“The world’s entry into the green economy is inevitable, irresistible and irreversible,” stated Marina Grossi, president of the Brazilian Business Council for Sustainable Development (CEBDS) at the opening of Sustentável 2016 – the 8th Sustainable Development Congress, held by the organization on October 25 at the Museum of Tomorrow (RJ). With a packed audience throughout the eight-hour event, Sustentável 2016 brought together companies, government, academia and civil society, bringing together over 500 people in attendance and over 520 views during the live broadcast of the event.
For Marina Grossi, the event took place at a time of great challenge, in which the market needs to review practices and learn to measure, for example, the value of elements currently ignored in traditional business plans, such as a standing forest, quality water or a population with access to education and well-being: “In the new scenario that is emerging, the relative prices of products and services will change completely to reflect the cost of carbon embedded in each item”.
Private enterprise – both companies and the financial sector – is an indispensable agent in the transition to a green economy. Without it, there is no scale to make the changes needed to contain global warming to the levels negotiated in the Climate Agreement (limit of 2O C above the pre-industrial average, with efforts not to exceed 1.5O C). “This engagement will require replacing market and investment practices focused solely on profit and consumption with environmentally and socially sustainable business models. We need to develop mechanisms to achieve this balance, and Sustentável 2016 brought contributions to this debate,” she says.
Divided into four panels, Sustentável 2016 brought together important international and national experts and set itself the challenge of not limiting the discussion to theory, bringing inspiring examples of new practices. Check out some of these moments.
Sustainability in a crisis scenario
Putting an end to sustainability as a “department” in companies and including it in all stages of any business, from its conception, is a prerequisite for the green economy to become a reality. This was the main conclusion of the first panel, moderated by Linda Murasawa, executive superintendent of Banco Santander, with the participation of the director of the Climate Bonds Initiative, Justine Leigh-Bell, the president of YouGreen Cooperativa, Roger Koeppl, and the president of Jardim Botânico, Sergio Besserman. Other highlights included the need to develop mechanisms to finance projects to mitigate and adapt to climate change, especially green bonds (or green bonds), and the observation, by Justine Leigh-Bell, that the economic crisis is potentially a vector of change towards a low-carbon economy, as actions to reduce emissions can also increase the efficiency and profits of certain sectors.
A new relationship between business and natural resources
The second panel of the Congress, moderated by Daniela Lerda, coordinator of the CLUA Brazil Initiative program at the Ford Foundation, concluded that businesses are the new activists for sustainability, due to their own business capacity to ensure that objectives are achieved. However, there is the challenge of promoting a cultural change that does not dissociate natural capital from social and financial capital. One of the tools is carbon pricing, which, however, is floundering in uncertainty about how this regulation will be implemented, including due to the lack of a basis for comparison applicable to all companies. Another highlight was the role of the common citizen – who dictates the consumption model and has in his hands the decision to simply consume less or to adopt a circular economy, based on non-consumption, reuse and recycling. Thus, the market ceases to be an abstract entity and becomes the result of the sum of each individual's choices, which directly impact business decisions. The panel included the participation of Ana Carolina Szklo, senior manager of Projects and Technical Advisory at CEBDS, Kevin Moss, global director of the Business Center of the World Resources Institute (WRI), and Marcelo Alonso, sustainability director at Natura, who highlighted: “We are the last generation that can end global warming and also the first that can end extreme poverty”.
The future of cities and sustainable mobility
Moderated by Professor Ronaldo Balassiano, from the Strategic Planning Center for Transportation and Tourism at the Alberto Luiz Coimbra Institute of Graduate Studies and Research in Engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the third panel was inspired by the impacts/legacies brought by holding major events in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The panel included Jailson Silva, general coordinator of the Rio de Janeiro Favela Observatory, Pedro Junqueira, director of Operations for the City of Rio de Janeiro, and Rasmus Valanko, director of Climate and Energy at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), of which CEBDS is a member. Mobility was an important point of discussion, including its direct impact on reducing carbon emissions, as well as social engagement, waste treatment, energy generation and construction, topics that directly influence Brazil's ability to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2050.
Where we come from, where we are and where we are going
With the participation of the president of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES), Maria Silvia Bastos Marques, the president of the board of trustees of the Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development (FBDS), Israel Klabin, and the president of CEBDS, Marina Grossi, as mediator, the closing panel aimed to identify the major challenges facing governments, companies and society in the face of sustainability. Klabin opened the session by reviewing the development of the concept of sustainability since 1987, when the term was coined, until today, when societies must choose between maintaining the current catastrophic course of exploitation of natural and energy resources or using technology and human responsibility to immediately embrace a sustainable development model. Maria Silvia, in turn, established a bridge between the past and the future of sustainability when she spoke about the new agenda of the institution she heads, which will start to finance basic sanitation programs. According to her, this is a 19th century agenda that Brazil has not yet fulfilled, since it is estimated that 50% of the population does not have access to sewage systems. The contribution of the business sector to sustainability was Marina Grossi's focus. According to her, by joining initiatives to contain climate change, the business sector can contribute annually to reductions in carbon emissions of between 3.2 billion and 4.2 billion tons, something like 7% to 9% of global emissions. In Brazil, she cited the partnership between CEBDS and We Mean Business (WMB), a global coalition of leaders who are revolutionizing their business practices in light of commitments such as the use of renewable electricity, ending deforestation in the production chain and carbon pricing: “The formal adhesion of Brazilian companies and partners, such as CNI itself, shows that decision-making around climate change is strategic and essential for the future of any operation”.
Sustentável 2016 was sponsored by banks Bradesco, Itau and Santander, and featured a performance by the group Spectaculu at the opening of the event. At the end, Israel Klabin and the founders of CEBDS, Erling Sven Lorentzen and Eliezer Batista, represented by his son Harald Batista, were honored.
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Photos: Vânia Mendes
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