However, the study concluded that by simply having one less child, over 9, metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions could be saved, equaling out to just under 20 times more tons of saved in a lifetime when paralleled to what are considered usual green reductions.
While the study is publicly available, and was published in a time where climate change awareness was at an all-time high, most of society seemed to be more focused on the emerging green trends of the times. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by oceans is currently increasing by 2 billion tons per year. Air and land temperatures continue to increase, and was the warmest year worldwide ever recorded.
Carbon dioxide emissions have increased 7 percent since the early 90s, largely in part of overpopulation and industrial revolutions in developing nations such as India.
The future of climate change does have some upsides, however. The renewable energy market is growing around the world, as it has increased 5 percent since , and in that time has been the fastest growing source of energy consumption. Worldwide superpower India has implemented policy supporting solar energy expansion, and has decided to set a new goal of solar capacity a fivefold from their first estimations. But despite such opportunities, solving the largest environmental problems will require huge investments whose principal economic payoff will be the right to continue in business.
How efficiently these problems are recognized, analyzed, and addressed will determine the winners. The costs of change must eventually end up in price; the consumer will pay.
Shareholder values may be shifted among players, but they will not be massively destroyed. New capital, properly directed to environmental improvement, will still earn a positive return compared with the alternative of not investing.
If it cannot, the proper strategy is to liquidate the business. To strategize on this undulating playing field, the prudent manager needs to recognize its underlying forces. Despite some claims to the contrary, major environmental problems are not the creation of some anticapitalist elite. They are real, founded in science often not well understood , and globally threatening.
They are increasing because of rapid population growth and expanding economic activity. They can be solved only by a commonsense alliance of business, government, and environmentalists. Among these, only business has the resources of technology, finances, and organizational competence to implement the necessary changes.
Herein lies great opportunity as well as great peril. Where there is inadequate rationing through pricing, use will be profligate, and scarcity will go unrecognized. As society sees its quality of life—or life itself—at risk, it will take steps to avert that risk. A company that decides to play can incorporate the environment into strategic planning by taking certain steps:. Promote implementation mechanisms—especially economic signals such as subsidies, user fees, and taxes —to which business can respond efficiently.
The companies that survive the next 20 years will produce goods and services whose environmental effects are tolerable to all stakeholders.
Environmental issues will have to be evaluated according to their relative importance. Executives, therefore, must develop a vision of how a sustainable company operates or at least of how to find the way to do it. Only win-win companies will survive, but that does not mean that all win-win ideas will be successful. Managers need a methodology for discovering solutions that yield the greatest benefits. Most savings could be realized by increasing efficiency.
Also, in our experience, the most extensive environmental benefits could be attained at only high costs. Another recent development in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe is the environmental management system. But an EMS also yields only limited benefits. I prefer a total management system that can fulfill all managerial needs.
Win-win solutions are possible for companies that develop a specific corporate environmental strategy, design a system for reliable management information, and use a good methodology for evaluating environmental impact. Such a methodology includes:. Consideration of the best natural moment when making decisions about environmental improvements investment, reallocation, or replacement, for example.
Richard P. We have little basis on which to judge whether win-win environmental investment opportunities are rare or plentiful. Most U. Companies like Polaroid, DuPont, and J. Huber, however, are demonstrating that rigorous analysis can uncover win-win opportunities.
Such analysis looks at the full revenue- and cost-side contributions of environmental initiatives to shareholder value. Walley and Whitehead largely overlook the product-differentiation contribution of environmental initiatives to the revenue side of shareholder value. Product-differentiation opportunities arise not from domestic regulatory standards but from customer requirements reflected in supplier qualifications, international environmental standards, and competition in international markets, where environmental considerations are becoming increasingly important.
The product-differentiation category should grow in the s. The authors also understate the cost-side benefits of environmental initiatives. Because U. Resources that did not go into waste treatment and disposal have gone into more productive uses in the economy. I agree that many win-win improvements in environmental performance to date have consisted of harvesting low-hanging fruit, but companies like Polaroid continue to find cost-effective environmental improvements.
After the third year of its toxic-use reduction program, for example, Polaroid had exhausted the low-hanging fruit but went on to adapt best-in-class technologies to its existing processes and research new processes and chemistries.
Polaroid has put in place systems to maintain continuous improvement in its environmental performance while funding only the projects that meet corporate ROI objectives. The key to maintaining continuous environmental improvement is management, not technology. Cost-effective technologies will emerge so long as management systems identify, prioritize, and evaluate environmental opportunities.
Environmental performance measures must be tied to financial data to determine whether improvements contribute to shareholder value. On the cost side, TQM, which Walley and Whitehead dismiss much too readily, compares the costs of internal failure resource waste and waste treatment and disposal and external failure remediation, fines, and liability to the potential savings from prevention. Those costs must be allocated to specific products and processes in capital-budgeting and costing decisions.
In terms of traditional shareholder value, waste-treatment systems also tie up valuable capital compared with less capital-intensive prevention methods.
On the revenue side, TQM helps us understand customer requirements and the contribution of environmental performance to customer satisfaction and shareholder value.
More flexible government regulations create opportunities for environmental initiatives, but corporate management systems must take advantage of them. Traditionally, government regulations have focused on an imbalance between private and social costs as the basis for regulations. With greater flexibility, industry can craft more cost-effective initiatives. In an analysis of over initiatives, DuPont has found that, on average, its internally generated environmental initiatives are three times as cost-effective as those that respond to government regulations.
If we want the world to beat a path to our door because we produce a better environmental mousetrap, we need to improve processes and products, not find better ways of disposing of waste. We do not need to throw money at every environmental opportunity that comes along, but we must develop and implement methods to measure environmental performance and assess the contribution it makes to shareholder value both by reducing costs and by enhancing revenues.
Enlightened companies have exhausted many of the relatively easy energy, waste, and resource-efficiency options. They are now into the harder, longer term investment commitments in which conventional economic and environmental criteria are not necessarily in harmony. Companies—especially chemical industry giants like Dow, ICI, BP, and Shell—have been untypically transparent about the costs of staying in business: costs that, as Walley and Whitehead note, are difficult to justify on simple investment-appraisal bases.
We all want our economic prosperity—which we owe to the enormous success of business—to be compatible with environmental protection. But if we take a broader view and plot any measure of that prosperity against any measure of environmental degradation, we find that the two move, inexorably, in the same direction.
After nearly a decade of fairly committed efforts on the part of business and economic communities to reduce their environmental impact, all we find is that the rate of acceleration of environmental degradation throughout the world is slowing down. Given that we have no way of knowing whether or not the planetary ecology is truly in crisis, and that it is impossible for us to ascertain whether our present ways of doing business can be made compatible with environmental sensitivity, we as a business community have some hard thinking to do.
And the sooner we abandon the virtually empty rhetoric of win-win situations the better—for business and the environment. Throughout Europe, as in North America, companies are being driven by a mix of voluntary, semivoluntary, and legislative pressures, all of which attempt to go with the grain of the market. Voluntary environmental reporting is growing steadily.
Voluntary supplier-chain audits are placing market pressures on companies to get up to speed on environmental management. The panoply of European Union initiatives—eco-labeling; the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme; initiatives on packaging, waste, and contaminated land—are creating a climate of development that more and more companies are finding difficult and expensive to meet.
Enlightened companies are experimenting with the new issues, but many others are unsure of how to react to all the changes. The legislative situation varies among the member states and remains confused over issues like liability for contaminated land. A major expansion of airport capacity in the south-east of England. Support for a major expansion of the road network. Aggressive implementation of a new presumption in favour of development in the planning system.
Osborne has proclaimed that protecting the environment is against the public interest — something no senior politician in this country has done in recent history. As academics and students at the University of Oxford, we have been concerned by the statements from Niall Ferguson, former academic at Oxford, threatening to sue the London Review of Books on the basis of Pankaj Mishra's review of his recent book " Niall Ferguson threatens to sue over accusation of racism ", News.
Intellectual debate is not resolved through the courts. If Ferguson disagrees with a poor review of his book, he should respond by explaining his position as he has done on the letters page and allow readers to decide for themselves. He does not need to resort to tactics of crude intimidation.
We consider any threats of this nature to be a basic violation of intellectual freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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The authors thank Sam Chambers and the reviewers for CPT for incisive suggestions on an earlier version of this essay. The author would also like to acknowledge the funding of the Australian Research Council, grant DP, which made a portion of this research possible. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.
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