Our Common Future?

Bjorn Stigson, President, WBCSD

Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of a report called Our Common Future, the main publication of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.

This document virtually invented the concept of sustainable development, defining it as forms of progress that meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Energy offers the starkest example of our failure to begin to move toward more sustainable progress. We are failing to meet today’s needs for energy; 1.64 billion people (27% of world population) had no access to residential electricity in the year 2000. Meanwhile, we are threatening to change the global climate so that it may begin to work against our human systems and human civilisation.

Business is divided over how to proceed on energy, and this division is sending mixed signals to governments. Yet business is also receiving mixed signals, or no signals, from governments.

Who is in charge of creating a sustainable world? Presently the governments in a number of the leading OECD countries are weak, with limited ability to mobilize support for difficult political tradeoffs. The global intergovernmental cooperation via the UN, IMF, World Bank and WTO is also weakened and has quite limited capacity to bring the global community together in a coherent way.

Our Common Future contains a chapter on energy, spelling out a lower-energy, energy-efficient strategy, and noting that “there is no other realistic option open to the world for the 21st century”. It added that, “Properly managed, efficiency measures could allow industrial nations to stabilize their primary energy consumption by the turn of the century”. That sentence, written in 1987, refers to the year 2000, not 2100.

If we want innovation and new technologies, we need the proper management of different policies for the various ways we must seek energy efficiency and to decarbonise the global economy, approaches such as zero carbon power generation by large hydro or third generation nuclear, energy-neutral buildings, housing insulation, ultra-supercritical coal, or combined cycle gas turbine.

Let me offer you another quote: “Perhaps the most urgent task today is to persuade nations of the need to return to multilateralisim”. That too is from the Brundtland report of 1987. In terms of climate change, we will share a common future, one that today looks rather gloomy. Yet in terms of management of energy systems, different nations and regions seem to be seeking separate futures. We in the WBCSD often remark that “Business cannot succeed in societies that fail”. But society cannot succeed in solving these issues without business. So we need to engage and contribute to create an environment in which business can prosper, innovate and grow in ways that benefit all stakeholders and society as a whole.

For more information: www.wbcsd.org