Business leader council calls out environmental goals

A Scandanavian-based council that pairs business leaders with scientists has issued a “call” aimed at pursuit of six environmental goals. The Copenhagen Climate Council issued the call at the close of the World Business Summit on Climate Change held in late May.

The call sets out the elements the council’s participants believe are required to forge an effective new global climate treaty in advance of the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP15) in December. According to a council article on the call, the six goals or steps in the statement are:

1. Agreement on a science-based greenhouse gas stabilization path with 2020 and 2050 emissions reduction targets that will achieve it;
2. Effective measurement, reporting and verification of emissions performance by business;
3. Incentives for a dramatic increase in financing low emissions technologies;
4. Deployment of existing low-emissions technologies and the development of new ones;
5. Funds to make communities more resilient and able to adapt to the effects of climate change, and
6. Means to finance forest protection.

These goals seem worthy and hardly objectionable to me, especially the need for effective measurement and reporting of emissions. That said, the council seems Eurocentric. Some business interests and business-sector lobbyists in the U.S. would object with goal 1 in so far as it might serve as a tacit endorsement for stringent, global cap & trade agreements. Here in the U.S. business interests continue to seek ways to tweak proposed U.S. cap & trade regulations, as noted in this article from today’s Washington Post. But overall, the council’s goals seem reasonable to me, and worthy of note for those following sustainability trends in global manufacturing enterprises.