My Climate Change News

Applying these principles can lend more authenticity to sustainability decisions and strengthen understanding among key audiences.

As the sustainability agenda expands, it becomes even more complicated to manage issues, communicate progress with stakeholders and maintain influence in a world of limited attention spans. Sustainability professionals have periodically compounded their own dilemma and shortchanged their influence by chasing shiny objects rather than adhering to more focused concepts integral to business and policy success. Four concepts in particular convey authenticity but are underused to communicate effectively about sustainability issues. Employing these principles would simplify understanding and resonate with key audiences.

Over the past 30 years, two parallel universes have addressed pollution and climate change. First, traditional environmental statutes and regulations have cranked down air, waste and water releases primarily from industrial sources. A second, separate sphere of scientific assessments, international agreements and infrastructure investments have incrementally attempted to hasten the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but with limited success. From time to time, policy decisions taken in one universe benefit environmental conditions in the second. For example, since the 1970s the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued more restrictive ambient air quality standards for particulate matter (PM). The public health benefits of PM controls overwhelmingly outweigh the cost of implementing them. The co-benefits of reducing PM to prevent future GHG releases derives from the fact that many PM sources (automobiles, chemical plants, electric power generating stations, refineries) a

Going forward, business investments and public policies aimed at reducing pollution and abating GHG emissions should be jointly leveraged. The existence of two parallel universes - one focused on pollution, the other on...