The development of corporate integrated reporting (IR) standards has the promise to be one of the great business innovations of the 21st century, and could be pivotal in restoring public trust in business institutions, Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria told a seminal gathering of IR key stakeholders at an HBS workshop last week.

 The 2007-2009 financial crisis was a perfect "black swan" event: unexpected, a rarity, with broad and deep impacts; and, with the benefit of hindsight, it was also retrospectively rationalised by many "experts". We got it all "sensationally" wrong: bankers (like myself), policy-makers, supervisors, auditors, research analysts, economists, civil society itself. And even as the crisis was unfolding, many initially did not consider its seriousness. We saw dangers of shocks, but underestimated the confluence and impact thereof.  

Press Release.- Washington, DC – December  4, 2009 – Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and The Climate Prosperity Alliance today launched their Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® which tracks private investment in companies growing the green economy globally.  This new, never before reported number, showing $1,248,740,645,993.00 (over $1.248 trillion) in total investment since 2007, indicates how investors and entrepreneurs are leading governments in promoting sustainable growth.  The scoreboard totals investments in solar, wind, geothermal, ocean/hydro, energy efficiency and storage, and agriculture.  We purposefully omitted nuclear, "clean coal," carbon capture and sequestration, and biofuels.  We indicate which investments have been publically announced and committed by major companies for 2010 and beyond.

Dialogue between Anthony Alexander, writer, consultant and Director for Research for Alan Baxter & Associates engineering and planning consultancy; and David Vigar, report author.   AA: My work in the built environment sector is focussed on the practical delivery of carbon reductions. This is affected by a number of factors including: the extremely long development cycles in planning, urban design, architecture and construction, the need to transform the working practices and business models of the commercial property sector, and the institutional inertia and steep learning curve related to any change in policy.    Hence, I thought your analogy in the introduction to the Beyond Peak Carbon report that the government was like an architect and business was like a builder was rather an interesting one. 

Can Copenhagen deliver a new industrial revolution?  – David Vigar, Climate Change Adviser, Tomorrow’s Company, david@davidvigar.co.uk As December’s Copenhagen climate summit approaches, new evidence is emerging of the massive scale of the action needed to avert the risk of runaway global warming. At the same time, contradictory signals emerging from the pre-summit discussions don’t inspire confidence that it’s likely to be taken.  The scale of the task is underlined in a new report, Climate Solutions 2, produced for WWF by Climate Risk, a company that advises insurers and others on climate-related issues. Their modelling takes into account targets for stabilising greenhouse gases, available low-carbon technologies and the speed at which industries can grow in a market economy, given physical and financial constraints. The report’s bottom line is that world’s governments, businesses and investors have five years to shift low-carbon industries into a high growth phase to avoid...