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Corporate Sustainability Emerging

“When I became chairman and CEO of GE in 2001, I would never have imagined that I would be standing here today giving a speech focusing on the environment,” are the words Jeffrey Immelt spoke to an audience in Washington, DC in 2005. Immelt, head of the 11th largest corporation in the world with revenues of $157 billion, spoke these words as he announced GE’s new strategy called Ecomagination. This strategy is based on the development of a new series of eco-friendly products that will place GE at the cutting edge of “cleaner power and environmental technology” and is expected to bring in an additional $20 billion in revenues to the company by 2010. GE – now moving toward the forefront of corporate sustainability with this new global strategy – is described by some as “bucking business world tradition,” but GE is in fact not an anomaly among the world’s largest corporations. (Read the full article on corporate sustainability trends here or the article with a focus on the forest products industry here -- the figure below is a diagram illustrating sustainability initiatives from the paper on the forest products industry).

Nearly every one of the largest 50 corporations in the world (based on Fortune’s Global 500) has undertaken significant new corporate environmental commitments over the past 10 years or so. From the most effectively marketed example of BP (from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum) to the notorious “sustainability laggards” such as Wal-Mart, corporate environmental sustainability has become a mainstream issue. Wal-Mart’s new (2006) commitments include a plan to double the amount of organic food it sells, selling only seafood that has been independently certified as sustainably harvested, requiring redesigned eco-efficient transport trucks, and cutting greenhouse gas emissions at existing stores 20% over the next seven years. CEO Lee Scott has led the initiative, with the help of sustainability guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, in part to improve its image and in part to save millions through efficiency gains.

Many of these corporations – including Wal-Mart, Citigroup, Ford, Royal Dutch Shell, and Chevron – have been the targets of aggressive brand smearing campaigns by advocacy NGOs in the past and have since developed public commitments and concrete programs to improve their corporate environmental performance. Other corporations have been moving forward on their own for a variety of reasons. While there is a great deal of skepticism about how far these corporations will truly move toward genuine sustainability, few can deny that significant trends are emerging throughout many global industries in the direction of greater environmental sustainability.

The text above is an excerpt from a working paper on "Emerging Trends in Global Corporate Environmental Sustainability."

See Part 2 of this paper -- which focuses specifically on how these trends are playing out in Sustainability Trends in the Forest Products Industry" (with a special look at Home Depot and linkages with other actors).