It's a curious old world

The Rio +20 Summit is taking place next year and the environment press is already trying to gee everyone up and convince us that this, not Copenhagen 2009 or Cancun 2010, has to be the turning point in a global response to climate change. There are always high hopes for these conferences and to date none have lived up to expectations. That is why Paul Hohnen writing in the Guardian last week quite rightly pointed out that ‘the message from Rio+20 matters more than ever’. Paul identifies 5 groups of people, each with a different perspective on and response to climate change. There’s the ‘clueless’, the ‘cynics’, the ‘curious’, the ‘champions’, and the ‘calamitists’ – no great surprises and I’m sure we all know people that would fit into these categories. The group that clearly need the most focus is ‘the curious’; they are the ones that haven’t fully made up their mind either way and need a bit of encouragement. And this is where businesses can play a powerful role. Both by taking actions to reduce their own impacts and helping consumers find ways to reduce theirs, companies and brands can help empower ‘the curious’ to feel like they are part of something bigger and that their actions, however small they may seem on their own, can actually make a profound and positive difference.

From my sarcasm at the beginning of this post, perhaps you’ll assume I’m a cynic; to a certain degree you’d be right. But it’s not cynicism about the reality of climate change or the need for the Rio+20 Summit; it’s cynicism about what is expected from these summits and whether efforts would be better spent focusing on supporting and pushing business to take a greater lead.