Author Archives: Paul Hohnen

Thatcher’s inadvertent corporate responsibility legacy

[Originally published on Ethical Corporation.] The explosion in the private sector’s importance since the 1980s is why companies now need to take the lead on sustainability.

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Why sector-based initiatives will take sustainability into the future

[Originally published in The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog.] CSR and sustainability departments of emerging market and mature market multinational companies face very similar and familiar challenges. Internally, these include difficulties convincing CEOs and CFOs of the business relevance of CSR. Externally, … Continue reading

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The coming of age of Life Cycle Assessment?

[Originally published in The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog.] A recent international conference in France that I had the honour to chair provided a fascinating glimpse of how far Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) have come, and of their future potential. For many … Continue reading

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Sustainability reporting: immediate choices for the future

Originally published in The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog. Two recent developments in the Rio+20 context will help prompt welcome – and overdue – attention to the crucial role that corporate reporting can play in promoting progress towards sustainable development. The … Continue reading

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Countdown to Rio+20 – learning the lessons of history?

Originally published in The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog. The unseasonably wet and mild Christmas and new year period in Amsterdam was an especially reflective one for me this year. Along with the traditional Christmas pudding, I decided it was time to add … Continue reading

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What should a company do to be “best dressed” in the sustainability stakes?

Originally published in The Guardian Sustainable Business Blog. In this blog I would like to take a slightly light-hearted approach to a very serious subject: the different strategic approaches that companies have developed in response to the challenge of sustainable … Continue reading

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Why the message from Rio+20 matters more than ever

The participants in Rio+20 need to think  about the psychological and sociological dimensions of the public’s attitude  toward sustainability. George Bernard Shaw saw the world as divided into two sorts of people. Those who looked at it and asked “why?”, … Continue reading

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Why the private sector is holding back on sustainability

Next year’s UN conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro will be my third such event. Already I am torn between disempowering premonitions of a “Rio lite” outcome, which fails to match the substance of its namesake 20 years … Continue reading

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Is there a Long Term for Short Termism?

We read nowadays of many clashes. Leaving aside the titanic struggles so breathlessly expounded on sports pages, the conflicts I am thinking of are the great global shapers of politics and economics. They might be between technologies (e.g. Apple vs … Continue reading

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Where is the “sustainability Churchill”?

Last month was a tough one. As a card-carrying optimist working on the sustainable development agenda, I was struck by how pessimistic the expert community has become about humankind’s prospects this century. Where a decade ago there was still optimism … Continue reading

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