“It is a fundamental business issue…”
…according to Mindy Lubber, President of Ceres, who was speaking about sustainability at MIT’s Sustainability Summit last week. Ms. Lubber was a member of a panel entitled “How do we progress towards sustainability during a recession.” It was clear from her point of view as well as the other members of the panel, Michael Wise, Partner at A.T. Kearney and Wayne Balta Vice President of Corporate Environmental Affairs at IBM that sustainability is an imperative even given the current economic climate. Discussing the impact of global warming to the governments and businesses Lubber stated, ” The costs of ignoring climate change will make sub-prime look like child’s play.”
The cost of ignoring climate change will make sub-prime look like child’s play.
The conference held at M.I.T’s Sloan School of Business, brought together students, engineers, business leaders, academics, environmental activists, and public servants and focused on real world challenges we face in moving to a sustainable world. Discussions ranged from corporate social responsibility to climate change at the macro level, to the most effective way to interact with local government officials and historic preservation as a sustainable business practice on the local level.
The other members of her panel were as emphatic as Lubber in their points of view that business cannot afford to let the current business climate prevent them form implementing sustainable business plans. Mr. Wise who was one of the authors of the “Green Winners” report (cited in my February 11th post) spoke to the driver for implementing an effective sustainability plans which include competitive advantage, innovation and risk management. He said that the pace of environmentally related business change has accelerated to a degree that many top corporations are running scenario analysis’ and war games to identify the risk potential environmental issues may place to their businesses.
Wayne Balta, who rounded out the panel spoke to IBM’s “Smarter Planet” campaign and he clearly believes that IBM has embarked on an initiative which converges traditional IT infrastructure and applications with sustainable business practices. He stated that because of the following factors there is an opportunity for technology to bring about change in the environmental and corporate social responsibility arenas. The factors he listed were:
- Devices are becoming vastly instrumented
- They are becoming interconnected
- Because of this they are becoming more intelligent.
These intelligent devices allow businesses to better measure the environmental footprint of their businesses. Mirroring what Mindy Lubber said earlier in the program. “What can be measured, can be managed.”
-FR
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