We don’t know the priority of climate change and global warming in the business world’s agenda. However, the information shared in the forum organised for the 6th time by RepMan Reputation Research Centre this year was striking. One of the most important findings of the research, which was conducted by ZENNA Corporate Brand Research and Consultancy on behalf of RepMan, was that 63% of the opinion leaders thought that companies were not “sincere” about sustainability. You can visit www.repman.com.tr for the details of this research.
Overall, the business world is making an effort and has goodwill in terms of sustainability, but when it comes to dealing with financial expectations, “a conflict of interest” comes to the fore.
We are trying to colour the planet’s red line “green”. However, the news about climate change and global warming provide data which shows that our goodwill and effort are not sufficient at all.
If we could go back in time, we would see that nobody cared about the planet’s red line (or any other line) until 1990s. We could ruin forests as much as we wanted, we could damage arable land for mining exploration, we could release chemicals into the streams, rivers and seas, we could use carbon monoxide as a perfume in production and consumption, and we could outrageously ignore nature’s rules of sustainability of life. (Considering the efforts to get the olive cultivation law through, we can say that the things we mentioned above are still valid.)
We might have started to open our eyes since Generation Y is a bit more sensitive, since this generation was promoted to significant positions in important companies, and since the scientific data about pollution started to affect the flow of daily life. It always suited us to leave the repairs to our worn out planet to someone else without ever facing the fact that our private lives played a role in this pollution in any way. It didn’t matter how many times we flew in a month. Our “indifference” to separating waste glass, plastic and paper was becoming a part of our lifestyles. It was of course not possible to know that more than 1.5 million people were not able to find water if we did not even ask why we had to pay for water in the first place. We thought that our companies paid the cost of the petrol consumed by our vehicles anyway. That thought got lost among all the unanswered questions about how and where our organisations poured their waste.
Beside a Bedridden Patient
In short, the planet was being polluted and its curable diseases were turning into a bedridden patient. However, we targeted everyone but ourselves.
We invented corporate social responsibility! “Dressing” the planet’s wound in a social or corporate dimension suddenly became an attractive idea as if we dealt with our personal responsibilities sufficiently. We always denied that the main goal of giving resources to social projects was to appear in a three-column article in the newspapers. We even turned those social projects into TV advertisements while trying to whitewash our faults which made the planet sick.
A movement started when regulatory organisations started taking responsibility to create public benefits laws, memoranda or regulations under pressure from civil society. At least “The Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact or Millennium Development Goals” and “the sustainability standards” of civil initiatives like Global Reporting Initiative revealed that the burden of responsibilities forgotten by individuals was laid on companies.
However, things started to become more complicated just at that point, because the main problems turned into “a conflict of interest” when trying to comply with laws, regulations and regulative instructions.
There are two reasons for this: The first one is the fact that “total compliance” with them consists of official instructions which are way behind the things to do. Conditions change until the regulatory organisations take a step towards “the things to do” and publish them. Naturally, companies take these instructions as a basis and design their operational processes according to them. Does that cure the present traumatic results threatening our entire future? Of course not! It is not even a medical dressing! If we have “sustainability” in our agenda today, it may partly be because of our carelessness, impassivity and greed. However, it is also because of the practices of the governments and public institutions that were not able to identify this problem at the right time and to put it in their laws and regulations.
The second reason is the fact that companies are still managed using “finance-based” data. A company’s stakeholders may appreciate how much clean energy the company uses, how carefully it destroys its waste or how much it has reduced the rate of carbon monoxide. However, the main question in the shareholders’ meetings is still “How much have we earned?”
It is impossible for the planet to be happy in an economic and commercial world where growth rates are measured based on financial data. The planet’s expectations and the companies’ interests step on each other’s toes under the table! It seems like the companies will win in the short term. However, I really wonder how they will answer the question “Why aren’t there any raw materials?” when they cannot find any raw materials to produce things due to the destruction of nature.
Embracing the Planet Holistically
By 2000s, when things were globally managed based on old habits, we started to see some hints that would restore our hopes at a time when regulations had no clue about them. These developments initiated by the people who cared about the planet’s problems showed that there was still hope for the future although they were not sufficient.
For instance, sun, wind and water, which were defined as clean energy, merged realistically with technology and entered our lives. Large companies started to use sustainability philosophies in sourcing and purchasing. Local seeds have almost become more important than the GMO agenda. Organic and ecological transition found itself a strong position in the vortex of city life! Different points of sensitivity started to be formed at different levels of social life. We discovered that the people with disabilities were “one of us” in society a long time before the related laws and regulations. Women, children, animals, plant species and everything about life are in front of us as the minorities’ “matter” even if they are too small.
Consuming with Green Brands!
This agenda that we have caught up on even if it’s a bit late has formed “the green brands”. The concept of green brands, which can be translated as “I realise that the planet is being polluted, but I should at least do something to ensure that it is polluted less”, does not take us away from “the consumer society”, which is the root of the problem. That’s because the main problem is “our consumption habits which are the cancerous cells of the last century”.
We are still consuming madly. Cars, bags, shoes, detergent, shampoo, pens, stationery, computers, electronic devices, and whatever else you can think of. It doesn’t matter how much our income is. We are in debt to the future and we do not have to pay it now. However, we can consume now! We have a philosophy assuming that we will be happy as long as we consume.
I don’t know if women can see shopping from a different point of view when they find out that around 8200 litres of water are used to make a handbag. However, we know that the natural damage caused by human beings is coming back at human beings as the destruction of nature. We pay the price for ignoring climate change with floods, drought, famine, epidemics and tens of other things that can be counted here. The ozone hole is getting bigger every single day. It threatens not only human beings but also the whole life on the planet.
Internet kids born in early 2000s have recently started to enter universities. Unlike us, they did not see a poison like DDT, which is the number one trigger of cancer, being sprayed from planes in order to protect crops in fields from pests. They were not the young people who used aspartame, carcinogen artificial sugar, in fuzzy drinks to make them “diet or light”. They had to jump “headlong” into the world that we tried to understand quietly. They understood the world that we left them was not the “future” that we should have left. They found out that colouring the planet’s red lines green was “an exercise in futility”! That’s why, the colours of a “rainbow” can make them meet beyond discrimination on the grounds of religion, language, race, gender and nation. The planet’s red lines will hopefully correspond to their values in the required colours.
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