Tuesday 17 November 2020
That was the suggestion from Jonathon Porritt, Co-Founder of Forum for the Future and veteran environmental campaigner, who spoke last week as part of Energy Live Xpo 2020, the theme of which was ‘Rethinking Energy’.
He said: "It's actually been a pretty good year for corporate sustainability in the round, for companies stepping up, raising ambition levels across the board, not just on energy issues but most noticeably for me, a new set of big commitments around biodiversity and the natural world.
"Frankly that was always treated not quite in the same way climate change has been treated, but we've seen a lot of biodiversity commitments now coming forward, particularly in terms of making the connection between climate and the natural world, so if we can press the button on these so-call nature-based solutions, we can do the right thing by healing the natural world and simultaneously make a big contribution to climate mitigation, then that is a really good thing for companies.
"So I look at the year as a whole, from a corporate sustainability point of view, pretty positively, I think it means you have to then increase the scrutiny on government responses to that, because there's no question now that any new initiative from the government is playing into a business community which is more or less completely bought into and pretty enthusiastic about getting on this net zero pathway."