Business Strategy Towards Climate Change
1.Introduction
Carbon neutrality is not more a dream, a nice marketing phrasing or either a reason to rebel. It is strategy. Many companies now realize that they can rather make profit by being reasonable about global warming than trying to tackle new regulations. This is the result to changes that first became an important issue after the Kyoto Protocol was agreed on, back in 1997. This protocol was the written code for the new era of climate change control, with new resolutions and indexes aimed at the reduction in emission of green house effect gases all around the world, by the countries who agreed upon the protocol, which entered vigor from the beginning of 2005.
Only a handful of nations did not sign the Kyoto Protocol. One of them, and perhaps the most remarking one, was the United States. With so many highly polluting industries, it was a strategy call to disagree and to argument that the climate wasn’t changing at all.
That was a long time ago, and no reasonable strategy will now say that the key is to keep emissions high. The word that goes now is to become Carbon Neutral, and to add trading of carbon to the portfolio as soon as possible.
This text is an attempt to make a rough analysis of the state of Barclays Bank PLC strategy in the area. Four sources were used for this article, being a highly reliable report from Ceres (formerly the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies) from January 2008, an article from the Director Magazine from May 2007 and two sources from Barclays itself; one being a press release from march 2007 and the other being Barclays actual website. These sources and this text were backed up by two articles from the Harvard Business Revi ...