By Graham Russell, Executive Director, CORE

About 600 people attended this year’s Summit in Denver. While the attendees were the usual mixture of corporate executives, small business people, entrepreneurs, academics, students and government managers, it was noticeable this year that large corporations were more strongly represented than in previous years. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that sustainability has now become such a key driver of corporate strategy in so many of the world’s largest companies.

There was a strong consensus that climate-related legislation in the U.S. is probably not going to happen in the foreseeable future. Disappointing though this is, several speakers - including plenary Peter Fusaro - pointed out that similar objectives can be achieved through regulatory programs such as those being proposed by the EPA to regulate CO2 emissions and the SEC to require disclosure of climate-related risk in annual reports of public companies. Local government sponsored sustainability initiatives were also encouraged by many speakers.

Several sessions focused on sustainability as a driver for economic development.  Government officials and advisors from Denver, St. Louis, Portland and Silicon Valley discussed how sustainability-based thinking helps governments attract leading edge companies to their cities through the creation of a vibrant, forward-looking business community.

The business case for sustainability was made eloquently and powerfully by plenary speaker Andrew Winston, co-author or “Green to Gold”, and also in a plenary panel of senior executives from AT & T, Waste Management and the Mexican Institute of Electrical Research. There can be no question that most large companies recognize that sustainability will be a key driver of innovation and competitive advantage for them in the coming decades.

Nowhere was this more clearly illustrated than in the plenary panel session dedicated to the Sustainability Consortium, originally initiated by Wal-Mart but now comprising a Who’s Who of Fortune 100 companies that supply products and services to the retail industry. This program and others like it are without doubt the most powerful mechanism for driving sustainable business practices into the mainstream of the business community.

This will be the focus of CORE’s mission in the coming year as we enhance and expand our formal educational and training courses to help smaller businesses understand the benefits that they too can achieve through a strategy based on the principles of sustainable business management.