Business, nature meet in sustainable development

Companies will have to start talking business if they want to save the planet. One good place to start is the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Its president, Bjoern Stigson, shared his views with The Jakarta Post's Berni K. Moestafa over the weekend on where nature and business interests share common ground.

Q: What is the impact that businesses have had on the environment since the first Earth Summit in 1992?

You have two trends that go against each other; on one hand you have efficiency improvements in companies. The economy today is much more efficient.

But then you have the underlying overall growth in economic activity and population growth. So you have in absolute terms a bigger environmental load. But if you had the same efficiency as you had 10 years ago you would have a much worse situation.

But the efficiency gain has not been sufficient to offset growing economic activity and population growth.

Aren't business policies often short term oriented rather than long term as sustainable development measures would require?

If you look at the leading companies, sustainable development is a long-term strategy to maintain their licenses to operate and to be successful in the long term.

Yes, you have to be successful: you must be profitable if you want to stay in business.

But you cannot avoid at the same time dealing with environmental and social considerations if you want to maintain your license to operate.

How does sustainable development address economic growth, which is a process that adds to the environmental load?

The biggest threat to sustainable development is poverty. And unless we can grow the economy, we will not be able to deal with poverty. Poor people have very few alternatives over how to use the environment where they are living. And therefore, you get a risk to the environment.

I think that when we look at what has happened in the nineties, the opening up of the global market has been a tremendous driving force for creating higher economic growth.

But that economic growth has not been shared equally across the globe. And if we cannot find ways of helping the poor parts of the world's population, I think we will risk a potential backlash against open global markets. So there is a very strong motivation to do what we can to help on these issues.

But when is it that we can say that the poor are no longer poor and that the pressure has been taken off the environment?

Our knowledge of the ecosystem is actually quite limited. No one knows what the long-term targets should be, what is the load we can accept on the ecosystem.

You need trade-offs in society, and we're not in a situation to say better rich and healthy than sick and poor. That is not how the world is functioning.

More consumption will mean an extra load on the environment so at the same time we except that we have to drive efficiency. And the long-term catalyst for an efficient economy is innovation in technology.

You know the equation; you have population times living standards times technology, and this is really what defines the environmental load.

So as the population grows and living standards grow, the only offsetting factor is technology. So the question is how innovative can we be when it comes to technology.

What do you expect to come out of the meetings in Bali and later Johannesburg?

They (governments) cannot come out of this conference not knowing where they would like to end up in Johannesburg.

The governments are responsible for setting the priorities and making the political trade-offs in setting objectives.

A number of your questions (on economic growth and environmental load) can only be resolved by political trade-offs.

Unless the governments come up with their political trade- offs, and say this is what we think is the best solution and what is a politically acceptable balance of different interests, it (setting priorities and objectives) will not happen.

When you say priorities, do you mean time targets?

Priorities mean targets, timetables. What are the developed countries willing to do to support the developing countries financially when it comes to overseas development assistance (ODA), debt relief and other kinds of support? These are the kinds of trade-offs and political priorities that should be set.

If you look back over the past 10 years, the private sector has increased investment in developing countries and at the same time ODA has gone down. Ten years ago, two-thirds of all the financial flows to developing countries were ODA, one third was from foreign investment. Now, 85 percent is foreign investment, 15 percent ODA.

In countries that do not have natural resources, it is very unlikely that foreign investment will bring them out of poverty. They need help through ODA from rich countries; otherwise they will not be able to move out of poverty.

What do you see 10 years on from Johannesburg?

I'm hoping that Johannesburg will, as we come closer, create a momentum. For the last 30 years we have had a period where we tried to create norms. My hope will be that when it comes to 10 years further down the road, we can look back and look at the era of implementation and not creating more ideas and norms around this.