The Compass Your Company Needs to Navigate the Climate Crisis
At Davos 2020 corporations talked the talk. Why? Complex, cross-boundary environmental and climate issues involve multiple actors, making it difficult for a single company to have an impact alone. The solution? Multistakeholder dialogue via Collaborative Platforms to boost expertise, identify and scale-up solutions to cross-country and cross-sector challenges. Discover CSR Europe’s Collaborative Platforms
CEOs are navigating turbulent waters. Extreme weather, biodiversity loss, climate action failure, natural disasters, and human-made environmental disasters are the top 5 risks that will threaten businesses and societies across the world in the next years. This alarming results, published in the Global Risk Report 2020, confirm that companies need to urgently act now. Half of our economy is dependent on nature. According to the recent World Economic Forum (WEF) analysis “Nature Risk Rising”, examining 163 industry sectors and their supply chains, “$44 trillion of economic value generation — over half the world’s total GDP — is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and, as a result, exposed to risks from nature loss. Construction ($4 trillion), agriculture ($2.5 trillion) and food and beverages ($1.4 trillion) are the three largest industries that depend most on nature.”
Despite the Davos Manifesto and the WEF’s founder’s invitation to commit to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or earlier, at Davos 2020 corporations talked the talk. CEOs expressed support for aligning ESG topics in their annual reports on the non-financial aspects of business performance such as greenhouse gas emissions and strategies, diversity, employee health and well-being and other factors. But action needs to be scaled up.
While the WEF’s efforts are encouraging, they do not offer sufficient practical clues on how companies can equip their business to its carbon-free future. Such complex, cross-boundary environmental and climate issues involve multiple actors, and therefore it is difficult for the single business to have an impact alone.
Leadership can only yield impact if systemic change and transformation of the entire eco-system are envisaged in a very practical way. For this reason, CSR Europe engages companies and stakeholders in collaborative and cross-sector platforms.
What is a collaborative platform? It is a multistakeholder dialogue that boosts expertise amongst business partners, allowing them to identify and scale-up solutions to cross-country and cross-sector challenges. In other words, collaborative platforms help businesses in making systemic change happen and support them in building corporate leadership based on the sustainability driver. Only by joining forces it will be possible to innovate business models and accelerate the necessary transformation to tackle the current climate and sustainability challenges in an inclusive way.
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