Business Leadership Vs. Business as Usual?
Private Sector Must Rally in Support of Global Climate Deal
Progressive businesses must continue to speak up in support of a strong climate deal in Copenhagen or risk allowing
their head-in-the-sand competitors to derail the talks, cautioned Oxfam International today, ahead of high-level events
on the private sector’s role in tackling climate change.
With conflicting voices emerging from the business community – one calling for ambitious and urgent action and the other
for obfuscation and delay – Oxfam is urging progressive business leaders to encourage wavering governments to show
leadership in the international negotiations.
The private sector plays a central role in the fight against climate change. Many companies have taken significant steps
to cut their own emissions in line with keeping global warming well below 2°C. More and more companies are now
recognizing the importance of securing their own markets and supply chains by helping communities adapt and build
resilience to its impacts and are seizing opportunities to create and disseminate technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions around the world.
“Corporations can open space for negotiators in Copenhagen – or they can close it down,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam
International executive director who will join global business leaders and policy makers at the Copenhagen Business Day
event at the talks. “It is encouraging that an increasing number of companies not only recognize the business case for
addressing the climate problem systematically, but are also advocating for public policies that tackle emissions and
help developing countries prepare for and adapt to the adverse impacts of climate change.”
Some in the private sector have lobbied against policies seen as threatening “business as usual,” such as the effort
just days ago by Business Europe, a coalition of national business associations from across the EU, to water down the
EU’s ambition on emission reductions. However, an increasing number of well-known companies have worked together to call
loudly for ambitious climate policy action at the national and global levels. This includes the 16 major US-based
consumer brands that make up Business for Innovative Climate and Energy Policy (BICEP) such as Nike Timberland, Levi
Strauss, Starbucks, and eBay. On the global level, the Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, created by the Prince
of Wales and based at the University of Cambridge, has organized the Copenhagen Communiqué. This detailed policy
statement “ signed by the BICEP companies, GE, Siemens, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, and over 800 other major companies around the world “ calls for “an ambitious, robust, and equitable global
deal on climate change.”
Dissension in the ranks of the business community over climate policy action has been on vivid display in the United
States recently, with major companies withdrawing from the US Chamber of Commerce or its board over its backward-looking
opposition to government actions to tackle global warming. This conflict is likely to spill over into the international
negotiations in Copenhagen.
“A critical mass of major companies has recognized that averting climate catastrophe and accelerating the transition to
a low-carbon global economy is a business imperative. We are at a crucial juncture, and now is the time for business to
call loudly with one voice for a fair, ambitious, and binding global deal,” said Oxfam senior policy advisor Jonathan
Jacoby.
ENDS