• Wednesday, May 23, 2012
• Inter Press Service

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Tuesday launched Changing Pace , a report detailing recommendations to share business solutions to address sustainability challenges at the B4E Conference in Berlin, Germany.

'The WBCSD launched 2 years ago a report called Vision 2050 : The New Agenda for Business,' Communications and Business Role Managing Director for WBCSD, Peter Paul van de Wijs told IPS.

'Thirty of our member companies and experts around the world had a year long discussion on what would the world look like in 2050 to be sustainable. Jointly they asserted that by 2050, 9 billion people live well and within the limits of the planet'.

'The current trajectories of progress are not leading us there and what the Vision 50 report didn’t do was to lay out what are the kind of policies that business would need to really do what it does best which is innovate and implement', van de Wijs added.

Changing Pace is an invitation from WBCSD and its members, to governments, civil society and fellow business leaders to actively engage in dialogues to shape policy solutions and pathways to a sustainable 2050 at national and international level.

The report identifies seven categories of action that create a dynamic and achievable policy framework and applies them to the nine elements laid out in Vision 2050 necessary to create a sustainable world.

The seven categories of action that constitute the 'Green Growth Policy Accelerator' in Changing Pace are: Set goals with a clear purpose and specific goals that define the world in which we want to live; Communicate and educate the public to foster understanding and commitment to pursue sustainability objectives; Standardize by enforcing and introducing performance standards, emission or usage limits and codes of conduct; Budget through fiscal reforms to price scarce natural resources and negative externalities; Invest for efficient infrastructures, technology developments, and green public procurements that mobilize private capital for green growth; Monitor progress through adequate indicators that compensate for the limitations of GDP; and, Coordinate governance that is predictable, coherent and persistent.

'This is the first time that a business group put such a comprehensive set of propositions on the table.' Changing Pace recognizes that only with business, government and civil society fulfilling their respective roles can we achieve the speed and scale necessary to reach a sustainable path by 2050.

Policies at the national level must be enacted that will drive business innovation and success while achieving sustainability in a world whose population is projected to increase two Billion by 2050. 'We are now at an interesting tipping point. Large companies have understood that the resources are consumed fast, that the population growth will have a huge impact on the ability to do business'. 'The awareness is raised so we are now slowly moving into a 'do-tank'. Changing Pace is a good example of that 'do-tank' because, we’ve put together a set of concrete forces, we are thinking about the next step to sustainability', he concluded.

© Inter Press Service (2012) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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