Business, nature meet in sustainable development

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.