Climate change simply not a priority to UK business
The findings of an extensive survey conducted by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) were published last month; they raise a very important question.
Amongst its many findings, it reports that the number of managers who plan to make climate change a priority in 2010 is just one in six (16%); this despite the fact that 69% recognise that the low carbon agenda is a key business issue. The other finding which merits reporting, though should come as no surprise to any of us, is that young, junior managers are more enthusiastic about tackling climate change than those at the top, who are much less anxious to embrace the opportunities and challenges in this area, with just over half (54%) of directors identified as ‘climate change cynics’.
The questions, then, is “where’s the business sense?”
COP15 may not have been a great success but it did illustrate the point that change will only come about by the will and actions of the commercial sector; the politicians will deliberate and prevaricate until the oil runs out, the forests are meadows and there’s not a drop of freshwater left. We in the business community, however, do not have that luxury; long before any of those eventualities come to pass (and, with appropriate actions they need never come to pass at all), we will be faced with energy costs that may make our current businesses uncompetitive and thus redundant. It’s a simple case of demand and supply.
Ruth Spellman, chief executive of CMI, was shocked with the results of her organisation’s survey. I’m not sure why, unless she is so out of touch with her membership as to make her redundant. Whilst the ‘old guard’ of senior managers remain in post, little is likely to happen. The old guard are too young to remember the war and too old to be able to understand the expanded meaning of sustainability. The younger generation of managers have grown up in age where pay-for-use makes more sense than ownership and have been educated (NOT indoctrinated, as the cynics would have it) in the finite nature of our resource base. They have watched their parents’ generation live to excess in the honey years whilst the zeitgeist comedy was provided by ‘loadsamoney’.
The CMI is calling for all UK organisations to have a green management team in place and active, by 5 June 2010 - World Environment Day… which is nice, but doesn’t even come close to what is actually required. I have worked with organisations that have ‘green teams’ and it’s not pleasant; junior and middle managers marginalised in the cause of satisfying shareholders and customers with green spin whilst the organisation continues on its profligate commercial path.
The real cause for concern is that those managers who are currently passing up the ranks may not achieve the senior management stratosphere in time to make the changes that are necessary; if they do not, they may take up the directorial mantle at a point when any action will only slightly mitigate the damage that has already been done and their careers and reputations may be diminished as a result of the (in)actions of their predecessors.
That would not only be morally reprehensible; it might also mean that the extremist predictions so graphically illustrated in “The Age of Stupid” have a better than even chance of becoming a reality, or a close version of it.
