Resources for a sustainable future

12/7/2010 Guardian  UK Environment secretary Caroline Spelman will speak at the first Global Business
of Biodiversity Symposium in London.Modern businesses are “soulless corporations” that are in danger of becoming a
“cancer” on society, a leading UN environmental official warns today.
Companies usually take a short-term view of the importance of the environment,
said Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN’s investigation into how to stop the
destruction of the natural world. This short-term thinking is seen in their
lobbying against new policies that could slow environmental devastation, he
said.
Sukhdev, formerly an adviser to the Indian government and now on sabbatical from
Deutsche Bank, spoke as he prepares to publish tomorrow one of the most eagerly
awaited parts of his report – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
(TEEB) for Business.
The report will be launched at the first Global Business of Biodiversity
Symposium in London, where speakers will include environment secretary Caroline
Spelman. She will highlight examples of businesses causing damage which imposes
a huge cost on themselves and society – including an estimate that global
destruction of forests costs the world’s economies $2tn-$5tn (£1.3tn-£3.3tn) a
year.
She will also speak of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “BP’s shares have
halved since the spill began in mid-April – there will be no dividends this
year,” she is due to say. “While the real impact on the local economy, wildlife
and marine health may not be fully known for years … What’s bad for
biodiversity is bad for business.”
Sukhdev told the Guardian that private businesses were too important as
employers and payers of taxes to embark on a revolution, calling instead for
society to take a greater responsibility for regulating the behaviour of
companies. When the final report is published, at a biodiversity conference in
October in Japan, Sukhdev will recommend major changes in the way companies are
regulated.
“We have created a soulless corporation that does not have any innate reason to
be ethical about anything,” he said. “The purpose of a corporation is to be
selfish. That is law. So it’s up to society and its leaders and thinkers to
design the checks and balances that are needed to ensure that the corporation
does not simply become cancerous, and that’s something that sometimes we do and
sometimes we really don’t.”
TEEB was set up after the success of the groundbreaking 2006 report by Sir
Nicholas Stern for the UK government. The Stern report argued that the cost of
tackling climate change would be 1-2% of the global economy, while the cost of
doing nothing would be 5-20 times that. Sukhdev’s team says that the failure of
governments and businesses to put a “price” on ecosystem services provided by
nature – from flood protection and pollination of crops, to carbon take-up by
forests and the sheer wonder of nature – has led to widespread destruction of
whole ecosystems and of the variety of all life on Earth.
Previously, Sukhdev has called for governments and businesses to be forced to
report their environmental and social impacts alongside – not separately from –
their financial accounts. He has also called for stricter limits on extraction
and pollution.
Go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/12/soulless-corporations-hurt-environment-pavan-sukhdev