Where is the leadership (again!)?
A recent report, published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (The Carbon Chasm Report), contains some good and bad news.
The report looks at the actions being taken by the commercial sector to reduce its carbon footprint in order to avoid the quite serious level of climate change that is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to happen by 2050 if we do not reduce our carbon emissions by some 80% by that date. The predicted consequences are well publicised, so there is no need to dwell on them here other than to say that there will be no more business-as-usual if the targets are not met.
The good news is that the top 100 companies are making some progress; as a group, these top 100 are reducing their emissions by some 1.9% per annum.
The bad news is that at this rate, the required reduction will not happen until 2089 – 39 years too late. The actual reduction needed to hit the deadline is a year on year reduction of 3.9%.
The report asked these top 100 global companies what their reasoning was behind their respective carbon reduction strategies. The answers, regrettably, speak volumes; cutting energy bills, keeping ahead of future legislation and gaining a competitive advantage. In other words, the departments that have been given the task of ‘doing’ something are facilities management, legal and marketing.
The question remains, then, where are the CEO, COO and CFO in all this? The science has been proved over and again with (now) hard data to support the fact that energy poverty, due to overuse of limited carbon energy sources, will limit our near-future ability to carry on business-as-usual and the continued burn rate will continue to accelerate the impact of climate change to a level where certain global corporations will have to drastically review their core business and operating bases.
Surely matters of this nature are the concern of a CEO who should be looking at long term business strategy and taking a helicopter view of the business, a COO who should forward planning the operational manufacturing and/or delivery infrastructure and profitability and a CFO who should have regard for those areas on the books that show susceptibility to economic stress and should be constantly looking at means of using the company’s ability to invest in a sustainable financial future?
The CDP report highlights some necessary steps that companies need to take and policies that they need to set in stone if the environmental threats to their economic future are to be overcome (or, at the very least, mitigated). If you read the report, you will see that they are all actions and/or policies that need to come from the top and require the unique skills that CEOs, COOs and CFOs are fabled to possess.
Time to start earning your money, guys? In a very real sense, if you don’t start doing what you’re employed to do, you face two alternatives; either the company loses its ability to trade and function and you’re all out of a job anyway or some fairly serious questions are going to be asked of you at the crunch point which, if you’re not able to provide good answers to, may lead to the statement, “you are the weakest link. Goodbye”.
