UAE can emerge as an environmental leader

Abu Dhabi: The UAE has an opportunity to lead the world and usher in a strategy that provides for a sustainable environmental future, an American academic said on Tuesday.

Yale University Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy Daniel Esty said: "Where so much change is taking place and choices are being made now, Abu Dhabi has an extraordinary opportunity to lead the entire world and break a new 21st century policy for a sustainable environmental future".

Esty spoke before the Majlis of General Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces. Shaikh Mohammad also attended the function. Esty, who is described as an advocate for environmental sustainability and decision making through a data-driven approach, argued in favour of overhauling the traditional approach to environmental regulation.

Polluters pay for harm

The traditional approach tolerated externalities by offering "permits" up to a certain level of harm, he said.

Esty suggested broadening the push to make polluters pay for all the harm they caused, thus creating incentives for care and conservation, efficiency and resource productivity.

Esty, who co-authored the book Green to Gold, explored what he said every governmental official and company executive must know, to manage the environmental challenges facing government, business and society.

Esty discussed how companies could generate lasting value, cut costs, reduce risk, drive new revenues, and create strong brands by building environmental thinking into their core business strategies.

Esty is also the former energy and environment adviser to the Obama Campaign and he presented examples from companies across the world that he said were achieving both environmental and business success.

He showed how these companies were establishing an "eco-advantage" in the marketplace by examining all aspects of their business, from production to marketing through an environmental lens.

He also presented strategies and tools he said would help companies find their way in a world of resource constraints and pressures from all sides.

Esty also described well-designed reporting rules that make it easier to spot externalised risks and harder-to-hide malfeasance, as well as widely available metrics that could facilitate benchmarking across companies.

Assessing performance

"These rules and metrics offer a mechanism for assessing performance, highlighting leaders and laggards, and spurring competitive pressures that drive all toward better result," he said.

The professor said he supported studying the leaders, which could demonstrate important ways to identify best practices in everything from corporate strategy to pollution control.

Likewise, outliers (such as those who make 10 per cent returns year after year without fail) could be isolated for special review and scrutiny.

Esty contended that businesses were beginning to see the environment not just as a matter of risk management but as offering opportunities not to be missed.

Business attitudes towards the environment had undergone a big change in past years, he said.

The professor said companies, big and small, in manufacturing and services, had begun to see the environment as not just about regulations to follow, costs to contain, and risks to manage.

Instead, they had recognised that big market opportunities existed for companies that could provide solutions to problems such as climate change, water scarcity, chemical exposures, air pollution, and declining natural resources, from fisheries to forests.

Esty asserted that environmental concerns had moved up the public agenda, and that environmental factors had become a matter of core business strategy.

He said no company or industry could afford to ignore higher energy prices, pollution control requirements and costs, and natural resource management pressures.