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A recently released report from one of the leading business organizations of sustainable development has some stark and shocking ideas about what may lay ahead for our future.
As many of you may already know, United Nations Agenda 21 & the Sustainable Development philosophy that it supports is infiltrating our corporations and businesses nationwide and around the world. With the traditional “bottom line” measurement of business success increasingly giving way to the new “triple bottom line” method that represents the balance of the three pillars of sustainability (Environment, Economy, & Social Equity) we see a radical shift toward a far left re-engineering in the structure of doing business.
The idea of Corporate Social Responsibility or (CSR) is interchangeable with the concept of sustainability and adherence to the triple bottom line method of measuring success. To support this shift in corporate culture we see various organizations that have emerged that serve to either gauge the progress of corporate efforts toward a “sustainable” goal or to promote and advance the agenda of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability even further. One of these major organizations is called the World Business Council for Sustainable Development or the (WBCSD) which according to their website was founded by Swiss industrialist Stephan Schmidheiny “…on the eve of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to involve business in sustainability issues and give it a voice in the forum.”
Mr. Schmidheiny became involved in the process when Maurice Strong the Secretary General of the Rio summit invited him to coordinate the business participation in the meeting. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit is where “Agenda 21” the United Nations document for implementation of Sustainable Development worldwide was crafted and signed by a majority of the world’s nations.
From this beginning the World Business Council for Sustainable Development would go on to grow and become a major organization today composed of “…some 200 members drawn from more than 35 countries and 20 major industrial sectors, involving some 1,000 business leaders globally.”
Some of the corporations who are members are:
Duke Energy, 3M, Alcoa, American Electric Power, Caterpillar, Chevron Corporation, ConocoPhillips, Constellation Energy, Dow Chemical, DuPont, General Electric, IBM, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson & Son, The Coca-Cola Company, United Technologies Corporation, UPS, Weyerhaeuser
The (WBCSD) organization operates under the mission statement “…to provide business leadership as a catalyst for change toward sustainable development, and to support the business license to operate, innovate and grow in a world increasingly shaped by sustainable development issues”
The (WBCSD) recently released a report envisioning what the world may look like under a global sustainable development system over the course of the next forty years. This report is called “Vision 2050: The New Agenda for Business”.
This vision, according to the (WBCSD) website addresses questions like:
- What would a vision of a sustainable future look like?
- What are the pathways and solutions for achieving sustainability?
- What does this say for the changes needed?
- What are the risks to achieving this “sustainable” future?
- What are the dilemmas we must address to move forward?
- What are the robust actions, policies and investments needed to move rapidly onto a sustainable pathway?
- …and what is the role of business ?
In describing the "Vision 2050" report the (WBCSD) says that the vision offers neither a “prescriptive plan nor blueprint”….yet it goes on to “backcast” a likely scenario of future world development from a year 2050 sustainable vantage point.
The “Vision 2050” report sees a world that must be radically changed and different than we live in today. Viewing this future society through the pages of the “Vision 2050” document reveals a strange, new world that is much more interdependent and that heralds a “One World – People and Planet” ideal, it’s a world where familiar economic systems have been radically altered changing the ways we gauge things like growth, and prosperity. Within the pages of the document, among other things, we see a sustainable march through the “Turbulent Teens” 2010-2020, toward an era of “Transformation Time” 2020-2050 and ultimately a globalist, sustainable new world by the year 2050.
This report is filled with many more revelations of how the (WBCSD) envisions our future world and how we as individuals and corporations operate in it.
The (WBCSD) is a powerful organization promoting Agenda 21 policies of Sustainable Development within the global corporate world, and will be returning to Rio next year to attend Earth Summit 2012 also known as Rio+20 as a voice for sustainable business.
The “Vision 2050: The New Agenda for Business” report was created by a collaborative effort of 29 member companies of the (WBCSD) and is available on the World Business Council for Sustainable Development website or by clicking the "Vision 2050" image above. I would encourage each of you to read and analyze this document carefully as it is the best effort at envisioning our future from those who are in great positions of global influence and power.
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