The three-day United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) summit beginning from Monday in New York will take stock of the global progress and what more remains to be done to achieve the goals. The summit will be attended by senior government officials and business leaders across the world.
Top Indian industry leaders like Reliance Industries CMD Mukesh Ambani, ITC chairman YC Deveshwar, Ballarpur Industries MD Rajeev Ranjan Vederah and LifeSpring Hospitals CEO Anant Kumar are expected to join. Also, international business leaders like Edelman CEO Richard Edelman, ExxonMobil chairman Rex Tillerson, Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll and Diageo Africa MD Nick Blazquez are expected to join the event. Ambani is already a member of the MDG Advocacy Group along with Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates and UN Foundation chairman Ted Turner.
Speaking to FE before leaving for the event, Anant Kumar, CEO, LifeSpring Hospitals, said, “We hope that concrete steps and lessons from this event can be used to advise businesses and governments on how the private sector can best be engaged with the global MDG agenda. We believe that companies can and should conduct business in a manner that is aligned with social and/or environmental values.” LifeSpring focuses on providing high quality and affordable maternal healthcare to low-income women. Kumar added, “Furthermore, we are hopeful that new public-private partnerships will stem from this event to provide under-served communities with access to basic needs such as healthcare in innovative ways.”
It was in 2000 that 189 governments pledged to achieve MDGs by 2015 to reduce poverty, hunger, maternal and child deaths, diseases, gender inequality and environmental degradation. Though there has been a lot of progress by many countries, there is still a lag in achieving all the goals globally. A recently launched report, ‘What will it take to achieve the Millennium Development Goals’ sums up the action agenda for the summit, including the private sectors role in achieving the goals in the remaining five years.
The private sector’s role would particularly come up for deliberations in the event on accelerating progress towards the MDGs through inclusive business on Tuesday. The event is expected to be attended by more than 100 representatives from businesses, governments, and NGOs to deliberate on the role of business in coming up with sustainable and market-based solutions to poverty and urge governments to provide an enabling framework for inclusive business.
In its conclusion, the meet is expected to come up with a business statement, which would be released at subsequently at the UN Private Sector Forum, which is likely to focus on getting commitments from global leaders, including chief executives.
These two predominantly business events would be held in addition to six plenary meetings and six interactive roundtables, which would also include private sector representatives. Besides, the World Business and Development Awards would felicitate the private sector for its contribution in achieving the MDGs.
Firms focusing on carbon management as a strategic business priority
Irrespective of the success of the global climate change talks, companies are focusing on carbon management as a strategic business priority, according to the new 2010 Global 500 report released on Monday by UK-based organisation Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). It has been produced by PwC and sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. CDP is known for hosting the biggest inventory of carbon emissions of the largest companies in the world.
While globally 65% companies have set emission reduction targets, the figure is only 33% for companies in India.
But local companies claim to be doing more at the ground level. Two out of every three (69%) Indian respondents are taking action to reduce emissions in contrast to 48% companies worldwide integrating climate change in their business strategy. Action is focused mostly on energy efficiency and launching innovative products and services. Similarly, more local companies (88%) have assigned climate change responsibility to a senior executive in contrast to 85% globally. The percentage of companies seeing opportunity in climate change is same (90%) for global as well as local companies, according to the findings of the report.
CDP sought information from more than 4,700 of the biggest companies in the world on behalf of 534 investors, including HDFC Bank, IDBI Bank, IDFC and YES Bank, with assets of $64 trillion to disclose their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and actions to address consequent risks and harness opportunities. Based on their responses, Siemens, Deutsche Post, BASF, Bayer and Samsung Electronics have been adjudged as the best performers globally.
Source: The Financial Express
Published on 21 September 2010