Run up to Rio



Admiralty House


I was at a pre-Rio event hosted by Nick Clegg yesterday evening, which pulled together the various contributors to the UK's Rio+20 submission.

I have been following the development of Paragraph 41 of the Zero Draft with interest- I hosted a business breakfast with Caroline Spellman back in February to help drum up support in the City.

(You can find a copy of the Rio+20 Earth summit draft text here- http://www.scribd.com/doc/96419644/Draft-of-UN-Rio-20-main-text)

The UK Government has asked Aviva to lead UK submissions on financial services at the Rio Summit and Aviva have established the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Coalition (CSRC), a group of organisations representing investors with assets of approximately $2 trillion under management, as well as civil society and international bodies.

The CSRC is asking the countries attending Rio +20 to develop national regulations requiring companies to report on sustainability issues. It is also asking for beefing up the ways in which investors can hold companies to account.

Why is this important- well if you don't know whether companies are managing sustainability risks effectively  (water, energy and raw material risks ), or are likely to be sued for exploiting or injuring workers or the local community, how can you work out whether your investment will pay off?

If you want to find out more about this, check out http://www.london-accord.co.uk/

Anyway UNEP have thrown their weight behind these efforts and a great deal of international diplomacy has gone on behind the scenes to pull countries behind the proposal. Needless to say there are still a few refuseniks, but with some tap-dancing around the wording it looks like there will be a positive move in this direction.