Fortune 500 companies are ramping sustainability initiatives: Is Africa paying attention?
In an economy where the President is removing protections on environmental safeguards, a growing number of Fortune 500 companies are accelerating efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, procuring more renewable energy and reduce their energy bills through energy efficiency.
A report released April 25, by World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Ceres, Calvert Research and Management (Calvert) and CDP says that sixty-three percent of Fortune 100 companies have set one or more clean energy targets.
Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies – 48 percent – have at least one climate or clean energy target, up five percent from an earlier 2014 report. A significant numbers of companies are setting 100 percent renewable energy goals and science-based GHG reduction targets that align with the global goal of limiting global temperature rise to below two degrees Celsius.
Findings from the new report, “Power Forward 3.0: How the largest US companies are capturing business value while addressing climate change,” are based on 2016 company disclosures to CDP, which holds the world’s largest collection of self-reported corporate environmental data, and other public sources.
“American businesses are leading the transition to a clean economy because it is smart business and it is what their customers want,” said Marty Spitzer, World Wildlife Fund’s senior director of climate and renewable energy.
The commitment to sustainability is low in Africa though the continent is the most susceptible to upheavals from environmental disasters. Multinational companies in Africa are still in the forefront of commitment to sustainable initiatives and many African governments still have poorly developed sustainable regulatory frameworks.
According to the United Nations, there is an inextricable link between poverty and environmental degradation. Poverty can be the cause and/or the effect of environmental degradation. Poverty itself is a complex multidimensional problem with origins in both the National and international domains.
To achieve sustainability in Africa, the UN opines that an environmental policy that focuses mainly on the conservation and protection of resources must take due account of those who depend on the resources for their livelihoods, otherwise it could have an adverse impact both on poverty alleviation and on chances for long-term success in resource and environmental conservation.
The agency also avers that a development policy that focuses mainly on increasing the production of goods without addressing the sustainability of the resource base will sooner or later run into declining productivity, thereby aggravating poverty.
Nigeria and other African countries have a plethora of programmes to curb poverty. In Nigeria, successive governments have adopted programmes such as economic programmes for the empowerment of women; Primary Health Care (PHC) programme, whose purpose is to bring health care, particularly preventive health care to the grass roots of the Nigerian Society and establishment of the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) in all Nigerian states.
However, many of these programmes were not structured with a long-term objective of enabling all people to achieve sustainable livelihoods as new governments fail to continue them. To be impactful, these programmes should have an integrating factor that allows policies to address issues of development, sustainable resource management, and poverty eradication simultaneously.
Current efforts at sustainability by big companies is paying off as the report indicate there were about 80,000 emission-reducing projects by 190 Fortune 500 companies and nearly $3.7 billion was saved in 2016 alone.
The emission reductions from these efforts are equivalent to taking 45 coal-fired power plants offline every year. Praxair, IBM and Microsoft are among the companies saving tens of millions of dollars annually through their energy efficiency efforts.
The 240 companies with targets have set one or more of the following goals: GHG reductions, energy efficiency improvements, or renewable energy sourcing. Two hundred and eleven companies have set a GHG reduction goal, making it the most common target.
Businesses in Africa should lead the way in setting, implementing and communicating clean energy targets while supporting local, state and national policies that make it easier to achieve their climate and energy commitments.
ISAAC ANYAOGU