Report from world climate summit why business needs to care: assimilating two often incompatible objectives--lowering carbon emissions and reducing waste, while at the same time raising productivity and revenue--dominated the discussions during the recent summit in Mexico.

• Author: Starbuck, Steve
• Position: STRATEGY

United Nations delegates from 191 countries met in Cancun, Mexico last December, with an aim of working toward a global agreement to mitigate climate change. The United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as the Conference of Parties (COP), has taken place each year since 1995. The primary focus of recent conferences has been on negotiating a new, comprehensive agreement that would include commitments from all major economies, including the United States and China.

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Achieving such a comprehensive agreement among the parties has proven difficult. No new agreement was created during the summit in Cancun. As a result, there is a growing sense of urgency to create a new accord as the commitments from the last global climate change agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, are set to expire at the end of 2012. The next COP is scheduled for Durban, South Africa in December 2011.

While the U.N. negotiators struggled to reach a consensus in the halls of the Cancun convention center, leaders from businesses all around the world met in different forums outside the convention center to observe the proceedings and assess their own evolving roles on climate change.

One of the largest side events was the World Climate Summit, a business conference that took place in between the two weeks of U.N. negotiations. During this event, executives candidly discussed how the business community can realize the ultimate "win-win"--to improve financial performance while reducing carbon emissions and waste.

Despite the lack of progress on a global climate change agreement and the related regulatory uncertainty, corporate executives in Cancun expressed a commitment to investing proactively in environmentally sustainable business practices that simultaneously meet the bottom-line growth expectations of their stakeholders.

Driving Business Benefits

Momentum for corporate action to combat climate change is increasing, in part because businesses recognize they can no longer afford to wait for guidance from the public sector. Jose Maria Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica and leader of the U.N. Information and Communication Technologies task force, summed up the matter at a speech during COP 16: "The war on climate change is too big to be left in the hands of government."

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The role of business in relation to climate change was expanded upon during a keynote speech by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N...