Businesses must and will play a central and essential role in the ecological transformation of our world. They are the drivers of change, holding the resources and innovation needed to make a meaningful difference.

 

Businesses are not only responsible for minimizing the environmental impact of their activities, but they are also ideally placed to be leaders in green transformation by bringing impactful solutions to markets.

 

But a necessary condition for the success of their ecological transformation is profitability, which is the key to their sustainability. A profitability reviewed in the light of the equation People-Planet-Profit.

 

This profitability will come through sustainable markets which will experience strong growth over the next 10 to 15 years and which contain a multitude of growth opportunities for companies which will seize them and develop impactful solutions.

 

Our work in identifying thousands of sustainable solutions, as well as that of other organizations such as the remarkable action of the Solar Impulse Foundation which has labeled more than 1,500 impact solutions, show that many solutions exist today, are operational... but they must be deployed on a large scale to have a significant impact.

 

But this beginning of ecological transformation – because we are only at the very beginning! – is still too often done within the framework of a linear economy.

We must promote a rapid rise in the circular economy coupled with greater sobriety and put an end to the intolerable waste of our resources, and to practices such as planned obsolescence.