The environment is depressing

I’ve spent a good deal of this week preparing content for what we term an ‘internal focus week’. These are periodic, week-long bursts of internal communication around a certain topic.

Next week is our annual Environmental Sustainability Week. It pivots on the UNEP’s World Environment Day but – as you would expect – takes a more Capgemini-based perspective. We cover a fairly broad spectrum of topics ranging from our own environmental performance to biodiversity and from climate change risk to sustainability services for our clients.

Necessarily, my research involves a lot of reading and, I have to say, that is a depressing task. There’s not much good news to report and, even more down-heartening, my research for this year’s Environmental Sustainability Week yields an even more pessimistic view than last year’s research. Refer, for example, to:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report,

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased”

The National Climate Assessment published by the White House

“Over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly. Increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change…. The only real surprises have been that some changes, such as sea level rise and Arctic sea ice decline, have outpaced earlier projections”

The DARA International website.

“The rising scale of crises, our collective inability to resolve protracted disasters, and the interplay of new global challenges – such as water scarcity, climate change, food price volatility and rapid urbanisation – have led to a global deficit in the operational and financial capacity of governments and humanitarian organisations to respond”

So, come Friday, I was at a pretty low ebb.

Enter David Bent from Forum for the Future. David was kind enough to record a podcast for us as part of our Environmental Sustainability Week content. I asked David if, from his dialogue with businesses around the world, he is hopeful of positive change. “Yes” he said, “I see leading companies investing time and money to change their business … change the rules of the game. That’s really heartening”

Thank you David.