Companies Should Propose Radical Climate Change Solutions
By Sarah Kaplan
Australia's apocalyptic bush fires make the dystopian future of "Mad Max" look tame. The World Economic Forum recently reported that it will take another 100 years to achieve gender equality at the current pace of progress. Garbage patches twice the size of Texas have accumulated in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, wreaking havoc on ocean food chains that reach all of the way to human consumption.
Corporations are implicated in it all. That isn't company bashing. It's just a reality.
Pick an issue. When it comes to climate change, we can rightly blame the top energy companies that are responsible for the majority of industrial emissions. But we can also put the responsibility on car companies for not making more fuel-efficient or alternative-fuel cars. Or Amazon for congesting roads with polluting vehicles. Or the banks that finance these companies. And the list goes on.
Achieving gender equality is slow because companies simply are not hiring and promoting women into higher paying roles. Pay transparency reports in the U.K. revealed many Canadian companies that operate there - for example, RBC, SNC-Lavalin and BlackBerry - have wage gaps of 30 per cent to more than 90 per cent, mainly due to the lack of women in leadership.
According to Greenpeace, one truckload of plastic enters the ocean every minute. It identified 10 companies - Coca Cola, Pepsi-Co, Nestle and Danone among them - as the largest sources of this plastic pollution. We can hold retailers that sell those products accountable as well.
While the government clearly has a role in regulating pollution or mandating pay equity, companies can and should step in to lead change.
It is in vogue for companies to file corporate social responsibility reports discussing how they are doing on these social impacts.
Canada has a legal framework for considering the interests of stakeholders not just shareholders, but Canadian companies have not followed suit.
Action to address these trade-offs has been, on average, incremental at best.
That simply will not do. It's 2020 and the world is on fire.
Full (paywalled) op-ed in the Toronto Star: Companies Should Propose Radical Climate Change Solutions