January 11, 2016
This Service Leader comment first appeared in SR Inc’s Q4 Newsletter.
For more than seven years Sustainability Roundtable Inc. (“SR Inc”) has been assisting executives at some of the world’s leading companies and enterprises to: Set Goals, Drive Progress and Report Results (internally and externally) in their move to more sustainable operations. See a fuller description here.
In Paris in December of 2015, every national government committed to the plans they had developed to: Set Goals, Drive Progress and Report Results to move to a more sustainable economy. Those commitments help constitute an agreement about overall and specific goals, systems of measurement and systems of reporting. It was an effort twenty-five years in development that achieved a breadth and depth of agreement between all the governments of the world that is without precedent in history.
Just as SR Inc has helped world-leading companies and enterprises understand that a more sustainable approach to operations helps drive a growing operating margin in an increasingly global and resource constrained economy – where concern about sustainability only always grows – the United Nations’ 21st “Conference of Parties” in Paris (“COP21”) was informed by top business leaders such as Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever. Paul and others made clear at COP21 that companies and countries can either work to profitably managing climate related risks now, or be subject to unmanageable climate related risks later. Partially as a result of top business leaders substantial input into the COP21 process, what has been called the “Sustainability Imperative” is now as clear as the unmistakable, unanimous, signal from every government in the world from Paris: in every corner of the world, the need to track, reduce and report GHG emissions will always increase.
As Michael Liebreich of Bloomberg New Energy Finance summarized, COP 21 was not about all the governments of the world coming together to write a letter to the global fossil fuel industry saying: “we are trapped in an abusive relationship with the fossil fuel industry; Paris is the world’s economy serving divorce papers.”
SR Inc Member-clients have heard this signal. More than a dozen are already committed to sourcing 100% of energy for their owned and leased assets from renewables. And all SBER Members now want a strategy for Renewable Energy that recognizes it as a globally scaled set of technologies improving and being adopted at a pace that no fuel based energy – of any type – can match. The revolution is now.
