WBCSD Members Sets ‘Vision 2050: Time to Transform’ to Ensure More Sustainable Future

To move beyond business-as-usual into the accelerated transformations necessary, business leaders must adopt three mindset shifts: reinventing capitalism that rewards true value creation; focusing on building long-term resilience; and taking a regenerative approach beyond doing no harm.

While business can take a leading role, it must work on and design systems transformations, together with scientists, policy makers, financiers and investors, innovators and consumers. Only collaboration at unprecedented levels will create the impact and speed needed to achieve all people living well within planetary boundaries by 2050.

“Vision 2050: Time to Transform should not be read with the idea that tomorrow is going to be much the same as today. This is a report for change, starting now, outlining how business needs to play a leading role. We have no time to waste. Achieving this vision requires a wholesale transformation of everything we have grown up with: energy needs to decarbonize; materials need to go circular; food needs to be produced sustainably and equitably and provide healthy diets”, said WBCSD President and CEO Peter Bakker. “Our future depends on transformation. One of the keys to success will be a mindset shift around capitalism. Our economic systems, incentives, global accounting standards and capital market valuations can no longer just be based on the financial performance of businesses: we must integrate our impact on people and planet as part of how we define success and determine enterprise value.”

The report’s foreword, signed by 42 top executives from WBCSD member companies, makes a collective call to global business, stressing: “Business can lead. Business can forge the collaborations required to drive change. It can… but more than that, it must. It is in business’s interest to pursue the transformations set out in Vision 2050 – because its long-term success depends on thriving societies to trade with, and a healthy planet for us all to exist on.”

Commenting on the development, Nadir Godrej – Managing Director, Godrej Industries Limited, Indian business leader who contributed to the Vision 2050, said “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought vulnerabilities to the surface, underscoring just how fragile and interdependent many of our most vital systems are. Despite its enormous human and financial cost, the pandemic has also created an opportunity to drive and accelerate change at a completely different pace. We now have a unique but rapidly closing window of opportunity for action - it is time to transform our businesses and societies.”