Corporate sustainability: a new business model

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better”.

(Dottor Seuss)

Sustainable Development in the Global Economic Landscape

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, wrote in the report "Our Common Future," what was to become the manifesto of sustainable development, defining sustainable development as a model that allows current generations to meet their needs without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same.

At the foundation of this radical but necessary change in perspective is the empirical fact that the current economic system shows its own critical issues, with an increasingly impoverished global South and a North unable to propose a sustainable model of production and consumption, all against the backdrop of a climate crisis that calls everyone to take responsibility. In this context, the challenge is to define a new model that can reconcile the needs of development with those of the environment.

The proposed approach starts with the understanding that the resources available to humans are naturally limited and necessarily scarce in relation to the global population. This necessitates a long-term perspective that encompasses intergenerational justice.