Response from Lars Georg Jensen, Danish chapter of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF): To me, sustainable development is a stool with three legs: environment, health and economic wealth. If one of them is missing, or if they are not equal in length, you will fall over. It is evident that a responsible business must have superior performance in all three dimensions at any time. Businesses must see themselves as actors in the global community; they not only generate wealth for their shareholders, but for society. Granted, that is a very complex task, but businesses have to understand how these factors interact and must take their part in dealing with the big issues. Climate change, for instance, will affect conditions for life anywhere on our globe, for rich and for poor alike. Extreme weather conditions are just some of the indications we are already seeing of how the world’s climate is changing. In addition, new scientific findings predict that by 2050 a million animals and plants may be extinct due to climate change. The industrial era of plentiful, inexpensive fossil fuels is behind us for good. We need global reductions in CO2 emissions. Any business committed to sustainable development must frame a strategy for absolute CO2 reductions in its activities, if it wants to be perceived as truly responsible. The perspectives of the challenges ahead of us speak for themselves. Environmental considerations can no longer be something that you recognise when times are good and profits are high. That is why the Kyoto Protocol is based on the assumption that wealth and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive – neither for states nor for companies. In the light of this, the UN Millennium Development Goals provide a good framework for businesses as well as governments. Sustainable development may appear to some as a distant, utopian goal, but faced with the naked facts of more than a century of unsustainable practices, we hardly have any alternative to taking action now. Health cannot and should not be seen in isolation from the natural environment. What is the value of getting access to diabetes care if you do not have safe drinking water or proper sanitation – or if your crops are being destroyed due to heat waves or floods? With more than a billion people currently living under conditions where they do not have safe drinking water, and two billion people without access to electricity, the correlation between environment and welfare becomes very real. Lars Georg Jensen is programme coordinator for global policy in the Danish chapter of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and an internationally recognised expert on climate policy. | 
