COMMUNICATIONS | BUSINESS GREENING

12-12-12 – the tide has turned

by | Dec 13, 2012 | Blog

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Looking back on 2012, some landmarks in the waters where I swim:

There seems no slowing of C02 into the atmosphere, so the signs at the moment are that the planet and its inhabitants are headed for uncomfortable if not traumatic times after mid-century the threshold of the 2 degrees limit is seen as increasingly difficult to stay under.

On the bright side, at the IPCCC COP19 global conference in Qatar, nations agreed on renewing the Kyoto protocol and agreeing to a ‘firm timetable’ to adopt a universal climate agreement by 2015.

The Sustain our Africa Conference in Cape Town went off well. Driven by idealism and then fuelled by corporate support, it brought in good speakers and a new wave of well-heeled delegates. One hopes the sweat of the many volunteers who contributed to its success is rewarded with equity in the limited liability company that the founders of the enterprise have set up.

Being irked along with many others I am sure by Ivor Vegter’s book on the environmental movement, I was pleased to see it  roundly panned and despite his retorts to critics, it has not been held up as a credible reference work.

Overall, if there is any significance to 12-12-12, in my experience it would be that the tide has turned and the doors to greening are opening everywhere.

As a recent article in the Harvard Business Working Knowledge series (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6865.html) says, “ Societal concern about sustainability, at both the level of the firm and society as a whole, has been growing from almost nothing in the early 1990s to rapidly increasing awareness in the early 2000s, to being a dominant theme today.”  The movement is not slowing down and has I believe reached a tipping point towards mainstream acceptance.

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