WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY
Sam Lakha
June 5, 2009
The Volans team wishes you a happy World Environment Day, an occasion launched by the fledgling United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1972. Much progress has been made in recent decades, but some of the underlying trends are profoundly worrying—as spotlighted, for example, by the work of the Global Footprint Network, one of Volans’ Phoenix 50 organisations .
Still, WED brings some happy memories to mind: seventeen years later, on World Environment Day 1989, John Elkington and Julia Hailes were elected to the UN Global 500 Roll of Honour for their work with SustainAbility, founded in 1987, and the green consumer agenda, with The Green Consumer Guide first published in 1988. Around the same time, too, John served on the International Board of Earth Day 1990, the first to reach beyond the USA and go global.
Earlier this year, during the Business for the Environment (B4E) summit in Paris, John took part in the ceremony in Paris where UNEP announced the latest round of Champions of the Earth, the successor to the Global 500, where people like Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Janine Benyus were celebrated.
Champions of the Earth, 2009: Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Janine Benyus
Over more than 25 years, years John has worked a good deal with UNEP, for example helping them with 1984’s World Industry Conference on Environmental Management (WICEM), where he coined the term environmental excellence—which has since enjoyed a long and successful run. From the early 1990s to date, UNEP has been a consistent partner in work SustainAbility has done on stakeholder engagement, sustainability reporting and supply chain management—and, in the past year, in work done by Volans which resulted in The Phoenix Economy. We are now in negotiation in terms of a significant extension of that work, whose details we hope to be able to announce soon.
Commemorated yearly on June 5th, WED sees the United Nations spotlighting efforts to boost worldwide awareness of the environment and encourage political attention and action. The agenda is to:
· Give a human face to environmental issues;
· Empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development;
· Promote an understanding that communities are pivotal to changing attitudes towards environmental issues;
· Advocate partnership which will ensure all nations and peoples enjoy a safer and more prosperous future.
Climate change is the overarching theme this year, reflecting the urgency for nations to agree on a new deal at the crucial climate convention meeting in Copenhagen some 180 days from now, plus the links with overcoming poverty and improved management of forests. And this is an area where Volans, in the wake of our participation in the World Business Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen, is also now working up an exciting pair of projects, to be announced during the summer.
