Saving the business environment
before killing off what's left

Najma Sadeque

In recent decades, monopolistic corporations have earned an extremely bad reputation for pure selfishness, callousness and irresponsibility -- especially extractive industries and investment companies - and with good reason. Extractive industries have been the most destructive since they take out non-renewable resources such as mineral ores or oil or gas and aim only at extracting the maximum possible even while knowing it is a finite resource and will be completely exhausted within a few decades. But that is not all; in the process they pollute and poison ecosystem, causing widespread disease and species extinction, often rendering areas they have worked in, absolutely dead.
The same attitude is to be found in investment companies that roam around the world buying and selling exclusively for profit and not really caring about the nature of the investment except for the financial returns and no matter what the consequences are to the locals, rather than providing a worthwhile product and service as well. As far as they are concerned, the world is so huge with unlimited resources and opportunities, they believe that even if there comes a time one resource is completely exhausted, science will have come up with an alternative; and in any case even if it is finished, they only need to move onto some other investment instead.
This is in fact a very ignorant attitude that is common both among the business and industrial community as well as government all over the world. Serious health and social consequences have taught a lesson to industrialised countries. Consequently they are trying to mend their ways with more restrictions and by spreading greater environmental awareness among people at large through the media as well as in school curriculum.
The same efforts are not however being made universally, especially in the South where ignorance or indifference about the limits of natural resources runs very deep among governments which, whether they are elected or not, are simply gunning for modernization at any cost. The ignorance actually runs to the extent that they do not even know that they have to educate themselves as well as the public from school level onwards, if resources are supposed to last forever through recycling. That extinction is a possibility and is actually going on, does not even strike them. At the same time, there are corporate interests that are better-informed but still try to shirk their responsibilities, wherever they can find authorities who are more lax or can be bribed.
A warning has now come addressing business and industry directly about what they must do as well as stop doing, and turn to sustainable business methods if they are to save themselves from financial loss and business ruination. The damage they have been doing to society especially the majority of billions who are poor, has throughout mostly fallen on deaf ears. But it is more likely when they themselves face the prospect of business ruin, they are likely to behave more responsibly.
The warning comes from Earthwatch Institute (Europe), the World Conservation Union (IUCN), the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and the World Resources Institute (WRI) - all respected international institutions working on ecosystems that both simple-living folk as well as the most sophisticated industries depend on. It comes in a report released jointly by them last month called 'Ecosystem Challenges and Business Implications'.
The report examines six environmental areas, namely water scarcity, climate change, nutrient overloading, biodiversity loss, habitat change and the overexploitation of oceans. Whether or not businesses and industries think they are involved with any of these, the fact remains that they use the environment, all aspects of which interact inseparably, and from which they get free services they are unable to replicate by any man-made technology, so that their collective activities in turn seriously impact on all these environmental aspects.
By ignoring the realities of a deteriorating situation, they will soon face (if they are not already) scarcity of raw materials and government restrictions forced by the situation, rising operating costs, and narrowing flexibility in their manner of operations. Consequently it is essential for companies to be forewarned and therefore to become better prepared to face some unavoidable eventualities such as shortages, and to turn to using processing or production methods that impact on the ecosystem as little as possible and are dependent on the ecosystem as little as possible. In fact, new business opportunities are most likely to arise through or in the field of preserving the environment so that business too can survive indefinitely.
The report starts with filling the gaps in businessmen's, industrialists' and investors' information. It describes how corporate businesses rely heavily and crucially on ecosystems even though they may not have been aware of the fact earlier, and how they negatively affect the ecosystems. It then directs the reader towards acknowledging and accepting this indispensable and inseparable reality, and ends with showing how companies can reduce their adverse environmental impacts and at the same time make a profit by pursuing new sustainable enterprises.
What are these new enterprises? They can be the same that businesses and industries are already pursuing, but the methods would be different by being environmentally-friendly. They would use new energy efficient technologies and products and ensure that ecosytems would be conserved, and they could create or branch out to new businesses such as habitat restoration, and new markets, such as trading in nutrients.
The report includes interviews with a fairly wide range of business leaders who have begun to recognize the implications of degraded ecosystems, and the new that are needed deal with them in their own interests as well. They include giant multinationals such as Syngenta, Unilever, Rio Tinto and Cadbury Schweppes, to name a few. Some, perhaps all, have been among the worst environmental polluters and destroyers in the world.
What is common sense for ordinary people at the local level should be obvious to companies with highly educated and trained personnel -- that extraction of a finite resource should be limited for use only in essential production, not wasteful manufacture that people can do without. That is not however how they are taught in business colleges. The focus in any area of business administration is just how to efficiently procure raw materials and components at the cheapest price possible, as well as efficiently produce goods or services at the cheapest price possible. One can look at any business course almost anywhere in the world including Pakistan . They never look at the human, social and environmental costs of any of their activities, let alone whether they have any responsibility towards society.
It is true that it's a huge world with huge amounts of resources. There is more than enough for everyone even for a six billion population or twice as much - provided use of resources is moderate and so long as they are renewable or recyclable. But what most people of the world did not expect was the hugeness of greed, wastefulness and selfishness on the part of a minority.
Most people are still not aware of how destructive some scientific applications and technologies are, even if unintended; on the other hand, most people view science and technology almost like gods, and harbour the dangerous belief that science and technology simply cannot be wrong. - They don't realize that science is simply the knowledge of the processes of all things in existence, but this does not mean that man has acquired all the knowledge that exists or even understands them perfectly. Many are just assumptions or theories and many things that were considered facts decades ago, have now been shown to be wrong. As for technology that man uses, it is entirely man-made and therefore as subject to error as man is.
An accompanying factor of ignorance is the belief that the environment has nothing to do with business which concerns itself only with assembling raw materials into products indoors in a factory or use them in services, also mostly or partly indoors. A superhuman effort therefore has to be made for all people to internalise the reality that humans rely on and use the environment all the time whether they are at work or play or are asleep.
If people of the world, especially the south developing countries, don't build up their knowledge about environmental and ecological issues within this decade, they are in for trouble. Authoritarian countries (including those that claim to be democratic on paper) are in the most trouble of all because vested interests, both in government and the private sector, control the resources and the policies regarding their use, and they think only from the viewpoint at how much money they can make out of it. Even if some decision-makers are informed better, it does not necessarily make them act wiser. If they are driven by greed and personal profit, their attitude will be that other people in the future, when they find out, can take care of the problem.
Since most businesses and industries do not ordinarily associate healthy ecosystems with their activities, it is going to require a massive information effort that convinces, because nothing short of a collective and universal business response is going to correct the damage that has mostly built up over the past century and is now threatening the survival of the planet and all humanity and other living things.
As the President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), Mr. Bjorn Stigson warns, "Business simply cannot function if ecosystems and the services they deliver - like water, biodiversity, food, fiber and climate regulation - are degraded or out of balance. There must be a value attached to natural resources, and businesses need to start understanding this value."
But Ms. Janet Ranganathan, Director of the People and Ecosystems Program at the World Resources Institute, points out the do-able. "Leading businesses have always adapted to new realities," she states, "The new reality is that ecosystems are losing their ability to produce some of what businesses value most."
This is the first joint report of Earthwatch Institute ( Europe ), IUCN, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the World Resources Institute, and is the first of a series of three addressing business and industry directly. Their next report will demonstrate how new business models, markets and entrepreneurs can profit from addressing the ecosystem problem
The third and last report will show businessmen and industrialists how to identify their dependences on ecosystem services, and how to avail of them in the long run through better methods. The information is free but priceless in what business executives need to know today, and all concerned would do well to avail of it immediately.