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SINGAPORE—While
there is a growing momentum for companies worldwide to
tackle climate change, more businesses are also asking
for sound government leadership in addressing this issue
in their respective countries, the United Nations said
Thursday.
“Time
has run out for deliberations on how to deal with
climate change, and we urge the business sector in quite
dramatic terms that the time for action is now,” said
Georg Kell, executive director of the United Nations
Global Compact.
Speaking
at the concluding session Wednesday of the Business for
the Environment Global Summit 2008, Kell added that
“there is a growing body of evidence that companies are
aware that acting proactively on global-warming issues
also needs government direction.”
The
two-day summit in
Singapore
has brought together nearly 1,000 business leaders from
more than 30 countries.
“Some
companies are really starting to wake up right now, but
I think they are not yet doing enough,” Kell told the
BusinessMirror. “But I think many more are sitting on
the fence and I am hoping that others bring in the
solution. If you don’t invest now in proactive
operations on climate change, you will probably lose
market shares in the future.”
With
nearly 4,000 participating companies and hundreds of
other stakeholders from more than 120 countries, UN
Global Compact is the world’s largest voluntary
corporate-citizenship initiative.
Kell
felt “voluntary initiatives alone cannot bring the deep
changes necessary” to tackle climate change, and
government leaders would have to commit to something
more in a post-Kyoto Protocol agreement that would
become effective after 2012.
“The
assumption is indeed that a proactive engagement of the
business sector and leadership from the government in
terms of environmental policies is very critical,” he
added.
UN
Undersecretary General Achim Steiner said businesses
around the world were divided into two groups—those
comfortable with the status quo and those who wanted to
change in response to the environmental crisis—and he
had found the first group getting smaller.
“We need
policy changes that will lead us to a greener future,”
said Steiner, also the executive director of the UN
Environment Programme (Unep). “Each of us must exercise
our responsibility to take action against global warming
that threatens our stability that imperils our
survival.”
Steiner
added that “for any of these measures to work, the
world’s poor nations must be at the forefront of this
agenda.”
“In that
case, it is important to make long-range investments and
start looking towards carbon-reduction technologies and
to start thinking now about what to do after the first
phase of Kyoto ends in 2012,” Steiner said. |
