BUSINESS & The “Profit and Planet” Question

Forward looking businesses are now considering the “profit and planet” question – the essence of business sustainability:

How, profitably, to satisfy the needs and aspirations of customers, consumers and shareholders today – in ways which maintain our planet’s resources and stability systems – to secure a continuing basis for business opportunity and general prosperity tomorrow.
^{© 2006-2007 Richard Poynton}

Typically, the initial response of an alert business is to consider one, or more of the following questions:

Why are these new challenges mainstream business issues?

SHORT ANSWER: Climate change and the demands upon business of our need to achieve “one planet living”, both present direct challenges to our established, “business as usual” models for delivering consumer and shareholder value.

“Business as usual” depends upon the “givens” of stable weather, river and sea levels and on the continuing availability of virgin raw materials and of our planet’s “sinks” for carbon emissions and other wastes. As these assumed stabilities change and availabilities decline, “business as usual” faces the rising costs of scarcity and the escalating risks and declining choices, arising from local and international regulation - society’s reaction to local and global environmental degradation. Business is challenged to rethink fundamentally, how to deliver customer and shareholder value in ways which are part of the solution to the concerns which drive these natural and societal feedbacks for change.

MORE:

Where have these new business challenges come from?
Can the resolution of these challenges generate business opportunities?
In practical terms, what is required?