Politicians make the policy. But it’s often left to business to implement it. For this reason RioPlus Business is featuring submissions from business across the globe in the lead up to Rio+20.
The aim is to demonstrate how Sustainable Development is becoming a reality on every continent, country and city.
Here KPMG’s Yvo de Boer explains how ensuring we minimise resource use and environmental impact could be one of the biggest sources of a business’ future success.
Over the past two decades, we have recognized that the way we do business has serious impacts on the world around us. It is now apparent that the state of the world affects the way we do business.
The central challenge of our age – maintaining human progress while minimizing resource use and environmental decline – can simultaneously be one of the biggest sources of future success for business.
Given the unprecedented natural resource scarcity, skyrocketing food prices, escalating energy security issues and an expected population growth of up to 10 billion in 2100, the private sector is ever more challenged to overhaul its strategy and make its business models future proof.
For example, if companies had to pay for the full environmental costs of their production, they would lose 41 cents for every US$1 in earnings on average. External environmental costs of 11 key industry sectors (including upstream supply chain) rose by 50 percent between 2002 and 2010.
They include things like pollution, external costs that society will likely have to pay for in some way or at some [...]
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