BOGOTA – 8th August 2014
“Madam Minister”, the journalist began his interview with the Colombian Minister of Commerce, “congratulations on your recent appointment. Colombians, whether they are business people, coffee growers, unemployed people or civil society activists, will be very interested to know what is your game plan for ensuring a robust and sustainable economy”.
“Our challenge”, the Minister began, “is not one of short-term economic growth.…
US$100 trillion is needed by 2030 to finance our global infrastructure, much of which needs to be greened if unsustainable increases in global temperatures are to be avoided.
Green Investment, a new report released on 21st January in advance of Davos by the G20-linked Green Growth Action Alliance, and shaped by a team including me, and an Accenture and World Economic Forum team, has costed this greening at US$0.7 trillion a year.…
Welcome to 2013!
Two words, socialism and capitalism, share the top spot in Merriam-Webster’s words of the year. Bigot came in third, just beating democracy in fifth, both of which streaked ahead of eighth place, malarkey.
Scale gets my predictive vote for 2013 as the closest one word to capture the zeitgeist in the world of sustainability.
How to get more of the right kind is the topic of my new year op ed in The Guardian:
2013: A Year to Fight for Scale in Advancing Sustainability
…worth a read even if it does no more than edging you to write your own “scaling sustainability” gameplan.…
Technological optimism is treated with suspicion by much of the non-corporate sustainability community. Yet with policy in a bad state, business at best a mixed affair and civil society distracted by imploding economies, food security crises and civil unrest, the potential of technology to move the needle on climate in particular simply cannot be ignored by cynics, skeptics and evangelists alike.…
On 26th October, I was honored to give the Inaugural Public Lecture at the University of South Africa on the occasion of the Symposium and Biennial Public Lecture 2012 on Energy Solutions in the Context of Sustainable Development, Green Economy and Poverty Eradication in Africa. My chosen theme was on what it takes to shape a green political economy, and my focus was on how to overcome three of the key barriers to progressing the green transition at scale: the financial sector, vested interests, and government.…
Tomorrow’s History will judge whether companies will prove to be the troubled but all-important titans of our age, or more like a flotilla of Titanics, grand projects floating us off on our last, fateful journey. Separating these competing futures is whether a new generation of businesses can invert today’s logic in internalizing costs as a systemic means of creating value. Titan or Titanic: Towards a Public Fiduciary is published today, reviewing the last decade`s “corporate responsibility” experience, and looking forward to its future development.…
Shorting entire economies has become an endemic practice, one that threatens our long-term health. By failing to channel our savings in ways that create an economy fit to serve a rapidly growing global population within environmental limitations, financial markets are shorting civilization itself, a point made vividly by Nick Stern in an FT article in the run up to COP17 at Durban.…
The World Economic Forum has launched its latest report on sustainable consumption in advance of its presentation and debate in Davos later this month. Entitled More with Less: Scaling Sustainable Consumption and Resource Efficiency, the report sets out the case for companies, governments and in particular plain old citizens to embrace sustainable consumption as a means of advancing the transition to a sustainable economy.…
