Twenty years ago, in 1992, the first Rio Earth Summit took place in Brazil. While it was convened amid great fanfare and high expectation, the only really lasting legacy was the creation of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the christening of "eco-efficiency"--doing more with less--as a key private-sector based strategy for sustainable development. The governmental negotiations produced a massive volume--"Agenda 21" but little concrete action.
Next week, the Rio + 20 Summit will convene, again in Brazil. The past twenty years has produced some good news and some bad news. First the good news: Eco-efficiency has become standard practice in large corporations everywhere and is now spreading to the world's small and medium sized enterprises as well. This is a major accomplishment and has significantly reduced the impact per unit of output in economic activity.
Now for the bad news: we have not yet begun to actually slow or reverse the level of human impact on the planet. Indeed, over the past twenty years, we have tripled the size of the global economy, added nearly two billion people to the world's population, and further intensified our ecological footprint on the planet. Growth swamped eco-efficiency. Today, the science is clear: we have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet and serious repercussions are now inevitable.
In 1997, I wrote an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review entitled Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World. The piece won the McKinsey Award in 1997 as the best article in HBR. The article stressed that corporate eco-efficiency (greening) strategies aimed at incrementally reducing negative social and environmental impacts, while important, would not be nearly adequate to the challenge of global sustainability in the decades ahead. Even then, it was clear that "beyond greening" strategies--leapfrog clean technologies, and business models that included and lifted the four plus billion poor in the developing world--would be essential if we were to fundamentally change the course of the global economy, and set it on a course to sustainability.
In the 1990s, people spoke in terms of the need for fundamental change over the next decade or two. Indeed, the title of the WBCSD's inaugural book was "Changing Course." Unfortunately, all we got was continuous improvement through eco-efficiency.
As I prepare to leave for Rio next week, my hope is that this Summit can plant a new stake in the ground--the Beyond Greening Stake. I will do everything I can to drive this agenda.
We are running out of time.
