SOS_Unabridged

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE: SUSTAINABILITYEmbedding Sustainability in Strategic Planning

Strategic Obejctive: SustainabilityEmbedding Sustainability in Strategic Planning

September 11, 2016

PrefaceThe Brundtland Report of 1987 defined sustainability in terms of sustainable development as: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Almost thirty years later, sustainability is not just a trending buzzword, but has become the major global challenge of our time. In late 2011, a survey conducted by EY and the GreenBiz Group of 272 sustainability executives in 24 industry sectors found that “76 percent of survey respondents anticipate natural resource shortages will affect their core business objectives over the next 3-5 years.”

Unlike a profession or industry that funnels those with the same skill sets and backgrounds into careers, the pool of those who have earned an MBA Degree span the globe and transcend every career boundary or discipline. The mission of the MBA League is to connect MBAs for the purpose of information and resource sharing to solve practical business problems great and small and every size in between. We believe that if we pool our knowledge and experience, there is no challenge that cannot be overcome. Our ultimate goal is to overcome the limits of silos within business and work towards the common goal of creating a sustainable world, especially in terms of the global water supply, which is the prerequisite for all life on Earth.

Corporate Sustainability and Social Responsibility, or CSSR, is contributing to society in worthwhile ways and protecting our natural environment while still vying for innovation, value creation and profitability.

Thank you very much for your interest in our work and this White Paper. We at the MBA League are dedicated to serving you, our fellow business thought leaders, readers and our pioneers. We hope you will join with us on this journey.

For more information regarding this paper and the information herein, for consulting services, speaking engagements and workshops, please contact either Matthew Urdan or Elizabete De Lima.

Matthew S. Urdan, MBA Founder

MBA LEAGUE EDITORIAL BOARD

Matthew S. UrdanElizabete De LimaTara BarbieriKevin DentJohn HutsonPatrice Luoma

WRITERS

Matthew S. UrdanElizabete De Lima

CONTACT

Matthew S. Urdan Sevierville, TN(865) [email protected]

Elizabete De LimaRehoboth, [email protected]

© 2016 MBA League

IMAGE DISCLAIMER: All images and photography are either copyright Matthew S. Urdan, copyrighted and attibuted to the author inline, or fully licensed from Adobe Stock Images.

Elizabete De Lima, MBA Founder

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STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE: SUSTAINABILITY

Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Contents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Climate Change, Water Depletion & Scarcity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Business & the Obligation to Future Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Strategic Sustainability Planning: A Narrative Synthesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

The Problems & Challenges with Corporate Social Responsibility . . . . . 40

Sustainable Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

BPR, LUP, Planning, Game Thoery & Nash Equilibrium . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Solutions for Embedding Sustainability as a Core Component of Strategic

Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

Appendix & References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

GAIA Theory & Strategic Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64

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STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE: SUSTAINABILITY

“BANK OF AMERICA MERRILL LYNCH RECENTLY PUT OUT A GIANT REPORT ON THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE AND WATER . AMONG THE TAKEAWAYS: WATER SCARCITY, AND THE RESULTING AGRICULTURAL CONSTRAINTS, IS THE BIG-GEST GLOBAL PROBLEM OF THE 21ST CENTURY (FERRO, 2015).

When considering sustainability as a core component in strategic planning, there are many complex issues that need to be examined to inform strategy construction, not the least of which is a lack of consistency as to how the term “sustainability” is defined. In the nearly thirty years since the Brundtland Report and the coining of the term “sustainable development”, the meaning of sustainability has been interpreted in countless ways. Therefore while some companies have embedded sustainability into their strategic planning processes and have created comprehensive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs that are aligned with their respective business interests and customer expectations, there remains countless instances where a gap exists between a given company’s CSR program and the company’s consumers’ expectations of what that CSR program should entail.

But in addition to a need for understanding what exactly sustainability means in order to incorporate sustainability in strategic planning, there is also a lack of integration in CSR efforts of economic, social and sustainable efforts. These three aspects of CSR often conflict. Lacking a holistic approach, sustainability efforts are often subsumed by financial and social priorities.

To examine the need for sustainability as a core component in strategic planning, this paper is divided into three major sections. In Section I, sustainability and CSR are placed within the context of climatic change, the planet’s agricultural capacity and ability to provide fresh water to its inhabitants, which are examined in detail. In Section II the case for an ethical framework consisting of an obligation to future generations as part of a core component of sustainability strategic planning is discussed and justified. Finally, in Section III, the need for sustainability to be integrated in a holistic approach to strategy, and how to accomplish integration, is discussed in detail.

Executive Summary

The world is running out of water. New NASA satellite data shows that a majority of the world’s largest underground aquifers — the predominant source of our drinking water — are being depleted faster than they can be refilled. From its recent 2003 to 2013 study, NASA concluded that 21 of the 37 largest aquifers (underground reservoirs that store groundwater from rain and snow) are running out too fast to be replenished. An additional 13 are declining at a rate that puts them in a category NASA calls the “most troubled” (Speiser, 2015).

This map shows the world’s 37 largest aquifers and their state of depletion. Red indicates aquifers that are being depleted faster than they can be replenished (in millimeters). Cream indicates aquifers that have remained relatively stable, and blue aquifers are in good shape at present (Speiser, 2015).

98 Embedding Sustainability in Strategic Planning

STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE: SUSTAINABILITYMBA LEAGUE

Introduction



“THIS WE KNOW: THE EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO MAN: MAN BELONGS TO THE EARTH…. WHATEVER BEFALLS THE EARTH, BEFALLS THE SONS OF THE EARTH. MAN DID NOT WEAVE THE WEB OF LIFE: HE IS MERELY A STRAND IN IT. WHATEVER HE DOES TO THE WEB, HE DOES TO HIMSELF” –CHIEF SEATTLE, 1855 (GUNDLING, 1990, P. 198).

Few would doubt the truth in the widely quoted words of Native American Chief Seattle to President Franklin Pierce expressing the Native American environmental ethic, however when considering obligations to future gen-erations concerning the environmental health of the planet we live on and its diversity of life that sustains us all, the issue is not so easily expressed or straightforward. As a species, human beings are not focused on the future nor the ecosystem on a planetary scale, but rather the immediate and near-term circumstances of individual lives in individual localities.

Often these immediate and near-term circumstances involve the daily grind: getting up in the morning, feeding the family, getting the kids to school, going to work. At work the focus is on finishing the next report, attending a staff meeting, learning of the latest product, trend, and business theory that will drive new sales, transform the workplace and increase profit-ability—which results in a stellar quarterly report, bonuses all-around, an increased stock price and shareholder satisfaction. After such a hectic day when corporate goals have been met, a night out in celebration might follow, asking the spouse and kids how their day went, a great dinner, maybe a dessert, some television or a movie before bed; and sleep before the alarm clock announces the next turn of the cycle. Maybe a reference to sea-level rise, Miami Beach’s struggles to hold back the sea, melting ice over Greenland or another California drought update or monthly report showing the hottest August on record popped up in a Facebook newsfeed; but upon seeing these updates, most people dismiss them as something too big to control, something outside one’s own control or recognize that the event is something that is serious but won’t be a problem for some time. After all, what do such events have to do with our daily 24-hour routines?

IntroductionWhy a Narrative Synthesis

As a species, human beings are not focused on the future nor the ecosystem on a planetary scale, but rather the immediate and near-term circumstances of individual lives in individual localities.

When considering sustainability as a core component in strategic planning, both from a business and an ecosystem perspective, it is necessary to consider an ethical frame-work that will ensure a habitable world for future generations. It is necessary because the world of today is at a nexus where the global stability that has allowed human beings to thrive is entering a period of a “new normal” in terms of greater dispari-ties between the haves and the have-nots, major climatic change and geopolitical and environmental instability brought about by a rapidly increasing population, increasing resource use along with degradation and depletion, and subsequent anthropocentric climate change.

Mastering strategy is part art and science because it involves creativity. “According to [renowned Professor of Strategy Henry] Mintzberg, understanding how strategy can be viewed as a plan, as a ploy, as a position, as a pattern, and as a perspective is impor-tant. Each of these five ways of thinking about strategy is necessary for understand-ing what strategy is, but none of them alone is sufficient to master the concept” (Ketchen and Short, 2013, p. 6). However, sometimes it becomes necessary to throw the old mod-els out when models become broken, and just when one believes one has mastered the art of strategic thinking through study and practice of existing theory; events occur that change the rules of the game and defy understanding.

The world witnessed this phenomenon in politics May 4, 2016 when Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s presump-tive nominee heading into the United States Republican National Convention. What had seemed unthinkable only a year before, when Trump announced his campaign, has become reality. Climate change is the ulti-mate unthinkable in global disruption. Not a single industry will be left unchanged by the global climatic and geo-political impacts poised to occur in timeframes as little as the next ten or fifteen to thirty-five years. Remaining focused then on short term profitability, quarterly or annual reports is a strategy for business failure when it is now

necessary to design and plan for long-term sustainable business strategies.

While many of the challenges of climate change can be predicted, many cannot. Climate change will also present new op-portunities, some of which are known, but most are not. Therefore strategic sustain-able planning must encompass anticipa-tion of emergent and adaptive strategies to a rapidly changing external environment. “Having a well-formulated vision employees embrace can therefore give an organization an edge over its rivals (Ketchen and Short, 2013, p. 30). Such a vision will demand cre-ativity, not just from a CEO who historically has been the key architect of any given com-pany’s strategic planning, but also from the entire executive team, department heads, mid-level managers and employees.

To examine the need for sustainability as a core component in strategic planning, this white paper is divided into three major sec-tions:

In Section I, climatic change is examined in detail in terms of increasing water depletion and scarcity in environmental, business and geopolitical contexts. Water is the major prerequisite for life, and water is also a necessary prerequisite for agriculture and business. Coming to terms with water sup-ply and demand and ensuring a sustainable supply is a critical strategic concern every business and governmental entity must ad-dress.

In Section II the case for an ethical frame-work consisting of an obligation to future generations as part of a core component of sustainability strategic planning is dis-cussed and justified.

Finally, in Section III, the need for Strategic Sustainability is discussed in detail, includ-ing the considerable challenges involved with implementing it on a long-term basis—not just for short term business competitive advantages, but for long-term business and human survival. Achieving strategic sustain-ability may well represent the ultimate in coopetition; and upon which, global society as we know it depends.

Climate change is the ultimate unthinkable in global disruption. Not a single industry will be left unchanged by the global climatic and geo-political impacts poised to occur in timeframes as little as the nest ten or fiftenn to thirty-five years.



Climate Change, Water Depletion

& ScarcitySection I



ISMAIL SERAGELDIN, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT FOR SPECIAL PROGRAMS OF THE WORLD BANK WARNED IN 1995: “IF THE WARS OF THIS CENTURY WERE FOUGHT OVER OIL, THE WARS OF THE NEXT CENTURY WILL BE FOUGHT OVER WATER.”

In truth, “the challenge of freshwater scarcity and ecosystem depletion is rapidly emerging as one of the defining fulcrums of world politics and hu-man civilization. A century of unprecedented freshwater abundance is being eclipsed by a new age characterized by acute disparities in water wealth, chronic insufficiencies, and deteriorating environmental sustainability across many of the most heavily populated parts of the planet.

Just as oil conflicts played a central role in defining the history of the 1900s, the struggle to command increasingly scarce, usable water resources is set to shape the destinies of societies and the world order of the twenty first century. Water is overtaking oil as the world’s scarcest critical natural resource. But water is more than the new oil. Oil, in the end, is substitut-able; but water’s uses are pervasive, irreplaceable by any other substance, and utterly indispensable” (Solomon, 2010, p. 367).

Climate Change, Water Depletion & ScarcitySection I

“Water is more than the new oil. Oil, in the end, is substitutable; but water’s uses are pervasive, irreplaceble byany other substance, and utterly indispensible” (Solomon, 2010, p. 367).

Proponents of the realist theory of political science would argue that Serageldin is correct, and that in light of increasing water scarcity, conflict over water is inevitable. However, since Serageldin’s pronouncement more than twenty years ago, while there has been conflict, not one water war has ensued and international cooperation over water issues has been the norm. According to neoliberal institutionalist thinking water scarcity provides a motive for cooperation since water interests transcend national boundaries and nation states stand to gain from cooperative efforts addressing water supply issues (Dinar, 2009).

Constructivists would argue that cooperative efforts would be expected so long as states can gain from those efforts. Should the status quo become upset, constructivist thinking would indicate states would reevaluate their position(s) and pursue courses of action in reaction to the changing situation (Viotti and Kauppi, 2009). So which school of political science thinking is correct and which outcome is most likely? Water wars or water peace? As Allan (2009), Bierman and Boas (2010), Solomon (2010) and others illustrate, the state of world peace and the future of human civilization is balanced on the delicate fulcrum of each na-tion state’s supply and access to freshwater.

While the world’s leaders may choose dif-fering courses of action in response to water scarcity according to the political school of thought they either subscribe to or the various national circumstances that force their hands, ultimately they will all share the same cause of action: global climatic change that affects the water cycle and global precipitation distribution combined with accelerating population growth. Hu-manity is at a critical nexus. As the water cycle, and climatic change affecting the water cycle, is the lynchpin that determines each nation’s water supply, business access to water for agriculture and manufactur-ing, and individual access to water for basic human needs; it is necessary to understand what the water cycle is and how it is af-fected to understand the growing magnitude of global water scarcity issues.

Simply put, the water cycle is the circula-tion of freshwater on the planet. The water

cycle begins with evaporation from the world’s oceans. Each day, solar heating causes water to evaporate from the surface of the oceans and enter the atmosphere, where the water is cooled, condenses into clouds, and eventually falls as rain or snow. When water falls on mountain tops dur-ing cold weather, it builds snowpacks and increases glaciation. The snowpack stores water for release into rivers when tempera-tures warm, thus ensuring a steady supply of water in high latitudes and mountain-ous regions well into summer and fall as the snow and ice melt. When water falls in warmer climes, water infiltrates the soil to be captured and used by plant life and then released back into the atmosphere through plant transpiration, percolates into ground-water, or most commonly, runs off in rivers to the sea where the process of evaporation begins again. In this way, water is spread to every area of the planet and provides for the sustainability of all life, unless it is intercepted and held in lake basins or oth-erwise diverted from its natural flow by the activities of man.

“The same, finite net, 4/1,000th of 1 percent of Earth’s total water that recycles endlessly and falls over land in the process of evap-oration-transpiration and precipitation has sustained every civilization from the start of history to the present. Man’s practical access to this renewable freshwater supply remains limited to a maximum of one-third, since about two-thirds quickly disappears in floods and into the ground, recharging



surface and ground water ecosystems and ultimately returning to the sea. Even so, that one-third portion totals enough avail-able renewable water to more than suffice for the planet’s six billion people—if it were all distributed evenly. But unfortunately, water is not distributed evenly. A large share runs off unused in lightly inhabited jungle rivers like the Amazon, the Congo, and the Orinoco and across Russia’s remote Siberian expanses toward the Arctic in the giant Yenisei and Lena rivers. So the actual total amount of readily available, renew-able freshwater per person often averages less—often far less—in some regions than the threshold annual 2,000-cubic meter measure of water sufficiency. And it is de-clining sharply in inverse relationship to the escalation of world population” (Solomon, 2010, p. 374).

In addition to the challenges presented by the uneven distribution of water, human activities are interfering with the water cycle and reducing the amount of water available.

Three of the major impacts to the water cycle and the available freshwater supply stem from deforestation, global warming and climate change, and overutilization of groundwater reserves.

Deforestation is taking place at the rate of 1% per year in the Amazon rainforest, and in other areas around the planet to make room for grazing lands and human civilization (Vi-otti and Kauppi, 2009). On deforested land, water does not percolate into the soil or recharge groundwater systems, but quickly runs off, reducing growing seasons, stunting plant life, and reducing agricultural yields.

Mountain glacial systems have been re-treating steadily for the last one-hundred fifty years due to global warming. But with warmer temperatures and the disappear-ance of glaciers, the earth is losing a natural water storage system that slowly releases water into river systems for use during the warm seasons (Bierman and Boas,, 2010.) Faster runoff means less of the water pro-

vided by the water cycle will be available for use, further exacerbating water scarcity and agricultural issues. Severe drought in California has been covered extensively in the media over the last two years. Impacts of the current drought in California will certainly have major impacts on the ability of Central Valley farmers to grow and export agricultural products we as a nation and the world depend upon. This is why snowpack values of less than 100% in Colorado and the Sierra Nevada are so concerning; and increasingly, snowpack values of greater than 100% are necessary to meet increas-ing water demand in the southwestern United States. Finally, unsustainable use of groundwatersystems threatens to deplete these vast underground seas. Groundwa-ter reserves are the source of water for the

world’s wetlands, springs and desert oases. Groundwater is contained either in the soil or in aquifers. There are two kinds of aquifers: rechargeable aquifers, and fossil aquifers. Wetlands are fed by rechargeable

aquifers, just underneath the surface of the ground, and they play an active part in the water cycle. Fossil aquifers, however, are separated from the water cycle.

In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer—which once contained as much water as Lake Huron—allows for agriculture in eight states west of the 100th Meridian. Not only does agriculture in this region provide the United States with the majority of its corn and wheat, but it also provides the grain for a large percentage of the world’s popula-tion (Annin, 2006). The aquifer under Saudi Arabia has mostly been squandered for lav-ish displays of Saudi wealth: fountains, golf courses, manicured lawns and desert wheat fields. Seventy percent of Saudi Arabia’s aquifer, which once measured one-sixth the

size of the Ogallala is gone. In 1992, the Nu-bian Sandstone Aquifer was discovered by Qaddafi in Libya who quickly started plan-ning a way to tap it and turn Libya green. The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer is the largest

©Little, 2009



groundwater reserve on the planet, but not only is it situated beneath Libya, it extends beneath Egypt, Chad and the Sudan as well and these countries object to Libya’s plans to exploit the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer’s resources. While the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer may provide water for some time, it shares the same characteristics as the Ogal-lala and the Saudi aquifers—the water they contain is fossil water. Over the eons, water slowly percolated into the ground until it couldn’t percolate any further because it was trapped by impermeable layers of rock. While it took nature tens of thousands of years to fill these aquifers, it has taken man only the better part of one century to mostly deplete them. Once depleted, these aquifers cannot be recharged and the agri-cultural industries that depend on them will disappear (Solomon, 2010).

The altering of the planetary water cycle, the inequitable redistribution of available water from changing climatic conditions, the growing earth’s population and increas-ing demands on available water, and the depletion of fossil groundwater that has allowed civilizations to grow unsustainably are all potential pathways to conflict, and at the same time, potential pathways to peace. “While it is true that water disputes have taken a military turn on at least seventeen occasions during the period 1900–2001, the last all-out war over water took place 4,500 years ago—between the city-states of La-gash and Umma. In comparison, thousands of water agreements have been concluded, the oldest dating back to 3100 BCE. Conse-quently, as Wolf and Hamner have noted, ‘the more valuable lesson of international water is as a resource whose characteristics tend to induce cooperation, and incite vio-

ience only in the exception’” (Dinar, 2009, p. 109). However, in the past, it was relatively easy to conclude water agreements when there was enough water to go around. How will these agreements be concluded when there isn’t any water left to share? Increas-ing water scarcity presents paths to both peace and conflict.

“While violent conflicts over transboundary water may be rare, political disputes and ‘conflicts of interest’ over shared freshwater are not. This is the case in regions currently known for relative peace among the regional actors (such as Europe and North America) and regions known for relative political volatility among neighboring states (such as the Middle East and Central Asia). Conse-quently, the literatures on environment, security, and hydropolitics have turned to explaining why disputes have taken place in such regions. Similarly, studies have invested much effort in understanding how cooperation ensues or fails in international river basins” (Dinar, 2009, pp. 109-110).

Dinar goes on to explain that the relation-ship between water scarcity and coopera-tion is non-linear. Referencing John Rawls and Elinor Ostrom, Dinar articulates what we term as a “Just Right” Goldilocks window of opportunity for cooperation. “Rawls has conjectured that when natural and other re-sources are abundant, schemes of coopera-tion become superfluous. Conversely, when conditions are particularly harsh, fruitful ventures break down. A situation of moder-ate (or relative) scarcity, therefore, provides a suitable impetus for action between par-ties. Similarly, Ostrom has argued that for cooperation to occur, ‘resource conditions must not have deteriorated to such an ex-tent that the resource is useless, nor can the resource be so little used that few advan-tages result from organizing.’ By extension, if water were abundant, a treaty dividing the waters may be unnecessary. Conversely, in-stances of very high scarcity would also dis-courage cooperation. If water were extreme-ly scant, the parties would have very little to divide amongst themselves, nor could they share any of the benefits that could be thereby derived” (Dinar, 2009, p. 119).

Perhaps our term, the “Goldilocks Zone of Cooperation,” in terms of water scar-city represents a unique period in human history and global civilization evolution when practical considerations, that may be representative of constructivist thought, will allow the transformation of society into a truly global civilization capable of finding solutions to the most pressing of global issues before it is too late and a perpetual Hobbesian state of war ensues. The water situations and interdependencies on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (Dinar, 2009); along with the endur-ing Indus Water Treaty (IWT) between India and Pakistan that persists despite serious disputes over territory in Kashmir strongly illustrate this idea (Sahni, 2006).

That India and Pakistan continue to honor and abide by the IWT is impressive, but perhaps it pales in comparison to water cooperation in the Middle East. Contrary to realist theory that would predict water wars, water cooperation in the Middle East is the norm. Allan explains that the “Middle East

is the most water-challenged region in the world, with little freshwater and negligible soil water. Water is therefore a key strategic natural resource, and realist theory, as well



ive groundwater pumping for their respec-tive soda bottling operations.

If virtual water supplies dry up in the Middle East, for whatever reasons, what happens then? Currently Israel is pursuing advanced desalination technology to guarantee its supply of freshwater, yet capacities of desalination plants are inadequate to meet national need (Dinar, 2009). Yet the aug-mentation to the Israeli water supply will certainly prolong the window of cooperation and perhaps greater technological innova-tion, as Malthus noted (Viotti and Kauppi, 2009), will postpone the inevitable war over water that the realists are predicting.

However, all roads do not lead to war, and perhaps the liberal institutionalist perspec-tive will win the day. As Solomon articu-lates: “while the risk of water war in this thirstiest and most politically combustible of regions is high, it is by no means inevi-table. The existential threat posed by water scarcity is so palpable that it generates opposing cooperative instincts for mutual survival as well. At the worst moments of the second Palestinian intifada, while Israel’s hegemony over West Bank water was being vehemently decried by angry stone throwers, Palestinian and Israeli officials continued to meet quietly and agreed not to damage each other’s waterworks. As a religion of the desert, Islam accords water a special esteem that also favors cooperation. All inhabitants in the starkly arid land share an intuitive appreciation of the Turkish Proverb: ‘When one man drinks while an-other can only watch, doomsday follows.’ In what might be considered a corollary of the mutually assured destruction doctrine that helped avert direct military conflict in the postwar nuclear age, it is possible that with rare statesmanship and sufficient despera-tion, a Middle Eastern water famine might lead inexorably not to devastating warfare but to a cooperative model of water détente that helps forge regional peace. It would be ironic, but not impossible, if salvation from the worsening regional water crisis came about through a resurrection of the faded dream of a marriage between state of the art Israeli agricultural know-how and Arab oil investment” (Solomon, 2010, p. 412).While water scarcity issues are certain to

intensify, the jury is still out regarding which of the differing philosophical perspectives has the best insight into ultimate outcomes. But certainly as long as cooperation over water resources prevails and the Goldi-locks window remains open, international government and business efforts to address the water scarcity issue provide possible pathways to the evolution of a global civil society. Two such pathways stem from ad-dressing environmental issues, especially those concerning environmental refugees; and the emerging understanding and recog-nition of a human right to water.

The first pathway, spurred mostly from increasing water scarcity, desertification, deforestation and climate change concerns the rapidly increasing number of climate refugees. “Drought and water scarcity is the third main climate change impact that may significantly contribute to climate-related migration. A temperature increase of 2–3 degrees centigrade could cause around 800 million-1.8 billion people to suffer from water shortage, assuming low population growth. In the worst-case scenario, the additional number of people experienc-ing hunger due to climate change could be around 200 million by the 2050s. Moreover, the supply of fresh water will decrease due to glacier retreat. More than one-sixth of the world population currently depends on

water supplied by glacier melt, which will further decline in the next decades” (Bier-man and Boas, 2010, p. 69). While these statistics are at once both overwhelming and alarming, Bierman and Boas go on to argue that

as popular intuition, has it that the scarcity of water in the region will lead to water wars. Despite growing water demand, the Middle East has shown no signs of a water war since some minor military events in the northern Jordan Valley in the early 1960s. On the contrary, there is much evidence of cooperation over scarce water resources in the region, especially in the Jordan River Basin, where freshwater is scarcest” (Allan, 2002, pp. 255-256).

This state of cooperation in the Middle East, however, is likely to be affected by increasing water scarcity elsewhere in the world. Currently, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have compensated for their lack of water resources by importing “virtual water” through the world grain market. Rather than growing their own grain, which is an extremely water intensive agricultural activity, the Middle Eastern nations simply import it, and by doing so, obviate their need to supply their own water—which, of course, they don’t have. Not needing huge supplies of water to grow grain and other food commodities allows cooperation over the resources of the Jordan River and the

aquifers in the Golan Heights and southern Lebanon, the West Bank and the coastal plain (Allan, 2002).Cooperation over Middle Eastern water resources will become more and more important, however, as impacts on the grain market due to climate change and growing population ensues. “China and India, together with America, produce half the world’s grain—their combined influence on international food markets is like that of OPEC on oil. The looming prospect of India and China becoming major grain importers therefore threatens to dramatically push up global food prices, crowd out the poorest and most water-famished nations, and help trigger humanitarian tragedies and politi-cal upheavals around the world” (Solomon, 2010, p. 418). Therefore, increasing popula-tion in India and China represent the big-gest threat to water security and coopera-tion in the Middle East, but it’s certainly not the only threat.

As already explained, the Saudi aquifer which supports the wheat crop in Saudi Arabia is seventy percent depleted; and with changing climate patterns that are predicted to affect the grain belts of North America, it is unclear how long the Ogallala Aquifer will be able to sustain Midwestern grain produc-tion. Farms are already being abandoned because of depleted wells (Parker, 2016).

Even more critically, “India relies on ground-water mining for more than half its irrigation water. No other nation in the world pumps nearly as great a volume of groundwater. By some estimates, water is being mined twice as fast as natural recharge. Food produced from depleting groundwater is tantamount to an unsustainable food bubble—it will burst when the waters tap out. One warning occurred in 2006 when, for the first time in many years, India was forced to import large quantities of wheat for its grain stockpile. As the water tables hit bottom, clashes were breaking out between food producers and industrial and domestic users. In 2003, both Coca-Cola and Pepsi bottling plants in southern India were scapegoated and had their licenses revoked on unproven accu-sations that they were responsible for the region’s exhausted groundwater reserves” (Solomon, 2010, pp. 423-424) from excess-

“The Indus Waters Treaty set a precedent of cooperation between India and Pakistan that has survived three wars and other hostilities between the two nations... As Stephen P. Cohen has observed, ‘The Indus Waters Treaty is a model for future regional cooperation, especially on energy, environmental concerns, and even the management of the region’s imimpressive water resources’” (Sahni, 2006, p. 154).



In the past, United States promulgation of human rights has been seen by other nations as sovereign intrusion (Viotti and Kauppi, 2009). The “lack of intellectual agreement among social-contract theorists, utilitarians, Kantians, and others who think about values in universal terms is part of the global confusion on such matters. This lack of consensus on human rights—how we are to understand rights and values and what we are to do about them—underlies the global debate on what commitments and obligations we have to fellow human beings throughout the world. Disagreement on what and whose human rights ought to be recognized hinders the construction of a just world society” (Viotti and Kauppi, 2009, p. 441). The emergent right to water in con-junction with other international declara-tions on the rights of women and children, the emergence of new networks of activists and NGOs dedicated to the establishment of these rights, such as the water justice movement’s demand for change in inter-national law to eliminate the commodifica-tion of water and instead universally assign governments to hold water in the public trust (Barlow, 2007) and Kaldor’s assessment that humanitarian concerns are taking pre-cedence over sovereign issues may indicate those barriers to the construction of a just world society are evaporating.

One final key in determining which path the world will follow in dealing with water scarcity is the role played by multinational corporations (MNCs). While scapegoated in India, the role of MNCs in the commodifica-tion of water is a serious issue with many advantages and disadvantages. In addition to the aforementioned groundwater deple-tion issue which exacerbates global water scarcity impacts, one of the major advan-tages of MNCs in the water business has been in the increase of water productivity and conservation. “While cities are learning to use their existing water more efficiently, industry has been the largest single contrib-utor to the unprecedented surge in water productivity. Across the industrial spec-trum, water is a major input in production. Alone, five giant global food and beverage corporations—Nestle, Danone, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch, and Coca-Cola—consume

enough water to meet the daily domes-tic needs of every person on the planet…. American companies began to treat water as an economic good with both a market price for acquisition and a cost of cleanup before discharge in response to federal pollution control legislation in the 1970s. With char-acteristic business responsiveness wherever operating rules were clear and predictable, they sought ways to do more with the water they had and to innovate in their industrial processes so that they needed to use less overall. The results were startlingly instruc-tive of the enormous, untapped productive potential in conservation” (Solomon, 2010, p. 469).

Unfortunately MNC’s may not have yet figured out that they need to be part of the global solution by initiating impor-tant conversations and accepting leader-ship roles in water conservation. “A set of cables released last month describes a 2009 visit between U.S. government officials and Nestlé executives at the company’s global headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. It con-firms what was already largely confirmed by science, government and business leaders: the global economy is on a collision course with water scarcity. Nestlé’s frank discus-sion about the world’s ongoing water crisis several years ago hardly portrays the com-pany as a model corporate citizen. Nestlé has long engendered its fair share of con-troversy, from its role in the baby formula scandal in Africa in the 1970s to its American

“dealing with the resettlement of millions of climate refugees over the course of the century will require not only a new legal regime, but also one or several international agencies to deal with this task.” Addition-ally, they note that these issues are already being addressed from a security standpoint by military and defense planners. In truth, in terms of any nation’s national security, it is in the best interests of all to plan for waves of climate refugees to mitigate the impact of potentially hundreds of millions of human beings moving across the planet in mass migrations.

Therefore, “In light of the most recent scientific findings, which indicate possibly accelerating climatic change, there is an urgent need for a new academic research program on what we propose to call ‘global adaptation governance.’ Global adaptation governance will affect most areas of world politics, including many core institutions and organizations of current global gover-nance. The need to adapt to climate change will influence, for example, the structure of global food regimes and the work of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); global health governance and the agenda of the World Health Organization (WHO); global trade in goods whose production will be harmed or helped by climate change; the world economic system and the ability of the International Monetary Fund to address climate-related shocks to national and regional economies; and many other sec-tors from tourism to transportation or even international security” (Bierman and Boas, 2010, pp. 60-61).

While Bierman and Boas do not suggest the formation of a world government, whether it be in the form of a federation of existing nation states or some other organizational structure, certainly by calling for research into how to govern issues from a global perspective, specifically the issue of climate refugees, suggests a transformation to a true global civil society. And so does the emergent human right to water, which can be construed as a basic right: “Gleick’s interpretation leads to a construal within later international documents of a spe-cific right to water that seems to qualify as

what Henry Shue terms a ‘basic right.’ The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) both explicitly name the human right to water, the first as part of the right to development and the latter as part of a general right to health. In Shue’s well known formulation, basic rights guarantee things ‘essential to a normal . . . life’ and are es-sential to protect ‘against a standard threat to rights generally. This is precisely why basic rights are basic. That to which they are rights is needed for the fulfillment of all other rights’” (Hiskes, 2010, p. 330).

Recognition and institution of global adaptation governance programs in concert with the recognition of the emerging human right to water would certainly add to the gains that are being made in regional state cooperation over the management of dwindling water resources. Another piece in the puzzle is the emergence of transnational networks of activists creating what Kaldor calls an emerging humanitarian regime. “During the 1990s, a new phenomenon of great importance was the emergence of transnational networks of activists who came together on particular issues: land-mines, human rights, climate change, dams, AIDS/HIV, and corporate responsibility. I believe they had a significant impact on

strengthening processes of global gover-nance, espe-cially in the humanitarian field. Notions of

humanitarian norms that override sover-eignty, the establishment of the Interna-tional Criminal Court, the strengthening of human rights awareness—all these factors were very important in the construction of a new set of multilateral rules: what we might call a humanitarian regime…a new respon-siveness to global civil society offers the possibility of a system of global institutions which act on the basis of deliberation, rather than, as in the past, on the basis of consent for American hegemony” (Kaldor, 2003, p. 588).

If the world’s militaries con-sider Climate Change impacts a threat to na-tional and inter-national security, why are business-es not acting ur-gently to embed sustainability?

“The global economy is on a collision course with water scarcity” (Kaye, 2016).



operations’ dubious agreements to source groundwater for its lucrative bottled water brands. The company, to blunt such criti-cism, will point to progress it has made on the sustainability front, from its cage-free egg-sourcing commitments to improve-ments in animal welfare. And some of those commitments could be traced to this particular report released by WikiLeaks. But what reads at first as a long-term economic analysis during the 2008-2009 global finan-cial crisis morphs into a gloomy assessment of the water economy: ‘A calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops,’ a Nestlé analyst suggested, ‘As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.’ The report then continues to give a damning assessment of the American diet. Claiming that the average U.S. daily consumption of 3,600 calories per person is largely derived from meat products, Herbert Oberhaensli, Nestlé’s then-vice president of economics and international relations said global water supplies would be “exhausted” if the world’s population reached 6 billion people — a number reached in 2000. Many of these threats related to water depletion, Ober-haensli went on, stem from subsidies that allow for the growing of crops in arid re-gions like California and the “mis-pricing” of water. But the gargantuan American diet was not solely to blame. The push to develop biofuels, then a central part of the European Union’s drive to shift toward clean-energy technologies, also contributed to the world’s growing water shortages. Nestlé estimated that 1,000 liters (264 gallons) of water were needed to produce 1.5 liters (0.4 gallons) of ethanol. As a result of the growing middle class’s demands for more meat, Oberhaensli believed the world would confront a 30 per-cent shortfall of grain production by 2025. The company, therefore, suggested a four-pronged approach toward combatting this emerging water crisis: a virtual market of water that would allow for this precious re-source to be sold across borders; the elimi-nation of subsides for biofuels; the accep-tance of genetically modified crops (GMOs) into the global food industry’s supply chain; and the liberalization of agricultural trade. With that, Nestlé execs told U.S. government

officials that the company wanted to ‘play a useful public role in the global debate on the environment.’ But there was one caveat: ‘The company management be-lieves that the current under-pricing of that scarce commodity (water) will lead to huge problems. It fears that subsidies for biofuels will potentially push the price of food out of reach for the poor in some developing na-tions. It is strongly opposed to water price subsidies and a strong proponent of market practices. However, the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, prefer-ring to influence its audience discretely by example.’

Whether Nestlé leads by example is open to debate. While the company does procure some meat for its portfolio of brands, which includes Hot Pockets, Stouffer’s, Gerber, Maggi and, of course, its pet food products, Nestlé does not directly purchase livestock from suppliers — most of the meat it buys is already processed. It is easy for the com-pany to express dismay about the potential impact of the global meat industry when such food is not the core of its business. And as for overall water consumption, the company is rather vague when it comes to what, in corporate-speak, is often called “water stewardship” policies. It is not fair to single out Nestlé, or ravenous Americans, for the world’s emerging water crisis. Many of the issues are structural, such as out-dated laws on water allotments in places like California, or the fact that water is still underpriced. And to Nestlé’s point, most of the world’s water goes toward farming, not industry or residential use.

But what this leaked WikiLeaks document reveals is that Nestlé had the opportu-nity to get ahead of the curve and start a global conversation on water consumption. Instead, the company confused “non-confrontation” with leadership” (Kaye, 2016, paras 1-13).

Perhaps realist, liberal institutionalist, and constructivist theories are about to be replaced by economic structuralist views. In his review of Robert Glennon’s Water Follies, Steinberg explains that “our nation’s demo-cratic system is on life support, that

the Constitution and the liberties it ensures remain in operation, but in terms of the people’s ability to participate in impor-tant governmental and political decisions regarding social and environmental issues, democracy in America is, if not exactly dead, then in a severely compromised state. This state of affairs is mainly the result of the increasing power and influence of multi-national corporations” (Steinberg, 2004, p. 620).

While MNCs increasingly operate out-side political boundaries and exploit the resources and employment bases of the countries they operate in, MNCs are also hastening the depletion of the groundwater supply, and thus threatening all the abilities of all nations to maintain or increase agri-cultural capabilities and supply worldwide populations with accessible potable water. As bad as this sounds, it also presents the

intriguing possibility of an emerging global economic structuralist regime in which MNCs become the new world government. Already operating alongside of or outside of or independent of official state governments in many ways—and certainly outside of democratic electoral structures in the Unit-ed States especially since Citizens United exponentially expanded corporate political influence— MNCs are in a unique posi-tion to take on global leadership or even governmental roles. If five major food and beverage companies consume enough water to meet the demand of every human being

on the planet, the prospect that they could supply water to the world through their dis-tribution capabilities and provide water to the 1.1 billion that lack access to safe water and the 2.6 billion without basic sanitation (Spoth, 2009), is worthy of consideration. Certainly a government of the “Coca-Cola Nation” could be formed with the consent of the 1.1 billion human recipients at the end of the Dasani pipeline. In terms of the “global adaptation governance” of Bierman and Boas, MNCs are uniquely positioned to play an effective role since they alone really participate in and interact with a complex array of world governments on a daily basis. And what better entity exists to deal with global food and water supply issues than a global food and beverage company? The question that begs to be asked, however, is could an MNC transform itself into an effec-tive governmental entity that would protect the interests of its citizenry—its customers—

over that of its shareholders? Therein lies intriguing possibilities and possibly creative emergent sustainable strategies. However, MNC corporate cultures would need to be transformed across the board, incorporating strategic sustainability priorities into core strategies and even corporate mission state-ments. The recognition of their collective obligation to society has to occur. Obliga-tions to shareholders must be balanced with obligations to humanity and to future generations, and the planet.

Obligations to shareholders must be balanced with obligations to hu-manity and to future generations, and the planet.



Business& the Obligation to Future Generations

Section II

“MAINSTREAM CUSTOMERS ACROSS AN ARRAY OF MARKETS AND GEO-GRAPHIC AREAS ARE INCREASINGLY EXPECTING SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMEN-TAL PERFORMANCE FROM THE BRANDS, COMPANIES, AND PRODUCTS THEY CHOOSE. MORE IMPORTANTLY, THEY WANT IT WITHOUT ANY GREEN OR SOCIAL PREMIUM. MAINSTREAM CONSUMERS WANT PRODUCTS THAT ARE MORE AFFORDABLE, BETTER-PERFORMING, HEALTHIER, LONGER-LASTING, WITH ADDED APPEAL—IN OTHER WORDS, IT IS ‘SMARTER’ RATHER THAN GREENER OR MORE RESPONSIBLE THAT THEY ARE AFTER” (LASZLOW AND ZHEXEMBAYEVA, 2011, P. 15).

The ethical implications of increasing water scarcity were briefly discussed in the previous section, especially as they pertain to the emerging rec-ognition of a human right to water. One major dispute over the issue is concerned with where the obligation to future generations originates. Is the obligation a moral one (D’Amato, 1990) or a legal human right? And if a legal human right, should the rights be viewed in terms of generational rights rather than individual rights (Weis, 1990)? Further, some contend that framing the issue in terms of rights is a distraction and that the focus of the debate should be on the concrete and practical nature of the obliga-tion that combines both a moral duty and the duty of law (Gundling, 1990). But to the extent that many issues in ethics involve politics (Mosser, 2010), especially environmental ones, a legal framework is necessary if an obli-gation of any kind to future generations is to be identified, agreed upon, and enforced by international law. However, the question remains as to how to construct the framework. We would argue that the international recognition of emergent environmental rights can provide that framework and establish the obligation to preserve the environmental health of the planet for future generations.

In terms of morality, an obligation to future generations is very difficult to justify because moral philosophy provides inconsistent guidance as “any moral principle can be construed to justify moral or immoral action” (D’Amato, 1990, p. 197). This is illustrated in utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, ethical egoism and moral relativism (Mosser, 2010). In utilitarianism, it would seem that if human beings are concerned with calculations based on the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number of people on Earth right now they would be concerned with their own survival and improving their own situation through resource exploitation. Those living in poverty in China, India, Africa and the developing world have immediate needs that resource exploitation can improve, while any obligation to a future generation would seem abstract and not immediate at best, even if every person on the planet was concerned with the survival of the species. If this regard, concerns of obligation would not be a concern to the majority

Business & the Obligation to Future GenerationsSection II

of the world’s deontologists if the act of resource exploitation resulted in improved living conditions for those living in squa-lor, how could resource exploitation be wrong? If the will of those taking action is to improve living conditions for all human inhabitants currently alive on earth then potentially negative consequences for fu-ture generations do not matter to a deon-tologist. Similarly, a virtuous person may be inclined to do everything possible to relieve hunger and starvation of human beings cur-rently living in extreme poverty. Even if this means clearing all the land in the Amazon Rainforest to graze enough cattle to feed the planet such an action would be accept-able under virtue ethics if the people doing the clearing were virtuous and had noble goals. This will be true, however, only until the tipping point is reached and the people currently living are immediately threatened with death by environmental destruction. An ethical egoist may or may not be concerned with any obligation to a future generation. However if an ethical egoist thought that leaving the earth in a better or worse shape for his or her children was okay to satisfy his or her own needs, then ethical egoism along with moral relativism, which would ar-gue that if a society thought that it was right to exploit the planet now and worry about it later, would not be of much assistance in determining an appropriate outcome.

Because moral philosophy fails to ad-equately guide us in considering obligations to future generations, it is necessary to look at a framework of human rights. But before this discussion can begin, it is necessary to note that any framework that deals with an obligation to future human generations is species chauvinistic and does not consider a larger global picture (D’Amato, 1990). Further, a complex philosophical argument, Parfit’s Paradox, demonstrates that there is no moral obligation to future generations because an obligation assumes a respon-sibility to specific individuals that do not exist. The argument, utilizing chaos theory, explains that just as the flapping of a but-terfly’s wings over North America may result in a hurricane bearing down on Australia, any action that is taken today to protect or restore the world’s environment for the benefit of future individuals would change

the conditions for any individual at the time of conception just enough that when compounded over time, these actions would actually cause the future individuals that would be conceived not to be conceived and allow others to be conceived in their stead. Therefore, it is impossible to owe specific future individuals any obligation whatsoever because acting in their interests results in their non-existence (D’Amato, 1990). Perhaps, but it can be equally argued that people are required to make the best decision possible, realizing that there will be a set of individuals that exist in the future, even if that set of specific individuals is undefined. Accepting Parfit’s Paradox and following it to its logical conclusion, there would be no basis for making any decisions based on ethics because we can never know a specific outcome for certain.

However, Parfit’s Paradox only deconstructs the idea of an obligation to future genera-tions and not environmental obligations in general. This is why Weis (1990) argues that in determining an obligation to protect, preserve and restore the environment for future generations, one has to look at the responsibility to the generation itself and not to specific individuals (Weis, 1990). Still, using human rights to justify an obligation to future generations is problematic as well because rights legally accrue benefits to in-dividuals (Gundling, 1990), and not to groups of people.

What is Moral?

What is Ethical?

How can an International Standard

be Recognized and Agreed Upon?

Moral Philosophies Fail in Providing Guidance for Busi-ness Decisions. Therefore a Frame-work of Human Rights is Required.



To help those in China, India, Africa and other Third World nations rise from their condition, it would be necessary to help them exploit their own resources to the full-est extent possible to increase their wealth, overcome their second class status, and join the rest of the modern developed world. Such an effort to help our own generation in this manner would have serious environ-mental consequences and jeopardize our ability to pass on a world to the next gen-eration in a condition at least comparable to the world we inherited from the previous generation (Weis, 1990). Interestingly, if the modern world decided to act in this way for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Third World nations, none of the moral philoso-phies already discussed would take issue with this action, even if this action would seriously impact the world’s environment in a negative way and depleted most of its resources and caused widespread species extinction.

Therefore, Gundling (1990) suggests that a legal framework in the form of an interna-tional treaty is necessary to establish the basic principles for acting in the interest of future generations. Unfortunately, he also suggests the most difficult task of significant reform or change to the global economic structure. “The objective of true preven-tive environmental protection will only be achieved if we change, fundamentally and on a global level, our way of running the economy. This, in turn, will be achieved only if we change our basic system of values. Economic growth is not per se an indica-tor of progress, nor is wealth necessarily an indicator of prosperity” (Gundling, 1990, p. 211). Perhaps because no individual or organization can tackle the issue of reform-ing the global economy, Gundling concludes with an assignment of the responsibility to the state, and thus absolving individuals of the need to take action. “Responsibility to future generations should entail not only moral duties but also duties of law. The threat to future generations is too seri-ous and the task of warding off this threat too complex, to be left to the informal and often uncertain domain of morals. Laws should provide for the fundamental duty to preserve the environment for the benefit

of future generations, and it should also provide the basic principles that states must observe in fulfilling this duty. The funda-mental duty and basic principles should be part of both national and international law; without doubt, the responsibility to future generations is the common task of all states” (Gundling, 1990, p. 212).

But if the responsibility to future gen-erations is the common task of all states, whose responsibility is it to initiate action? In the past, United States promulgation of human rights has been seen by other nations as sovereign intrusion (Viotti and Kauppi, 2009). And the “lack of intellectual agreement among social-contract theorists, utilitarians, Kantians, and others who think about values in universal terms is part of the global confusion on such matters. This lack of consensus on human rights—how we are to understand rights and values and what we are to do about them—underlies the global debate on what commitments and obligations we have to fellow human beings throughout the world. Disagreement on what and whose human rights ought to be recognized hinders the construction of a just world society” (Viotti and Kauppi, 2009, p. 441).

The emergent right to water in conjunction with other international declarations on the rights of women and children, the emer-gence of new networks of activists and NGOs dedicated to the establishment of these rights, such as the water justice movement’s demand for change in international law to eliminate the commodification of water and instead universally assign governments to hold water in the public trust (Barlow, 2007) and Kaldor’s assessment that humanitar-ian concerns are taking precedence over sovereign issues (Kaldor, 2003) may indicate those barriers to the construction of a just world society are evaporating. But while the nations of the world grapple with construct-ing a just world society for the current gen-eration in our own time, the obligation to future generations remains clouded at best.

While Gundling assigns responsibility of the question of environmental obligations to future generations to the world’s nations, he also illustrates the need for interaction be-tween the disciplines of philosophy, science, sociology, economics and political science. Philosophical discourse cannot answer this question alone. But philosophy does identify the central dispute to be settled so that the legal framework for establishing an environmental obligation to future genera-tions can be constructed. We believe all the pieces exist and that they just need to be assembled. To us, it is clear that there are many obligations owed to the current gen-eration of humans living on the planet. It is also clear that there are a number of emer-gent rights that should be considered as ba-sic human rights—among them are a right to water and a number of environmental rights that are conditions for basic existence and survival of individuals—not just for humans,

but for all life on the planet. This is why we find the argument that fulfilling obligations to future generations fulfills obligations to the current generation to be the most com-pelling (Hiskes, 2005).

While “arguments for justice across genera-tions have been difficult to maintain ever since David Hume ridiculed the idea of the social contract for presuming that the recip-rocal ‘conditions of justice’ could be met in a relationship between one living genera-tion and another that did not yet exist” (Hiskes, 2005, p. 1347), David Hume did not live in a world of widespread environmen-tal destruction, massive deforestation and accelerating species extinction that threat-ens the existence of the web of life on this planet that every living thing depends upon for survival. These effects are “emergent ef-fects” (Hiskes, 2005, p. 1355) of man’s actions that are resulting in the emergence of the



Many societies believe obliga-tions are to the group and not the individual), and as Weis notes, “rights are always con-nected to obli-gations” (Weis, 1990). Equally important as intergenerational rights are inter-generational rights. As the developing world is living in great poverty, before we can address the ob-ligation to future generations it would be neces-sary to address the needs of our own generation living in poverty.

tant—and considering that life has existed for approximately three billion years and that this condition probably establishes the importance that life should continue to exist to some degree of reasonability— then we believe an obligation exists to pass on the planet in at least its current life-sus-taining condition to future generations.

Additionally, Rawls’ theory of justice, if ap-plied in an intergenerational manner, would also support an environmental obligation to future generations. Under the veil of ignorance, a society would be constructed fairly for all if those doing the construct-ing had no knowledge of whether they be in a majority and favored or in a minority

and were discriminated against (Mosser, 2010). If this concept is applied intergen-erationally, and one could choose at what time to exist—in a world where pollution was minimal, the air and water were clean, the land was not despoiled and there was unlimited water and other resources or a world with widespread environmental deg-radation with polluted air, scarce water and poor soils that did not support agriculture and increasing resource scarcity, we believe most would choose to live in a time where the world’s environment was not degraded and resources were plentiful. We believe this strengthens the argument for at least an environmental obligation to future gen-

erations and further helps explain why such an obligation to future generations not only exists, but also why it is superior to argu-ments to the contrary.

Chief Seattle was correct: whatever man does to the web of life on the earth he does to himself. Taking care of the earth is there-fore in man’s self-interest, not only for the current generation, but so that future gen-erations can also survive and flourish. Our collective self-interest, then, is where the obligation to future generations originates. If we care for our children and our grand-children and great-grandchildren out of our personal needs to perpetuate ourselves, and if we are at least a little bit concerned

that a society continues for our personal descendants to live in and to be a part of, then we have an obligation to ensure that the planet’s environment is healthy enough to allow for our descendants’ survival and to support the society they will live in. Such an obligation is reciprocal in that by taking action to protect the environment for our descendants we preserve it for ourselves. Therefore the international recognition of emergent environmental rights can provide the legal framework for intergenerational justice and to establish the obligation to preserve the environmental health of the planet for future generations.

new class of environmental rights that are distinct from traditional human rights that have been widely examined and considered by philosophy and governments. Therefore, while it has been impossible to owe an ob-ligation to a specific individual in the past, in terms of the environment and the health of the planet, a new reciprocal relationship between generations is being understood (Hiskes, 2005). Hiske explains:

“In brief, the unique relationship with the future invoked by emergent environmental rights makes it necessary to ascribe rights to future generations as well. As Donnelly notes, all claims of rights are future-orient-ed to some extent, since ‘their principal aim is to challenge or change existing institu-tions, practices, or norms, especially legal institutions.’ Similarly, all declarations of rights presume that individuals in the future are guaranteed them as well. But environmental rights go further in seeking to guarantee through their operation that the environment will be preserved for the future; therefore they make it possible in practice for future generations also to pos-sess the same rights—in fact, the guarantee is a presumption of such rights’ existence. Therefore, although it would be too much to say that emergent environmental rights guarantee or logically presume that fu-ture generations also have such rights, in a pragmatic sense it is clear that the point of environmental rights is precisely such a guarantee. Furthermore, arguing for the rights of future generations to a safe environment necessarily also strengthens the same rights for the living, because the health of the environment inherited by our successors depends upon actions taken by the living respecting the same rights that they hold. That is, defending the rights of the future makes the case for present rights even stronger by necessitating that ac-tion be taken now to enhance those rights; such action will also obviously enhance the environmental rights of present generations as well. Interestingly then, emergent envi-ronmental rights offer at least a pragmatic solution to the dilemma of noncompossibil-ity of the rights of future generations. That is, environmental rights might offer a new approach to the entire issue of intergenera-

tional justice by reconfiguring the nature of reciprocity between generations. Arguing for the rights of future generations to a safe environment in return makes the argument for one’s right to the same thing even stron-ger” (Hiskes, 2005, p. 1355).

Hiskes’ position, like all positions, is not without detractors, however. Weston (2012) addresses the fallacy of the self-interest argument for reciprocity as made by Hiske (2005): “nevertheless, to be convincing, pro-ponents of intergenerational ecological jus-tice must ground their argument on a theory of human rights that avoids fundamental controversy; and to this end is ventured the idea of necessity driven by enlightened self-interest. A just society, whether operat-ing across space or time or both, requires rights as a matter of necessity to guarantee its possibility. And to ensure its probabil-ity, it must be defined by values freely and equally chosen by its members in rational contemplation of the self-interest—their self-interest—that inheres in mutually toler-ant and reciprocally forbearing attitudes and behaviors” (Weston, 2012, p. 263).

We would have to agree with Weston that taking action to protect the environment for ourselves and for our successors is in the self-interest of the current generation and future generations. However, we would also have to ask Weston: “What is wrong with self-interest?” Every living thing on planet Earth acts in its own self-interest to survive and to improve its living conditions. Plants extend roots to find richer sources of food and water. Animals migrate to find richer pastures and better conditions to raise their offspring. Humans take jobs or obtain education to improve opportunities for themselves and their families. Whether conscious or unconscious, self-interest has driven evolution and behavior since the dawn of life on Earth. Perhaps taking steps to restore the health of the world’s ecosys-tem and to slow species extinction is in the self-interest of the current generation and the future generation, but in this case such self-interest is in terms of the fundamental survival of life on Earth. If survival of hu-man beings, or for that matter, the survival of any species of life on the planet is impor-



Strategic Sustainability

Planning: A Narrative

SynthesisSection III



“AS NATURE, AS A WHOLE, IS MORE POWERFUL THAN HUMAN SOCIETY, IT MAKES EMINENT SENSE FOR COMPANIES, AND INDIVIDUALS, TO LEARN HOW THEY CAN WORK WITH NATURE RATHER THAN AGAINST IT, IF THEY WISH TO BENEFIT LONG TERM” (BORLAND, 2009, P. 560).

The key ethical issues of our time all stem from our obligations to future genera-tions, and are all environmental in nature: climate change, water scarcity, resource depletion, deforestation, population growth, food scarcity and species extinction. All are interrelated complex issues that threaten the web of life referred to by Chief Seattle. How we utilize our resources and how businesses exploit them for profit or adopt sustainable strategies and processes that will ensure their renewability is critical to maintaining the standard of living that has been achieved by the Western world and the hopes of developing countries to improve their standard of living. Global efforts to achieve sustainable use of the world’s re-sources is critical if we are to fulfill any type of obligation to the future generations that come after us. Water scarcity is especially troubling since nearly a third of the world’s seven billion people do not have access to enough water to meet their daily needs for drinking, hygiene or public sanitation (Solo-mon, 2010; Barlow, 2007; Kaldor, 2003).

Water scarcity requires nothing less than a comprehensive reevaluation of water’s vital importance as the new oil—a pre-cious resource that has to be consciously conserved, efficiently used, and properly accounted for on the balance sheets across the breadth of human activity, great and

mundane: from public health, food and en-ergy production to national security, foreign policy and the environmental sustainability of human civilization (Solomon, 2010, p. 383).

Ethical environmental issues persist be-cause the effects of global environmental issues are extremely hard to detect as they slowly manifest themselves (D’Amato, 1990). Additionally, because of the tragedy of the commons in which no contributor to global environmental issues views their own small scale activity as significant in the context of the enormity of the whole, it is difficult to pinpoint and prove causation. Therefore, causation is still debated as harmful effects accrue and no action is taken to address environmental issues (Shaw, 2014). It is be-cause of these two issues that environmen-tal problems remain externalities instead of being subject to market factors and acted upon in substantial ways by the world’s corporations instead of being shuffled under a corporate social responsibility (CSR) umbrella (Borland, 2009).

Adam Smith described how the market’s unseen “invisible hand” caused individuals’ self-interested competitive pursuit of profit to simultaneously, as a wholesome byprod-uct, maximize wealth creation for the entire society. Yet the market has glaringly failed to evolve any corresponding invisible green hand to automatically reflect the cost of depleting natural resources and sustaining the total environmental health upon which an orderly, prosperous society depends (Solomon, 2010, p. 381).

Strategic Sustainability Planning:A Narrative SynthesisSection III

The stakes cannot be higher: even looking at every area of carbon footprint impact in an given company’s entire supply chain is still a fragmented approach because companies seemingly almost never take ac-tion in other areas of sustainability beyond taking steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, mitigation and reduction of greenhouse gases is no longer enough action, nor is it sustainable because the time horizon for climate change impacts is now. We have surpassed the planetary boundary for greenhouse gas emissions that have triggered climate change (Rockstrom et al, 2009). Global temperatures are expected to rise two to three degrees centigrade by 2050 even if we reduce individual carbon footprints in every major business opera-tion and supply chain worldwide. This is because of increased aggregate greenhouse gas emissions and resource depletion due to rising population. Even if we take steps to become fully sustainable today in every business and logistics operation, population increase to nine billion and the impact of increased resource use from an increased population will outpace carbon reduction efforts and put enormous pressure on the world’s capacity to sustain life, let alone its energy and supply chain systems. How-ever, that does not mean we should bury our heads in the sand and do nothing. “In the new narrative, the gloom and doom of declining resources is also the foundation for opportunity, an emerging paradigm of business that can be more sustainable and more profitable” (Laszlo and Zhexembayeva, 2011, p. 9). For example, faced with tough-ened drinking water standards in the 1980s that threatened the need to spend six to eight billion dollar for filtering and water treatment facilities, the State of New York and New York City helped restore developed areas around the sources of the city’s water supplies to their natural states by planting trees to improve the upstate forests and soils and the land’s ability to retain water and filter out pollutants. The result was the cost savings from the expenditure of only one billion dollars to enhance the natural watershed, and a vast improvement in water quality as well as a new partnership be-tween city and state officials, environmen-talists and rural community representatives

in a project fueled by cooperation of all stakeholders (Solomon, 2010). This demon-strates how “embedding sustainability [in corporate strategy] creates blue oceans” (Laszlo and Zhexembayeva, 2011, p. 114), or new business opportunities in environmen-tally friendly ways. CEOs must seize the opportunities for competitive advantages sustainable practices afford when formulat-ing corporate strategy. Currently, all that is needed is vision and a strong moral center for business leaders to embed sustainability into their corporate strategy and culture.

The need to balance fiscal and corporate social responsibilities has been recognized by more than 1600 companies, which rated economics as the primary reason for such programs (Crawford and Scaletta, 2005). However, most of those 1600 companies are using CSR as a marketing or public relations tool instead of institutionalizing the prac-tices as a core value within their respective companies. This is because of great confu-sion as to what CSR is, means, or entails as there is no universally agreed upon defini-tion or interpretation of CSR.

When considering sustainability as a core component in strategic planning, it is im-portant to possess a clear understanding of the stakes involved, and an understanding of all the factors that influence and con-tribute to a successful implementation of the strategy. More importantly, emergent strategies will be necessary to cope with the potential for major disruptive events that are increasingly likely to occur from the real potential for geopolitical turmoil and climatic upheavals as described in the first section of this white paper. To better understand all of the interrelated aspects of what would constitute successful sustain-ability strategic planning, it is first necessary to examine the key elements that factor into effective and ineffective strategies. In doing so a better understanding of the difficulties corporations face in becoming sustainable should emerge, allowing for insight into how to move forward in meeting the substantial challenges all businesses, and the people of the world, now face.



The single major challenge corporations face with sustainability and CSR, or Corporate Sustainability and Social Responsibility (CSSR) is that CSSR is such a broad category that there is no consistent understanding or approach to strategy. This accounts for the gap between surveys where companies and executives believe CSR or CSSR is important, yet few have implemented comprehensive strategies addressing these issues (Searcy, 2016; Peterlin, Pearse, and Dimovski, 2015; Galpin, Whittington and Bell, 2015; Bratt, Hallstedt, Robert, Broman and Oldmark, 2015; Klettner, Clarke and Boersma, 2014; Montiel and Delgado-Ceballos, 2014; Hahn, 2013; Kiron et al, 2013; Soteriou and Coccossis, 2010; Borland, 2009; Pohle and Hittner, 2008). When companies talk about CSR, they tend to talk about it in terms of philanthropy or marketing. CEOs and corporations do not yet have a clear strategic view of CSR as a platform for growth. The lack of understanding of what CSR entails is also why 76% of business leaders surveyed admitted they don’t understand their customers’ CSR expectations well (Pohle and Hittner, 2008). And how could they? If CSSR is not clearly defined and CEOs do not understand what CSSR entails, it would follow that consumers also have many different ideas and expectations of CSSR.

The idea of sustainable development first was articulated in the Brundtland report from the World Commission for Environmental Development in 1987, which stated that “businesses are said to have a crucial role in managing impacts of population in ecosystems, ecosystem resources, food security and sustainable economies in order to decrease the pressure society places on the environment” (Montiel and Delgado-Ceballos, 2014, p. 113). Clearly, such a statement leaves much for interpretation. Since the articulation of the term “sustainable development,” Corporate Sustainability has been conceptualized in countless ways using three different approaches: 1) Stakeholder Theory, 2) Institutional Theory, and 3) a Resource Based View. Additionally, new constructs such as sustaincentrism, which is a term defined as “the process of achieving human development in an inclusive, connected, equitable, prudent, and secure manner” (Montiel and Delgado-Ceballos, 2014, p. 126) have also arisen with questionable value as such terms only add confusion to the umbrella concept of CSR.

Because of all of these definitions, interpretations, constructs, approaches and variations on the themes, it shouldn’t be surprising that there is no consistent way to measure or report CSR activities, and so companies lack a strategic approach to CSR. To address the inconsistencies, in 2010 the International Organization for Standardization published ISO 26000 “to provide guidance on ways to integrate socially responsible behavior into the organization and thereby help maximize an organization’s contribution to sustainable development. The standard outlines content and approaches to social responsibility and underlines that social responsibility should be an

The Problems and Challenges with Corporate Social Responsibility

30 years after the Brundtland Report, we still have a long way to go!

integral part of core organizational strategy” (Hahn 2013, p. 443). Certainly formal stra-tegic planning could improve operational efficiency and CSSR needs to be integrated into a company’s core operations. How-ever, ISO 26000 is still too broad to be a useful management tool. The standard is more concerned with symbolic value rather than generating actual results in helping companies follow a strategic approach to CSSR. ISO 26000 is more useful in the stra-tegic planning processes because it gives corporate strategists lacking expertise in CSR a baseline that can provide guidance in program implementation (Hahn, 2013). But ISO 26000 does not help companies with their own specific planning, developing an action plan, or promulgating CSSR activi-ties through an entire corporate organi-

zation nor does it provide guidelines on how to communicate CSSR strategies to all stakeholders, including boards of directors, shareholders and the public.

What ISO 26000 achieves is that it offers a “starting point for analyzing the internal and external environment of an organiza-tion, covering the most likely impact of an organization on all three sustainability dimensions of economic, environmental and social….ISO 26000 states in clause 7.4

that an organization could include CSSR in its vision or mission statement to make it an integral part of the company’s policies. The standard itself, however, offers little guidance on how to achieve this. This is not surprising given the highly context-specific nature of any mission and vision, which is inevitably bound to the purpose and envi-ronmental settings of the particular com-pany” (Hahn, 2013, p. 447). Finally, ISO 26000 gives little guidance for companies in gener-ating CSSR strategies. “This is not surprising when looking at the highly context-depen-dent nature of any CSSR strategy. However, despite the many good practice examples of exemplary measures and business conduct that are included throughout ISO 26000, the standard gives only a few examples and concrete references to possible overarching

strategies. The only exception is environ-mental management where ISO 26000 refers to pollution prevention, sustainable resource use, climate change mitigation and adaptation, protection, and restoration of the natural environment as sub issues that can be identified as exemplary strategic moves for achieving ecological sustainabil-ity” (Hahn, 2013, p. 447). These sub issues, though are critical given the urgency of cli-mate change and the current time horizon

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by effective regu latory and enforcement mech-anism to defend sustainable development.

4. The free market system has resulted in gross imbalances in the distribution of wealth and in the domination of profit by the few. There is a high correlation between natural resources and civil war. (The Syrian refugee crisis was prompted by Syrian governmental crackdowns on the civilian population over increasing water shortages.) In many instances, there have been wars to capture and ensure access

to the natural resources of other countries.

5. A free trade agenda is being advocated by the WTO, however commercial and trade rights trump basic human rights under these regimes. Further, the WTO has not been supportive of sustainable development pertaining to various trade issues like insufficient market access to the products of developing countries and barriers to the free movement of labor. These

approaches result in environmental harms and hinder sustainable development.

6. Reconciliation of the personal ethical codes of employees with corporate ethics encourages businesses to maximize profits by reducing costs. This leads to unethical and unsustain-able business practices (agency issues), such as the exploitation of labor and excessive pol-lution. The responsibility of the corporation to conduct business operations in a responsible manner is ignored. Further, non-compliance

with voluntary initiatives towards sustainable practices, actual and perceived greenwashing, and the violation of national and international laws by corporations results in the loss of trust between the public and corporations.

6. Reconciliation of the personal ethical codes of employees with corporate ethics encourages businesses to maximize profits by reducing costs. This leads to unethical and unsustain-

for increasing impacts. What corporations need to figure out is how to integrate these “sub issues” into their strategy and embed sustainability into their operations now. Yet, globally, challenges and obstacles to doing so are substantial, as Ahmad, Sos-kolne and Ahmed (2012) enumerate:

1. Ethics and values, such as justice, equity and protection of the environment, have al-ready been incorporated in many existing national constitutions and international laws.

The challenge lies in their implementation by governments under existing social conditions and in the light of the newly emerging threats.

2. Natural resource degradation undermines every society’s productive capacity. Extensive water logging, salinity, nutrient depletion, deforestation and erosion are worsening. South Asian countries are losing at least $10 billion US annually due to land degradation, which is equivalent to 2% of the region’s GDP.

Water shortage is considered as one of the most challenging environmental issues this century. Water is unevenly distributed across regions, countries and seasons. Worsening lo-cal, regional, national and international water scarcities will depress agricultural production, exacerbate water-related health problems and precipitate water conflicts between users within a country and also between countries. Further, the efficiency of water use is generally poor, and in some countries, it is close to 35%.

3. The international community has no effective supranational framework capable of handling global environments and social responsibilities. The United Nations and the World Trade Or-ganization are strongly influenced by national interests and their undemocratic functioning. An effective global framework, such as the Global Adaptive Governance Scheme advocated by Bierman and Boas (2010), is needed for the translation of ethical principles and WTO measures into meaningful laws accompanied

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able business practices (agency issues), such as the exploitation of labor and exces-sive pollution. The responsibility of the corporation to conduct business operations in a responsible manner is ignored. Further, non-compliance with voluntary initiatives towards sustainable practices, actual and perceived greenwashing, and the violation of national and international laws by corpo-rations results in the loss of trust between the public and corporations.

7. Rich countries that should lead in global dialogue about sustainable development of-ten exercise a double standard. They often advocate the selective application of ethical principles depending on their own interests. There is a lack of awareness among politicians or an inability for them to consider sustainable development issues.

8. The transition to sustainable development is difficult where power and wealth are concen-trated in the hands of few people. This elite group exploits people as they have little inter-est in abiding by national and international norms. This holds true particularly for devel-oping countries where a few families control the political arena and have a monopoly on a major part of the wealth.

9. World religions have shown little interest

in sustainable development. Religious insti-tutions could strengthen the core values of sustainable development, offer alternatives to materialism and provide direction to sustain-ability. These institutions could take a leading role through collective decision-making by encouraging moral norms. However, religions

remain isolated from one another and from other institutions.

10. Many MNCs, media and government ac-tions have promoted northern (rich countries) interests and thus have contributed to the acceptance of an unsustainable northern-oriented development paradigm.

11. Lack of education and awareness about the principle of sustainability among consumers and decision-makers have resulted in the inadequate adoption of sustainable develop-ment policies.

12. Sustainable development cannot be achieved in global societies under a situation of severe instability and insecurity. Moreover, efforts for sustainable development will always be trumped by international security concerns.

13. Science and technology results in the con-tinuous generation of new knowledge. New knowledge alters the way in which people perceive the world. As new knowledge chal-lenges old paradigms and existing narratives, institutions that were created under the old paradigm may be threatened with change or obsolescence.

(Ahmad, Soskolne, Ahmed, 2012).

In addition to the challenges to sustain-ability enumerated by Ahmad, Soskolne, and Ahmed, agency issues in the executive suite are also formidable obstacles that discourage a focus on sustainability issues as they normally negatively impact short term profitability. Profit measures (e.g., operating income and EPS) remain the most common metrics that trigger CEO compen-sation packages. Many metrics are industry specific, and some are unique to individual companies. Most companies reward bonus packages, stock options, or other forms of compensation based upon profit mea-sures. While such metrics seem logical and rational, these triggers can create agency issues, other ethics issues such as what transpired at Enron and World.com, and a short term focus and reliance on quarterly and annual reports rather than a broader focus on a corporate long-term strategy. McClure, 2016 explains: “But options are

far from perfect. In fact, with options, risk can get badly skewed. When shares go up in value, executives can make a fortune from options - but when they fall, investors lose out while executives are no worse off than before. Indeed, some companies let executives swap old option shares for new, lower-priced shares when the company’s shares fall in value. Worse still, the incentive to keep the share price motoring upward so that options will stay in-the-money encour-ages executives to focus exclusively on the next quarter and ignore shareholders’ lon-ger term interests. Options can even prompt top managers to manipulate the numbers to make sure the short-term targets are met. That hardly reinforces the link between CEOs and shareholders” (McClure, 2016, paras 9-10).

A short-term focus, a focus on stock price, a focus on earnings per share and other metrics not only interfere with long-term strategy, but it provides a very strong dis-incentive to ignore substantive long-term corporate sustainability and social respon-sibility strategic decisions that may move the company in a green direction. CEOs get stuck in a never-ending destructive circle that reinforces the need to meet financial goals to maximize compensation rather than spending time to create virtuous cycles that would benefit all stakeholders—people, planet, shareholders and CEOs along with other corporate executives.

Further complicating the issue is the frag-mented implementation of CSR in various corporations already taking place, and an emerging understanding that sustainability issues and responsibility for them extend

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beyond the boundaries of any one company. Searcy, (2016) explains: “a growing number of corporations have integrated sustain-ability considerations into their strategic planning processes and have established sustainability policies, plans and programs to respond to these issues. Although motivations for implementing sustainabil-ity initiatives vary, they typically include competitiveness, legitimation and ecologi-cal responsibility. Many corporations have made progress in improving the sustainabil-ity performance of their internal operations.

However, there is an emerging understand-ing that sustainability issues extend beyond the boundaries of any one corporation. Corporate sustainability management must adapt to reflect this expanded inter-pretation. In particular, there is a need to broaden the measurement of progress beyond internal operations (Searcy, 2016, p. 120). Unfortunately, “there is no inte-grated analytical framework that specifically guides corporations through the process of creating indicators and indices that mea-sure enterprise sustainability” (Searcy, 2016, p. 121). Essentially then, in this emerging understanding of CSR, corporations for the most part really are beginning from scratch to comprehend the enormity of their CSR responsibilities as part of global civilization, especially in light of Gaia theory (which has been upgraded from a hypothesis since it was introduced several decades ago), and which still offers hope. “Gaia theory [see the Appendix for a detailed explanation of Gaia theory as it pertains to business] points to the fact that humankind’s envi-ronmental sensitivity need not be altruistic. Although environmental debates are often couched in terms of ‘saving the planet’, research results from Gaia theorists make it clear that the planet can take care of itself. What is threatened via ecological and social degradation is not the planet but human-kind and its way of life. Thus, achieving sustainability will require balanced, complex interactions involving both co-operation and competition [coopetition] among all of the planet’s subsystems, or the human condition will suffer as a result. Our current way of life and ‘quality of life’ are clearly under threat but, despite these reminders,

there are numerous business opportunities waiting to be taken up by organizations that are willing to be true leaders in identifying and managing new products, services, ideas, and new values, consumer cultures and behaviors. The winners in the new busi-ness world will displace and replace existing players who have not made the necessary changes to adapt to the new business or world paradigm; a paradigm that actually holds the potential to improve our current quality of life rather than diminish it (Bor-land, 2009, p. 556).

In the past, we have thought of environ-mental sustainability within the context of business ethics or CSR. Now however, as Borland (2009) and Searcy (2016) and oth-ers have begun to realize and articulate, the fundamental significance of the envi-ronment in supporting all human activity, including business activity, is being recog-nized. Businesses especially are dependent on the environment, and their exploitation of the environment, for their long term suc-cess and profitability. As climate change has become reality, corporations are beginning to discover that if they want to protect their business models and stay in business, they must adopt CSR strategies in an attempt to maintain the environment in a state that will allow continued profitability. The particular CSSR strategies that corporations adopt, and how they are integrated into their core strategies, or not, is so important because corporations are the primary engines of economic development, they have financial resources, technological knowledge and in-stitutional capacity to implement solutions, and because the examination of environ-mental sustainability at the organizational level of analysis is both appropriate for the scale of the issues involved and also needs further examining (Borland, 2009). How-ever, corporations contribute only partially to global sustainability issues. Corpora-tions, consumers and governments must all work together in concert to address the environmental issues the planet faces. But companies can act by embedding corpo-rate sustainability as a core component of a company’s strategy, its corporate culture, and its globalization efforts.

Another reason why ISO 26000 is valuable to use as a starting point is because in recent years, corporate missions, visions, values, and objectives have become myopic as com-panies have focused heavily on the financial bottom line and shareholder value, rather than CSR. ISO 26000 can be used to instill purpose, direction and corporate goals in companies that have become too focused on pursuing short term profitability at the expense of other concerns (Borland, 2009).

Perhaps because the environment and sus-tainability have been neglected for so long is a reason why the Gaia Theory is gaining in acceptability and prominence. The “planet Earth and its ecosystem that is the first sup-plier and final recipient of all that is created by human beings is increasingly viewed as

a [corporate] stakeholder. The inclusion of planet Earth as a stakeholder is gaining ground, particularly when ethics, inclusive-ness, fairness and strategic perspectives [are] being integrated” (Peterlin, Pearse, Dimovski, 2015, p. 274). Peterlin, Pearse and Dimovski also recognize the agency issues of CEO compensation and note that the way we devise corporate strategy has changed because the way we compensate CEOs has changed (Peterlin, Pearse and Dimovski, 2015). Therefore Peterlin, Pearse and Di-movski suggest that it is necessary to add a new quality to the mix of sustainability and strategy: sustainable leadership.



“Leaders and managers need to have the mind-set that tells them that long term, the planet’s homeostatic balance is the most important consid-eration, and they need to believe that nature and humans, together, form ecosystems and that their organizations have a role to play in sustaining and enhancing ecosystems” (Parkes and Borland, 2012, p. 819). Servant and sustainable leadership approaches have a unique contribution to make in terms of “enlightened strategic decision making in this expanded context of responsible leadership that other leadership theories cannot make. This is because their orientation to serve and contribute to the well-being of others and the natural environment [takes priority over self-interest], their focus on the long term interests of multiple organizational stakeholders, rather than a few internal ones and their recognition of the duty of leadership as stewards of organizational and natural resources to serve the common good. Servant leadership and sustainability can inform strategic leaders as to how they should be exercising strategic decision making within this context of multiple demands from multiple enlightened stakeholders. Sustainable organizations in the contemporary business environment need new decision making frameworks which servant and sustainable leadership approaches can provide” (Peterlin, Pearse and Dimovski, 2015, p. 274).

In a sustainable leadership framework, corporate leadership would be exercised with five other stakeholder groups: consumers, co-creators, the planet Earth, community and investors. Sustainable leadership and strategic thinking also integrates well with ethical obligations to future generations because the decision making process of sustainable strategic leaders stems from their values systems. Sustainable leaders integrate the economic, social and environmental dimensions of their strategic decision making, activity and reporting. “Sustainable leadership is focused on nur-turing future generations’ potential for a dignified existence. Like servant leadership, sustainable leadership focuses more on the needs of others than on the leader’s needs. However, sustainable leadership is distinctive from servant leadership in the sense that it is focused on the future needs of many stakeholders, and not only the present needs of current followers. Sustainable leadership is based upon the notion of ethical leadership, but extends its area of application by claiming that it is ethical that we take into consideration the needs of a wider range of stakeholders, including future generations and the natural environment. Olivier (2012) exposed a number of critical leadership challenges, and described sustainability as one of the main contemporary social, economic and ecological challenges of the type of ethical leader that Aristotle called the ‘good man’, who seeks the welfare of his subjects because he is burdened with the pursuit of justice, in order to protect the common well-being of the community. In essence, in com-parison to other leadership theories that stem from the transformational leadership approach, sustainable leadership is distinguished by pursuing the value of sustainability at the individual, organizational, social and eco-

Sustainable Leadership

In a sustainable leadership framework, corporate leadership would be exercised with five other stakeholder groups: consumers, co-creators, the planet Earth, community and investors.

logical level for both current and future generations (Peterlin, Pearse, and Dimovski, 2015, p. 279). Therefore a sustainable lead-ership approach contributes to comprehen-siveness keholders are taken into consid-eration. It prioritizes the responsible and proactive care of the natural environment alongside personal, organizational and societal considerations. And most admi-rably, the service and restorative elements of servant leadership contribute to more comprehensive strategic decision making by ensuring that the long term social and ecological effects are also taken into ac-count, as well as addressing the legacies of poor decision making that arose from a long history of short term focus on profitability metrics because of agency issues regarding CEO compensation, and supplanting those legacies with a new one focused on the greater good.

Such thinking results in the conclusion that in order to install servant/sustainable leaders into executive positions in order to incorporate sustainability into the core corporate strategy, it is critical to consider how organizations select and develop their leaders. This requires Human Resources to be involved and focused on sustainabil-ity when making hiring decisions, and the possibility that a company’s culture needs to be overhauled to focus on sustainability also needs to be considered. “Organizations should select their leaders based on the fit between the personal values of applicant leaders and those of the organization. A se-lected decision informed by such consider-ations creates alignment, where pro-natural and pro-social ideas can be expressed in the organization, appropriate strategic deci-sions made by leaders and then implement-ed with the support of the organization.

Secondly, organizations should adopt pro-cesses that develop values based leadership throughout the organization. This includes role modelling, training, participatory com-munication and reflection. Finally, attention should be paid to the organizational culture, both in leadership training programs and in how leaders influence it. That is, the shared values of the organization are embedded in the culture of the organization. Therefore, leaders need to be able to decipher the organizational culture so as to understand its impact on decision making, as well as to shape the culture of the organization so that it is supportive of strategic decision making that advances sustainability” (Peter-lin, Pearse, and Dimovski, 2015, p. 283).

Moreover, “strong leadership is a special requirement of strategically sustainable corporate strategy, particularly from CEOs. Top management support, guidance and involvement in implementing strategic sustainability are crucial. Stead and Stead (2004) suggest that CEOs are the primary change agents responsible for instituting a strategic sustainability approach in their organizations and, collectively, they are the change agents most responsible for leading the paradigm shift from a closed circular-flow economy to an open living-system economy. They also consider that fulfilling these generative change agent roles will require that strategic sustainability manag-ers be effective leaders, who are able to mold sustainability-centered organizational cultures and structures to meet the needs of the Earth’s stakeholders to instill spiritual as well as emotional and intellectual intel-ligence into the learning processes of their organizations. From this leadership, other corporate mechanisms are necessary to cre-ate change, these include the integration

Leaders need to believe that nature and humans, together, form eco-systems and that their organizations have a role to play in not only sus-taining, but enhancing, ecosystems.

Strong leadership is a special requirement of strategically sustain-able corporate strat-egy, particularly from CEOs. Top management support, guidance and involvement in imple-menting strategic sus-tainability are crucial.



of corporate cultures, structures, human resource management systems, technology, accounting systems, research and devel-opment and marketing amongst others” (Borland, 2009, p. 563). Broadening the base in this way to incorporate a company’s entire organization allows companies to look beyond their traditional financial bottom line to other routes that lead to the financial and non-financial success of the organization, and ultimately “cradle-to-cradle” rather than “cradle-to-grave” approaches to product design and strategy and corporate vision. Product steward-ship and sustainable vision also engages external stakeholders, including supply chain partners and consumers, and thus contributes to a fulfilment of a company’s sustainability obligations that extend beyond the confines of company (Galpin, Whittington and Bell, 2015; Hahn, Pinkse, Preuss and Figge, 2015; Knight, 2014; Parkes and Borland, 2012; Borland, 2009).

“Connected Capitalism is a business phi-losophy introduced by a former Coca-Cola chairman and CEO, Neville Isdell. The basic tenet is that companies should connect the bottom lines of their businesses with a social conscious. The idea isn’t to forgo capitalism for pure, non-profit altruism, but rather to turn a profit while using the weight of the brand to be an agent for posi-tive change in the world. Isdell espoused that while capitalism is a great model, peo-ple have grown weary of corporate greed; the Millennials desire something more than just making money. Brands interested in long-term sustainability need to change the way they practice capitalism if they want the benefits of capitalism to continue. Financial results alone are not going to be enough. Business and society need to be better-connected going forward” (Knight, 2014, p. 189). Laszlo and Zhexembayeva (2011) call this “sustainable value,” and the creation of sustainable value is the strategy they recommend for companies to remain profitable while becoming environmen-tally and social responsible. Sustainable value creation all stems from the strategic decisions made by sustainable leadership, which trickle down throughout the entire corporate structure in terms of aligning

key staff to make sustainable decisions, transformation of the corporate culture, and hiring decisions made by Human Resources that reflect the new corporate sustainable value system.

When considering sustainability as a core component in strategic plan-ning, it may be necessary to apply business process reengineering (BPR) to the existing strategic planning process. “I believe you can reengineer any process including that of how you formulate strategy or structure your organization,” (Luoma, 2016). To develop any specific sustainability competency, such as sustainable development, an organization needs to develop a capability for the integration of sustainability into strategic planning (Soteriou and Coccossis, 2010). Business Process Reengineering can develop that capability. “Business Process Reengineering is a dramatic change initiative that contains five major steps. Managers should refocus company values on customer needs, redesign core processes, often using information technology to enable improvements, reorganize a business into cross-functional teams with end-to-end responsibility for a process, rethink basic organizational and people issues and improve business processes across the organization. Companies use Business Process Reengineering to improve performance substantially on key processes that impact custom-ers. Business Process Reengineering can reduce costs and cycle times by eliminating unproductive activities and the employees who perform them. Reorganization by teams decreases the need for management layers, ac-celerates information flows, and eliminates the errors and rework caused by multiple handoffs. Business Process Reengineering improves quality by reducing the fragmentation of work and establishing clear ownership of processes. Workers gain responsibility for their output and can measure their performance based on prompt feedback” (Rigby, 2015, p.18).

When applied to a corporation’s strategy, BPR can completely transform a company, as does adopting sustainable strategies recognizing the Earth as a stakeholder, an ethical obligation to future generations, an emerging understanding that corporations owe sustainability practices to a greater constituency than the company’s immediate stakeholders that includes a larger global community, a need to develop sustainable leadership, trans-form corporate culture and to look for sustainable values when making hiring decisions. Applying BPR to a company’s strategy has the potential to reorient the company’s priorities and focus from existing sources of value creation to sustainable value creation. This could be the missing “green hand” of wealth creation that Solomon (2010) was referring to.

Utilizing the Lead User Process (LUP) as developed by von Hippel, Thomke and Sonnack, (1999), those leading edge companies that are ahead of the curve in embedding sustainability into their core strategies can share what they’ve learned and help bridge the gap in knowledge, experience and un-derstanding that has kept so many companies from understanding what their roles are in implementing sustainability strategies and CSR and the differences in understanding what their own roles are from their customers’ expectations. Sustainable development is a society level concept in the

BPR, LUP, Planning, Game Theory and Nash Equilibrium

Applying BPR to a company’s strategy has the potential to reorient the company’s priorities and focus from existing sources of value creation to sustainable value creation. This could be the missing “green hand” of wealth creation that Solomon (2010) was referring to.

CONNECTED CAPITALISM:Companies should con-nect their bot-tom lines with a social con-scious.



sense that individual organizations cannot become sustainable: individual organiza-tions simply contribute to the larger system in which sustainability may or may not be achieved (Hahn, Pinske, Preuss and Figge, 2015). All corporations need to cooper-ate with each other and work together to achieve sustainability and help fulfill the ethical obligation to future generations in handing down a world to the next gen-eration no more degraded, and hopefully somewhat improved, than the world the current generation inherited. This is why the lead users will engage and the LUP will be successful in this context while the willingness to share among lead users is somewhat questionable in a traditional competitive circumstance. There is a strong motivation to help all actors become sus-tainable once sustainable leadership and a sustainability strategy has been adopted, and once the implications of Gaia Theory have been understood and accepted.

Another reason why corporations will cooperate with each other in sustainability strategies is a natural tendency to achieve a Nash equilibrium. The 2001 Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, A Beautiful Mind, tells the story of Economist John Nash and his search for the one brilliant idea, Governing Dynamics, while dealing with schizophrenia. In the movie, there is one brilliant scene (Goldman, 2011) that explains the essence of Nash Equilibrium in Game

Theory. In this scene, a man is at a bar with his friends. In walks a blonde woman with her friends, who are all brunettes. If everyone decided to talk to the blonde, Nash hypothesizes, she would be put off and date noone. Rejected, if the men decided

to talk to the brunettes as second choices, the brunettes would feel insulted that they were second choices and reject the men’s advances. However, Nash proposed that if everyone ignored the blonde and talked first to the brunettes, then everyone would be successful and earn a date with a woman. This was Nash’s breakthrough moment. In traditional economic theory as articulated by Adam Smith, in competition, individual ambition serves the common good. All cor-porations would function normally and seek to create value for shareholders and maxi-mize profitability. However, if everyone were ambitious and went straight to the blonde, the men would block each other and fail. This is the unsustainable path the world has committed to, and which has brought us to this nexus of climatic change. But if none of the men in the bar approached the blonde, the brunettes would not be insulted and all men would win, resulting in a win-win situa-tion and Nash equilibrium—when all players do both what’s best for themselves AND what is best for the group. Nash went on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994. Likewise, if all corporations, governments and individuals begin to work towards creating win-win situations for all, it would mean possibly sacrificing a bit of short term profitability while embedding sustainability into company core strategies and transi-tioning to a sustainable company, but it would result in long term sustainable value creation and an improved natural planetary environment, meeting needs of the Earth as a stakeholder, and upholding and protecting the current generation’s obligation to future generations.

“Firms today need systemic approaches to sustainability if they are to be competitive over the long term. Without a diligent effort to create an organizational infrastructure that supports the development of a sustain-ability strategy, the firm’s efforts to success-fully implement a sustainability strategy will be severely hindered. Innovative sustain-ability solutions, which produce win-win-win outcomes for the environment, society and firms depend upon leaders being intent in fostering a ‘culture of sustainability’ within their organizations” (Galpin, Whittington and Bell, 2015, p. 2).

When considering the holistic approach the Gaia Theory demands in un-derstanding that great climatic change and geopolitical challenges from climatic change are imminent, it should now be evident that sustainability strategic planning also demands a holistic and simultaneous approach that integrates previous disparate and independent components of strategic thinking and planning.

“Only recently, an integrative view on corporate sustainability has been emerging, which conceptualizes corporate sustainability as embracing ten-sions and contradictions between different sustainability aspects [which entails interdependent economic, environmental and social concerns]. The integrative view on corporate sustainability argues that firms need to pursue different sustainability aspects simultaneously—even if they seem to contradict each other. As its distinctive feature, the integrative view posits that managers need to embrace the tensions between different conflicting sustainability aspects rather than dismissing them. By doing so, it goes beyond the Triple Bottom Line because it explicitly addresses the oftentimes conflicting relationships between these different aspects. At its heart, the integrative view considers different sustainability aspects as interrelated elements and ‘recognizes and embraces the contradictions among the financial, social and environmental dimensions’” (Hahn, Pinske, Preuss and Figge, 2015, p. 299).

Integrating all sustainability aspects into a larger whole would also logi-cally involve a business process reengineering of the corporation’s mission statement, values and goal-setting processes to include sustainability as core components. “The process of fostering sustainability decisions and behaviors at all levels of the organization begins by incorporating sustain-ability into the organization’s strategic management process. In general, a mission identifies how a firm defines itself and establishes the priorities of the organization. A well-designed mission statement defines the com-pany’s primary, distinctive purpose and can help set a firm apart from other similar organizations. Mission statements are a powerful tool for setting the strategic direction and tactical actions of the company. Considerable research has shown that a well-articulated mission statement provides critical signals to organizational stakeholders regarding the aims of the organization and can ultimately lead to positive outcomes that benefit the entire firm. Developing an organizational culture of sustainability begins with a mission statement that strikes a balance between financial and social performance, yet seeks to achieve high performance in terms of both of these areas. It is important that the mission conveys the role of the organization to the market, as well as the role of the organization in relation to society. Mission statements that adopt this balanced posture will convey to both internal and external stakeholders that the firm does not consider success in financial and environmental terms to be mutually

Solutions for Embedding Sustainability as a Core Component in Strategic Planning

Integration is a process. It is important that the mission conveys the role of the organization to the market as well as the role of the organization in relation to society. Success in both financial and environmental terms is not mutually exclusive.

In traditional eco-nomic theory as articulated by Adam Smith, in competition, in-dividual ambition serves the common good. Nash shows this is the unsus-tainable path that has brought us to the nexus of cli-matic change.



exclusive. Instead, top managers will lead the organization in a way that reflects suc-cess in both financial and societal terms. Examples of firms that have adopted a sustainability perspective in their missions, and that also have achieved superior per-formance include Patagonia, Whole Foods and Ameren…. Shared values can also provide a source of motivation and com-mitment among organizational members. Shared values have been found to be a key component of aligning decision-making and behaviors with a firm’s sustainability efforts” (Galpin, Whittington and Bell, 2015, pp. 4-5).

While this section has focused on sustain-ability strategic planning in corporations and demonstrates serious challenges to overcome and potential solutions that if adopted will make major impacts for indi-vidual companies, shareholders, consumers and the global ecosystem; corporate action alone will not achieve the outcomes neces-sary fast enough to slow, forestall or prevent the worst of the climatic change impacts predicted and that by many reports are already occurring. A concerted effort and partnership between corporations and gov-ernments and supported by the will of the general population are needed to achieve the goal of passing on the present world to

the next generation in the same or better condition than the one that exists today. To achieve this ethical obligation, the world needs to work together, beginning today. Because this has not happened, it is likely that the predicted climatic change impacts will occur, along with continued geopolitical turmoil fueled by critical resource short-ages. In this regard, it is absolutely critical that all corporations adopt sustainable strategic planning now.

A critical component of embedding sustain-ability as a core component in strategic planning is adaptability. While how quickly the global environment will change is not known, corporations nevertheless must pre-pare for rapid change. Corporations must remain nimble, flexible and develop adap-tive competencies to meet the challenges as they come in order to protect their own logistical systems and supply chains while maintaining the capability to provide outstanding customer service and prod-uct quality to its customers. Finally, many sectors have important roles in contribut-ing to an environment conducive for large scale transformations that will help speed sustainable strategic planning among the world’s corporations and governments:

1. Academicians can provide scholarly and more objective informa-tion for the formulation of better environment and development poli-cies by taking long-term perspective and using the best available knowledge and integrating local and regional impacts. For meeting the requirement of sustainable develop-ment, activities may be carried out pertaining to strengthen the scien-tific basis for sustainable management, enhancing scientific understanding, improving long-term sci-entific assessment meth-ods and building up sci-entific capacity.

2. Indigenous peoples and communities have historical relationships with their lands by virtue of their hunter-gatherer cultural heri-tage. They have traditional knowledge about their ancestral lands, local natural resources and their environment. Various institutions must recognize the role of indigenous peoples and their communities in view of the close relationship between the natural environment and sustainable development.

3. Business and industry play an important role in the social and economic development of a country. Favorable government policies can encourage/incentivize this sector to implement long-term policies, increase the efficiency of resource utilization, increase the reuse and recycling of residues, reduce the quantity of waste discharge and treat waste before dis-posal. 4. Government should implement the principles and criteria for sustainable develop-ment with global impacts in mind. Since these crises exist at the global level, they should be

addressed with a focus on proper resource management the global level.

5. NGOs play a constructive, independent, effective, responsible and partnership role in activating a sense of common purpose in various sectors of society in the process of sustainable development.

6. Institutions, including local governments, service organizations and user associations, can play an important role for sustainable development. For instance, these institutions are very helpful in the mobilization of resources and regulation with a long-term approach at the local level.

7. There is a need to place values, ethics and law at the heart of the process of sustainable development and at each of the local, regional, national, and global levels, focusing on values, ethics, the rule of law, sovereignty and security.

(Ahmad, Soskolne and Ahmed, 2012 pp. 74-79)



Conclusion



AS ONE OF THE MOST POLLUTING, AND ENERGY AND WATER INTENSIVE INDUSTRIES, “THE FASHION INDUSTRY IS ON A RELENTLESS PURSUIT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION: WHAT DOES LUXURY MEAN TODAY? WHEN I JOINED THE ACTRESS AND ACTIVIST EMMA WATSON ON A FITTING FOR THE CUSTOM-MADE CALVIN KLEIN DRESS SHE WORE TO THE MET GALA IN NEW YORK, SHE HAD A SUGGESTION: ‘LUXURY TO ME MEANS PEACE OF MIND,’ SHE SAID. SPECIFICALLY, KNOWING THAT WHAT SHE IS WEARING HAS BEEN ETHICALLY SOURCED AND PRODUCED. FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS, WATSON HAS RESOLVED THAT ALL OF HER RED CARPET APPEARANCES INCORPORATE SUSTAINABLE FASHION. IN THE CASE OF THE MET GALA, THIS MEANT THE MAJORITY OF THE FABRIC USED WAS MADE FROM NEWLIFE, A YARN MADE FROM 100 PERCENT POST-CONSUMER PLASTIC BOTTLES; AND THE DETAIL-ING ON THE BUSTIER WAS MADE WITH ORGANIC SILK AND COTTON” (BLAS-BERG, 2016, PARAS 1-5).

Watson’s choices and stances on sustainability have earned her a United Nations ambassadorship; but more importantly, her activism has increased demand for sustainable products sustainably produced from the fashion industry, and has increased momentum among the industry’s suppliers to incorporate sustainability in their strategic planning processes.

This white paper has examined the need for sustainability as a core com-ponent in strategic planning from a holistic and integrated perspective. Establishing the urgency to slow the impacts of climate change along with the ethical imperative to assume an obligation to future generations to pass on to them a world at worst no more degraded than it is now provides the context and justification for why businesses must adopt sustainable strate-gies as the core of their strategic planning processes and align every aspect of business with those sustainability strategies. This involves embedding sustainability into corporate mission statements, developing sustainable leadership, and a transformation of corporate culture to include sustain-ability as a core value.

“Psychologist Kurt Lewin, known as the ‘founder of social psychology,’ created a well-known formula B = f (P,E) that states behavior is a function of the person and their environment. One powerful environmental influ-ence that can be seen in organizations today is based on generational differences. Currently, four generations of workers (traditionalists, baby boomers, Generation X, Generation Y) coexist in many organizations. The different backgrounds and behaviors create challenges for leading these individuals that often have similar shared experiences within their genera-tion but different sets of values, motivations and preferences in contrast to other generations….The generation that followed Generation X is known as Generation Y or millennials. This generation is highlighted by positive

Conclusion

For decades, as the global warming created by human emissions caused land ice to melt and ocean water to expand, scientists warned that the accelerating rise of the sea would eventually imperil the United States’ coastline. Now, those warnings are no longer theoretical: The inundation of the coast has begun. The sea has crept up to the point that a high tide and a brisk wind are all it takes to send water pouring into streets and homes. Federal scientists have documented a sharp jump in this nuisance flooding — often called “sunny-day flooding” — along both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast in recent years. The sea is now so near the brim in many places that they believe the problem is likely to worsen quickly. Shifts in the Pacific Ocean mean that the West Coast, partly spared over the past two decades, may be hit hard, too (Gillis, 2016, para 4).

attributes such as the ability to embrace technology. More than previous genera-tions, this group prizes job and life satis-faction highly, so making the workplace an enjoyable environment is key to managing Generation Y” (Ketchen and Short, pp. 300-301).

Emma Watson represents Generation Y. Her commitment to peace of mind from her purchasing decisions demonstrates how much she values life satisfaction and job satisfaction in her role as a United Nations ambassador. Emma Watson also represents

the future generations to which the Tradi-tionalists, Baby Boomers and Generation X owe a habitable world. With her activism for sustainability, and the purchasing deci-sions she and her generation are making, Generation Y’s future just may be a sustain-able one. Especially if sustainable purchas-ing decisions increasingly drive strategic sustainability decision making in the world’s corporations. However to create a sustain-able future, we must ignite change now “at the scale of the whole” (Laszlow & Zhexem-bayeva, 2011).



Appendix & References

Gaia Theory and Strategic Planning



As nature as a whole is more powerful than human society, it makes eminent sense for companies, and individuals, to learn how to work with nature rather than against it. Therefore it is important to under-stand the interrelationship between Gaia Theory, the laws of thermodynamics and ecosystems theory to inform strategic sustainability planning.

“The starting point for discussion regarding environ-mental sustainability, and how companies can oper-ate sustainably, needs to begin with an appreciation of some of the key scientific principles that govern the global environment. Gaia theory, the laws of ther-modynamics and ecosystems theory explain each in turn, how both animate and inanimate components, which make up the Earth’s surface and its atmo-sphere, behave. Gaia theory is a complex concept that has at its core the interrelationships between the physical, chemical and biological elements of life on Earth. The essence of this concept is that, it is life on Earth that creates and regulates the atmosphere and therefore regulates its own existence, which creates a state of homeostasis (a complex balance of all living and non-living things). Gaia does not provide pref-erential treatment to any particular species or any particular part of the globe. Gaia represents holism, diversity, complexity, constancy, consistency, quality of life, cooperation and competition: instrumental values that can also be reflected by modern corpora-tions, pursuing a core value of sustainability. Reduc-tionist research does not sit well with Gaia for the same reasons that it does not benefit organizations—interrelationships between activities and objects cannot be measured or monitored.

“The atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, and the crust of the Earth are regulated at a state comfort-able for life because of the behavior of living organ-isms. Specifically, the Gaia hypothesis says that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity, and certain

aspects of the rocks and waters are at any time kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automati-cally and unconsciously by the biota. Solar energy sustains comfortable conditions for life. The condi-tions are only constant in the short-term and evolve in synchrony with the changing needs of the biota as it evolves. Life and its environment are so closely coupled that evolution concerns Gaia, not organisms or the environment taken separately.

“In envisioning Gaia, it helps to relate the health of the planet to the health of a human being. Humans also have a homeostatic balance. When our body temperature rises because we are unwell, our body works hard to bring our temperature back down and to regain the temperature balance. In a similar way, when something is out of balance with the planet, nature works hard to bring it back into balance for the benefit of its inhabitants. As nature, as a whole, is more powerful than human society, it makes eminent sense for companies, and individuals to learn how they can work with nature rather than against it, if they wish to benefit long term.

“The laws of thermodynamics are the second princi-ple under consideration. There are two laws, the first law, the conservation law, states that the amount of energy released by the big bang is a constant in the universe. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one state to another. The amount of energy generated during this trans-formation depends on the temperature difference between the states. The second law of thermodynam-ics says that every time energy is transformed from one state to another, some of its available energy to do work is lost. This process is called entropy. Entropy occurs when stored energy becomes cooler, less concentrated, or less ordered when it is applied to do work. When energy is no longer available to do

GAIA Theory and Strategic PlanningIt’s not about saving the planet. It’s about ensuring that life continues. For all species, for mankind’s survial.

work, when it has degraded to the point of being use-less, it becomes waste. The entropy law, thus dictates that all things have a tendency to go from a higher state to a lower state, from a higher energy level to a lower level of energy, or put another way, from order to chaos. We can see this for ourselves, for example, when an iron bar is left out in the rain; it decomposes to ferrous oxide (red and crumbly) and eventually rusts away. The energy is released and its usefulness to humans is lost.

“The laws of thermodynamics are central to the sus-tainability debate. First, the amount of energy in the environment is constant; it cannot be created or de-stroyed. Second, during the entropy process, energy tends to go from a higher order state to a lower order state when we apply it to do work and thus is lost in terms of human usefulness, but is not lost from the environment. Humans are notoriously inefficient at converting energy and most of the energy we exploit is lost to the atmosphere, ground, waterways or land-fill sites; take, for example petrol cars, most of the energy from the fuel is lost to the atmosphere along with noxious gases.

“The third concept is ecosystems theory. Systems theory has its central tenet, the principle that life’s systems are non-linear. However, existing busi-ness and economic models depict linear processes, relationships and systems. There is an immediate and obvious conflict here when trying to predict the outcome of certain business activities in a physical environment that works cyclically and non-linearly.

“Given the principles of Gaia theory and the laws of thermodynamics, it is not surprising to note that planet Earth is a “closed system.” This means that the energy and matter contained on and in the Earth are constant and finite and therefore non-renewable. Technically speaking, they are renewable, but they need specific conditions and a very long period of time to renew and therefore in terms of human use-fulness, they are non-renewable. The only exception to the closed system rule is the input of sunlight. Sunlight is a renewable energy source, at this current time, and is available across the globe. It is the most important source of renewable energy and is freely available; the significance of this fact is enormous. With non-renewable resources being finite and lim-ited, renewable resources (sunlight and thus, wind, wave, and all types of flora) are the only replaceable energy sources. It also so happens that sunlight and flora form the basis of all life on Earth—they provide us with the food we eat. Therefore, from sunlight

natural ecosystems are created. A natural ecosystem follows the principles of systems theory in that it is non-linear, and is also the basic environmental ‘unit of analysis’. From this unit of analysis, energy genera-tion, utilization and consumption can be measured in much the same way as they can within an organiza-tion. Ecosystems support life in a unique, complex and diverse system of interrelationships and inter-dependencies. Ecosystems can overlap each other with animal species traveling between different local ecosystems. The conglomeration of the different natural ecosystems gives rise to the ‘global ecosys-tem’ a complicated patchwork of highly intricate and complex living relationships that form a perfectly, synchronized system supporting all known life forms.

“There are a number of relevant implications that arise from observing Gaia, thermodynamics and eco-systems theories. The first is that the human race is not regarded as a special case: we are subject to the same laws on Earth as all other species. The sec-ond is that because we live in a closed system, most natural resources are limited and finite. Yet, our use of them is increasing exponentially as our popula-tion increases exponentially and our per capita gross domestic product also increases significantly. The third implication of living in a closed system is the waste and pollution issue (high-entropy material). One of the goals for human societies, and particularly organizations, must be to create effective use of en-ergy and matter (goods and materials), and to reduce waste in all known processes, because there is no extra-terrestrial rubbish bin for us all to deposit our waste in” (Borland, 2009, pp. 559-561).

“One of the goals of human societies, and particularly or-ganizations, must be to create effective use of energy and matter (goods and materials), and to reduce waste in all known processes, because there is no extra-terrestrial rubbish bin for us all to deposit our waste in” (Borland, 2009, p. 561).



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