WBCSD: Business and Climate Change

Business attitudes to climate change are represented perhaps at there most progressive through the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. This ceo led organisation has produced several good reports on what business needs in order to support strong action on climate change. There will be winners and loosers in climate policy but for the main tranche of businesses a few core principles make redical emissions reductions possible if not easy. These include long term policy stability, international buy in from all major economies and an end to perverse subsidies.

Businesses at the forefront of corporate climate policy are still exploring what needs to be done. I personally find this interesting, and for climate change campaigners the views of these groups should be useful as many of the requests made for strong policy from govornment are the same as those made by NGO's.

Björn Stigson the president of WBCSD has just started a blog. A recent entry makes for intersting reading. A meeting at which business leaders where effectively flumoxed by the scale of the challenge, this is quite disconcerting but at least it shows an appreciation to some degree of the scale of this issue.

At the end of Bjorn's post he states that as a recent meeting was winding up one member of the audience summed up things as follows:

“The consensus seems to be that to lick climate change we are going to have to do everything, everywhere, for a very long time.”

My response to this was:

I almost agree with that.

I'd say, we can't lick climate change...we are already seeing the impacts now. We have 50 years more in the system from emissions already made, then we have the lag of the economic system to react. If we are going to avoid catastrophic climate change we are going to have to do everything, everywhere and we have a very short time to do it.

I don't know if you have seen the temperature vs co2 concentration papers and then connected this to emissions to stabilize at a given concentration but its pretty overwhelming. However, don't be overwhelmed business is the most dynamic part of society and a revolution in business is needed. Good luck!

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