BUSINESS MANAGMENT - CONTEMPORY ISSUES IN BUSINESS

Business Management - Contemporary Issues in Business

Business Management - Contemporary Issues in Business

Purpose of the Study

The main purpose of this research paper is to make a supportive argument on the statement ““companies that manage and mitigate their exposure to climate-change risk whilst seeking new opportunities for profits will generate a competitive advantage over rivals in a carbon-constrained future”.

Business Needs To Promote Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Wolf, 2004). It contains within it two key concepts:

the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given;

And the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs (Wolf, 2004).

Over the last ten years, many businesses have become aware of the need to incorporate sustainable development into their core business activities (Wolf, 2004).

The striking feature of the global drive toward sustains- able development is the extent to which the agenda has evolved since the 1992 'Earth Summit' in Rio: at least, certainly the way in which the emphasis has changed (Dowling, 2001). This has important implications and poses new challenges for business. The immediate post-Rio focus for business was on how to marry economic efficiency with environmental excellence to ensure continued economic growth, while consuming the world's resources and protecting its environment in a way that did not compromise the needs of future generations (Dowling, 2001). The business response was the concept of eco-efficiency: combining environmental and economic performance to create more value for business itself and also, crucially, for the whole community with less impact.

Many companies are today well advanced toward eco-efficiency, and it has also become a widely accepted policy concept, endorsed by, among others, the OECD and the European Commission (Dowling, 2001). Of course, more in business need to adopt eco-efficiency, not only the multinationals based in the industrialized countries but also small and medium enterprises in all sectors in all countries (Dowling, 2001). So the work of the WBCSD in pushing eco-efficiency further and faster within the whole business community remains of the utmost importance.

But sustainable development is built on three pillars: economic growth, ecological balance and social progress (Swierczek, 1991). These items have always been on the sustainability agenda, but until recently the third the social pillar has received less attention. That is changing: far greater emphasis is being placed now on social progress, and specifically on what business is doing to contribute to this goal, and how it is delivering its contribution (Swierczek, 1991). This has opened up a raft of issues.

Ecological & Economic Arguments

It may at first appear unlikely with a direct connection between a situation in which a system of transfer payments is changed to one of basic income, and a situation where people would opt for a more ecological lifestyle (Swierczek, ...