strategy
Integrating environmental strategies into industrial competitiveness
Synonyms:
Competing commercially using ecoefficiencyUsing ecoefficiency indicators to improve corporate environmental performance
Description:
Ecoefficiency indicators are designed to be used primarily by business to monitor and report their performance. They are equally relevant to similar operations operated by government. Ecoefficiency indicators relate economic and environmental performance to each other. On the micro level they allow managers to take better decisions and enable stakeholders to assess their companies more accurately. On the macro level they allow to measure the entire economy's progress in creating value with fewer resources and less environmental burden. Context:
Technology and innovation have key roles to play in attenuating the link between economic growth and environmental degradation. Countries have a shared interest in strengthening the development and diffusion of cleaner technologies and environmentally-sound products. Provided that prices are set appropriately, there may be opportunities to reap major cost savings, enhance efficiencies in resource use, reduce pollutant emissions and waste generation, and establish cleaner and safer workplaces by encouraging enterprises to incorporate environmental objectives into their management strategies and stimulate investment in clean technologies. Claim:
The ultimate goal of ecoefficiency is to grow economies qualitatively - in other words to provide more value rather than to transform materials and energy into more waste. Counter Claim:
1. Eco-efficiency may be a pragmatic tool for the decoupling of resource use and value creation, but does not include social, ethical and local accountability issues.2. Eco-efficiency is an outwardly admirable and certainly well-intended concept, but, unfortunately, it is not a strategy for success over the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, slowing it down with moral proscriptions and punitive demands. It presents little more than an illusion of change. Relying on eco-efficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite -- it will let industry finish off everything quietly, persistently, and completely (William McDonough and Michael Braungart).
Broader:
Competing in businessUsing performance indicatorsAdvancing industrial environmental managementProducing long-term business development strategyMaintaining dialogue between trade, development and environment communitiesPractising industrial ecology Facilitates:
Measuring sustainability Facilitated by:
Enhancing corporate environmental responsibilityRaising biodiversity awareness in economic sectorsUsing economic instruments for sustainable developmentConducting a periodic review of United Nations system efforts to integrate environment and development Subjects:
Commerce → Commerce Commerce → Business enterprises
Industry → Industry
Environment → Environment
Strategy → Strategy
Type Classification:
F: Exceptional strategies Related UN Sustainable Development Goals:
