise one life-history strategy -ruderal. Consequently, our knowledge of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi may be biased towards fungi that occur primarily in disturbed habitats and associate with disturbance-tolerant host plants. We can expect to see a signal for this in DNA-based community surveys: human-impacted habitats and cultivated plants should yield a higher proportion of AM fungal species that have been cultured compared with natural habitats and wild plants.Using the MaarjAM database (a curated open-access database of Glomeromycotan sequences), we performed a meta-analysis on studies that described AM fungal communities from a variety of habitats and host plants.We found a greater proportion of cultured AM fungal taxa in human-impacted habitats. In particular, undisturbed forests and grasslands/savannahs contained significantly fewer cultured taxa than human-impacted sites. We also found that wild plants hosted fewer cultured fungal taxa than cultivated plants.Our data show that natural communities of AM fungi are composed largely of uncultured taxa, and this is particularly pronounced in natural habitats and wild plants. We are better poised to understand the functioning of AM symbioses associated with cultivated plants and human-impacted habitats.

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