By Joydeep Gupta, IANS,
Singapore : Business houses around the globe are no longer asking why they should deal with climate change; now they want to know how, UN Global Compact Executive Director Georg Kell said here Wednesday.
Speaking at the concluding session of the B4E (Business for the Environment) global summit, Kell said during the two days of the meeting he had found “momentum growing to tackle climate change, especially in the private sector”.
The summit that brought together over 500 business leaders from more than 30 countries also provided “powerful examples that new technologies can be a large part of the answer” to the climate change crisis, Kell said.
“Now many more businesses are asking for sound government leadership,” he added.
UN Under Secretary General and executive director of UN Environment Programme Achim Steiner said businesses around the world were divided into two groups – those comfortable with the status quo and those who wanted to change in response to the environmental crisis – and he had found the first group getting smaller.
Emphasising the need for policy changes that led to a greener future, Steiner gave an example from Singapore, where solar power was not becoming financially viable because the power generators were not buying it back from whoever produced it.
He contrasted this with the situation in Germany, where the government had forced power companies to buy energy from whoever produced it from renewable sources, and this soon led to 18 percent of all energy in Germany coming from renewable sources.