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            1. 2009: the Year the World Decides
Business can also seize the Opporunity!

Many of the largest companies around the world are working towards a new Clean Economy as WWF Climate Savers

Understanding climate change:

The Opportunity

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The world’s financial and climate crises have a common cause: living beyond our means.

The world is running up huge ecological debts, just as it has run up huge financial debts.

Neither is sustainable.

Our leaders cannot successfully put capitalism back together again without at the same time fixing the greatest single consequence of unsustainability – climate change.

The links between finance and climate are not always obvious because of the way the world’s economy is accounted.

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Nature, our most fundamental capital asset, does not appear on company balance sheets or in most national economic data. So its depreciation goes unnoticed.

Nobody is called to account for the fact that we are spending our natural capital like there is no tomorrow.

When the financial system crashed, some countries bailed it out by printing money. When the planet’s life support systems are trashed, no such solution is available.

We CANNOT make another planet.

By filling the atmosphere with the gases that cause climate change we are undermining the planet’s basic life support system. As the former World Bank chief economist, Lord Stern, argued in his influential report on the economics of climate change in 2006, the failure to put a price on those emissions is “the greatest market failure the world has seen”.

But fixing that failure is a great enterprise.

Our economic system – our civilization – is only possible if the basic resources of the atmosphere, oceans, forests and soils, and fundamental processes like the climate system and its carbon and hydrological cycles, remain intact.

To make economics and ecology into enemies is to doom both.

But to reconcile them is to open up the possibility of a richer, more sustainable, more profitable and fairer world.

Yet, while politicians have thrown trillions of dollars at a solution to the financial crisis, they have yet to truly address the still more serious crisis of a crashing climate system.

The financial crisis is a result of our living beyond our financial means. The climate crisis is a result of our living beyond our planet’s means.

2009: a BIG year for our climate

The chance to make good that mistake comes in Copenhagen in December this year, when the world comes together with the intention of setting rules for controlling the gases that are creating that crisis and deciding how to deal with the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

Unless that failure is put right at the United Nations Copenhagen Climate Conference, 2009 will come to be seen as the year of one of the greatest political failures the world has ever seen.

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