Australian companies need to lift their game when it comes to action on climate change and preserving the natural environment, global business groups say.
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development signalled a change in priorities, replacing the Business Council of Australia as its preferred partner with the smaller Sustainable Business Australia (SBA) group.
Peter Bakker, the world council’s president and CEO, said the BCA had been ”a good partner” for many years but ”it was important to have a partner which is totally focused on and around sustainability that brings forward-thinking companies together”.
Mr Bakker, formerly head of global transport firm TNT, declined to criticise the BCA. The group, however, has lately taken a harder line on environment issues such as last month demanding the end of the carbon tax ”as the first priority”.
”[Australia’s] move away from the only recently implemented carbon tax is well noticed by the world and not seen as a positive sign when it comes to the whole issue of climate change,” Mr Bakker said from Abu Dhabi, where he was attending a conference on global warming.
Industrial and energy transformations were underway, whether it was to de-carbon the economy or preserving resources. ”It’s inevitable, it’s happening and everybody needs to decide which side of this they really want to be on,” Mr Bakker said.
The BCA said the end of the partnership was ”mutually agreed’. ”The two organisations have agreed to maintain an informal relationship based on our shared, firm commitment to sustainable growth,” said BCA spokesman Scott Thompson.
The SBA welcomed the opportunity to partner the global council. ”Australia is open for sustainable business,” said the group’s CEO, Andrew Petersen.
Companies should help protect the environment not just from a heritage perspective but view it as ”a natural endowment that creates value”, or a form of ”natural capital for the future”, he said.
The shifting of membership came as an international team backed by the US National Science Foundation released a report aimed at curbing the unsustainable rate of environment degradation inflicted by the private sector.
The report, New Nature of Business, noted that many species were threatened and once-abundant resources, including clean air and water, were being depleted at a rapid rate.
”Some firms, particularly in the services sector, do not see that they are at least in part responsible for the degradation that we see all around us,” said Professor Steve Elliot, of the University of Sydney and one of the report’s co-authors.
Raising awareness of the issues would be crucial to getting businesses on side, not least because ”naming and shaming” was a difficult task. Regulation, too, was ”a poor motivator that people will try to work around”, he said.
”Looking only to the short term is going to work against you in the long term,” Professor Elliot said.
