Sustainable Banking: Banorte-Ixe at the Global Climate Change Forum
For Mexico's third-largest bank, balancing long-term sustainability and short-term market forces was a key theme at the Carbon Disclosure Project's Global Climate Change Forum 2012
How can investments in low-carbon technologies and energy efficiency be made during today's uncertain economic climate? With extreme weather events on the rise and energy and commodity price fluctuations becoming more frequent, how can a company best manage operating costs? What are the best practices for adapting to resource scarcity and developing sustainable long-term business models? How can political leadership on climate change issues be sparked? How can we achieve greater certainty and clarity in regulation?
These were some of the high-level questions that were recently addressed at the Carbon Disclosure Project's Global Climate Change Forum 2012, what the CDP described as a "global virtual stage…to explore how businesses can succeed in an uncertain, resource constrained world." Connecting 10 locations over four continents, the Web-based forum was watched by some 2,000 people worldwide.[1]
GLOBAL 500 CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT 2012
The forum centered around the release of CDP's Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012. The report, in addition to revealing the top companies making it in to CDP's 2012 leadership indexes, "highlights how the largest corporations in the world are tackling climate change and building business resilience through innovation and leadership."[2]
Produced on behalf of 655 institutional investors representing USD 78 trillion in assets, the report, co-authored by PwC and now in its tenth year, provides an analysis of climate change as a strategic focus at the world's largest public corporations. This year, 81 percent of corporations—405 in total—in the Global 500 responded to the CDP questionnaire. The findings have struck a chord of concern.
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Reynard is a Justmeans staff writer for Sustainable Finance and Corporate Social Responsibility. A former media executive with 15 years experience in the private and non-profit sectors, Reynard is the co-founder of MomenTech, a New York-based experimental production studio that explores transnational progressivism, neo-nomadism, post-humanism and futurism. He is also author of the blog 13.7 Billion Years, covering cosmology, biodiversity, animal welfare, conservation and ethical consumption. He is currently developing the Underground Desert Living Unit (UDLU), a sustainable single-family dwelling envisioned as a potential adaptation response to the future loss of human habitat due to the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Reynard is also a contributing author of "Biomes and Ecosystems," a comprehensive reference encyclopedia of the Earth's key biological and geographic classifications, to be published by Salem Press in 2013.
