Corporate leaders are challenged to step up to greater commitments on sustainability, and to ensure they have performance measures for behaviour directly linked to responsibility and trust if they are to succeed. With sustainability driving trust and innovation, companies are making it core to their strategies and activities, so having stand-alone CSR (corporate social responsibility) departments looks like a fast-declining trend. This is according to global reputation auditors Echo Research, in their latest report, "A World in Trust - Leadership and Corporate Responsibility" with the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF).

Ashoka is the global association of leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems.

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...

Corporations face multiple, simultaneous pressures on profit growth and share price performance - at a time when environmental, social and economic issues challenge corporations' ability to stimulate growth from existing operations.

Our two main recommendations are to reword and extend the Combined Code so that it truly encompasses the responsibilities of investors alongside those of boards and better reflects cultures, values and behaviours in the assessment of risk and allocation of rewards