The Corporate Sustainability Forum is one of the main “pre-events” to the Rio+20 Summit.  It will keep us occupied from 15 to 18 June, even with plenty of other events competing for our attention, to be followed by a day, 19 June, for each of the nine “Major Groups” in the Rio dynamic – one of which, of course, is business and industry.  But we will also be drawn to the event on that day being organized by our colleagues at the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development – a Forum on Sustainable Trade and Innovation for Sustainable Development.   This is an event largely under the responsibility of the United Nations Global Compact.  In itself, it has information overload – with the typical Internet technique of giving you drop-down menus for each event, of which there are a multitude.  Thematically, they are organized into six categories – energy and climate, water and ecosystems, agriculture and food, social development, urbanization and cities, and economics and financing of sustainable development.  But consider the diversity of choices:  building markets for greener products, education for sustainable development, changing the world through fashion, the climate-water nexus, urban poverty, green chemistry…. We know that we will want to meet with the Anti-Corruption Working Group, a key interest of CMBD member Deloitte and the supporters of the Business Principles and Children’s Rights and the event on “Cocoa’s Promise”.  We note also that pre-event publications have come out on a “Caring for Climate Progress Report” available here), responsible investment and responsible management education, and also “Scaling Up Global Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture”.  This last has a case study on CMBD member Syngenta.  See the report here.  It covers sourcing, land and water management, nutrition, technology and commodity price volatility.  There is another one on sustainability reporting.  So we will be busy.

From the CMBD News 11 June 2012

The Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development is upon us, promising to deliver “The Future We Want”, and the Internet is delivering an information overload that makes it difficult to screen out the fluff from the real nuggets for that future.  The main event, the Summit itself, has an ever-changing “outcomes” document with a daunting menu of general and sector-specific provisions that are yet to be finalized by member-state governments, surrounded by the “Major Groups” of legitimately organized special interests – NGOs, women, youth, local governments, business and industry, labour.   Some parallel activities are multi-sectoral – such as the “Rio+20 Dialogues” allowing web-based participants to vote on priorities to be submitted to the Summit and the First GLOBE Summit of Legislators allowing parliamentarians to submit a “legislative protocol” to their own governments, as it were.  Others are more geared toward special interests – such as the “People’s Summit” and the “Leaders Forum on the Future Women Want” and the “Corporate Sustainability Forum”.  In this week’s CMBD News we take a look at some of the nuggets we expect to see in the main event, as well as some of the fluff in the side events that could actually become the seeds of future nuggets for that “future we want”, as well as a look at another “20” event, the G20 Leaders Summit further north in the Western Hemisphere, in Los Cabos, Mexico, where a B20 – or multiple variations thereof – vies for institutional continuity within a Mexican salsa of Y20 (youth), L20 (labor), Think20 (think tanks) and a G20 Civil Society Dialogue!

From the CMBD News 11 June 2012