Walmart is greening its supply chain. Twitter is being used to expose corporate practices that are destroying communities and the environment. Instead of dampening an emphasis on sustainability practices, the Financial Crises seems to be heating it up.
ClimateChangeCorp.com posted this interesting article by Brendan May, the Managing Director of Planet 2050. He believes that even though the global economic crises appeared to threaten the trend towards greener business, that there are strong reasons why the opposite might be true. May argues “that the doomsayers and sceptics who argued that green business would be an early casualty of the credit crunch appear to have been proved wrong.”
May offers five reasons why Green Business will likely grow during the downturn.
There’s a new sheriff in Washington
“There will be many debates and trade-offs ahead. But the ‘chatter’ around the Obama phenomenon is, for now, sufficient for the business community to assume that the old rules will no longer apply, and that scrutiny of their environmental performance will increase rapidly in a way that was inconceivable under the previous regime.”
‘Green’ means less greenbacks
“Combined with the economic stimulus plans being crafted, many of which place the search for new clean technologies at their heart, it is unlikely that people will look back on this global recession as a bad thing for the sustainability movement.”
Walmart is a bully—but the good kind
“Steadily, Walmart has begun to implement its strategy. The most significant recent development is that all suppliers to Walmart are now being required to step up to the plate on sustainability – rightly so as Walmart cannot possibly reduce and eventually neutralise its environmental footprint without its suppliers doing the same.”
Twitter has made talk cheap
“Environmental NGOs have an opportunity to exploit civil society’s inevitable dissatisfaction with businesses and governments at a time when both are being heavily blamed for a mixture of excesses and incompetence.”
Everybody’s doing it
“Legislation, consumer interest, media coverage, NGO scrutiny and investor pressure are all headed in one direction – more not less green.”
What do you think? Is this an overly optimistic view of things? Or have we reached some kind of tipping point on Sustainability?