Economic downturn or not, companies around the globe are staying put on their plans to adapt corporate strategies for the effects of global warming. That’s the conclusion of the new periodic report (pdf) by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). The study reveals that 90% of the top decision-makers at FTSE-100 listed companies believe they can make a buck out of environmentally friendly actions. What’s more, corporations are beginning to focus on their supply chains, demanding lower carbon emissions linked with supply chain producers. Other areas that corporations are ‘greening up’ include the way consumers use and dispose of their products.
The latest report was compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and is quite an accurate picture of the strategies of larger companies in Europe due to the high response rate. Richard Gledhill, who is a partner at the Sustainability and Climate Change department at the accountancy said that the carbon agenda in the UK has moved from debate to action. A spokesman at CDP, Paul Simpson, underscored this, saying that companies that do not address emissions risk getting penalized later on. Simpson spoke of a looming ‘Carbon Crunch’ which -like the credit crunch- will hit hard at one point. Companies are using up the natural resources of the planet for which, sooner or later, they will not to be able to pay back, according to Simpson.
“Everything, including our economy is reliant on the ecosystem. What we are doing is pushing the ecosystem beyond its sustainable limits to the point where it breaks and that is basically what we have done with the economy by lending money that does not really exist and people cannot afford to pay back,” Simpson was quoted as saying in UK daily The Telegraph.
The Carbon Disclosure Project represents 385 global institutional investors who have assets worth a total of around $57 trillion. The not for profit organization collects in-depth information about the climate change actions of more than 1550 corporations and multinationals and their supply chains in periodical reports published on its website for the public.
Photo Credit: Climate Disclosure Project
