Business leaders will they be tackled as much as the citizens?

On December 14, 2020, the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, met 130 members of the Citizen's Climate Convention. After several exchanges, only 40% of the 145 measures retained by the Head of State will be discussed in Parliament.

What we will take away from this exchange is the promise to integrate the fight for the climate into Article 1 of the French Constitution. Change is underway ...

As an extension of the Citizen's Convention for the Climate (CCC), Eric Duverger and his collaborator Valerie Brunel founded the Business Convention for the Climate (CEC). An awareness that will involve business leaders from SMEs to CAC40 in the fight for ecological transition.

A call for applications was launched from December 18, 2020 to February 20, 2021 to personalities from the economic world, in order to bring together 150 representative companies whose goal will be to find concrete solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40%. (GHG) by 2030.

Their mission :

Starting from the constant that our economic actors have the human and financial resources necessary to accelerate the movement of the protection of our planet, the CEC will set up a platform which will bring together all the “daring and impactful” proposals for the political world and presidential candidates 2022. The goal is to align their companies with the objective set by the CCC.

It is with the help of scientists experts in ecological transition and facilitators that this convention will take place from July 2021 to March 2022. The members of the CEC will work 12 days spread over 8 months to establish roadmaps, in which ambitious and credible internal initiatives will enable them to act for the regeneration of biodiversity and reduce their carbon emissions by 40%.

The ambition of this CEC is to overcome all the divergences and tensions which mar the proposals of the Citizen's Convention. Even if climate measures are an absolute and non-negotiable priority, the fact remains that the means to implement them must be concrete, applicable and respected.

The difficulty for these business leaders will certainly be to assess the means acceptable to each sector of activity to make this transition a success. We must reinvent the business of tomorrow so that each act does not generate pollution, destruction, suffering and waste. This initiative intends to show, if there is still a need, that business leaders are responsible economic players fully aware that their businesses have societal duties and henceforth strong ecological responsibilities. Their commitment is at the height of their determination to influence the political debate.

This CEC will allow companies to integrate an additional measure in their management, that of environmental accounting and ecological debt. It is a heresy to believe in the sustainability of certain companies in the face of the challenges of protecting the environment.

When we analyze the first cause of global warming, namely the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we can only realize that this increase coincides with the industrialization of Europe, of the States -United and a little later from Japan and China. Industrialized countries have a growing ecological debt to countries where natural resources are found. Added to this is "the degradation of habitats and the free disposal of the planet in order to deposit all kinds of waste due to industrialization."

This ecological debt must therefore make us aware of the inability of our economic system to last over time. It must force us to consider concrete reparations to the victims of past and future environmental upheavals.

New professions will appear. We can see that more and more citizens around the world are in favor of these radical changes and the time may have come to implement them.

Let us hope that the power of action and influence of our entrepreneurs will be powerful enough to remove the systemic obstacles to the socio-ecological transition of our companies. And we hope that these concrete actions can serve as an inspiration to other economic players around the world.