Let me start by stating the obvious: The current trajectory of our society’s consumption of natural resources is not sustainable. I know it, you know it, NGOs know it, and policy makers and business leaders increasingly know it.

Yet as the world prepares for the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in June, two questions loom large:

1. Why haven’t we made substantive progress towards sustainable development over the last 20 years?

2. What do we need to do differently over the next 20 years to transition to a sustainable economy?

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the annual workshops of SustainAbility’s Engaging Stakeholders network. The theme for the workshops was “value.” That is, how companies can derive greater business value from their sustainability communications and engagement, and how they can deliver greater value to stakeholders and society via their efforts.

This is the first in a series of posts about and from COP 17. Others in the series can be found here: two, three, four, five, six, and seven.

Durban will briefly be in the climate spotlight just months before the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit. Few of us at Rio in 1992 would have believed that so little progress would be made in the intervening years. At the time, I had four children of school age. Frankly, the UN process has served neither them, nor my four grandchildren, well since. Climate procrastination has put future generations (with over two billion ‘climate innocents’ to be born by 2050) at severe risk of increasingly dangerous climate disruptions. We have seen how national and international governments and institutions responded to the 2008 financial crisis in just two crucial days, but also how, in two crucial decades, they have achieved very little on the much deeper climate crisis. Nature neither defers decisions nor haggles; nor, as widely observed after the financial crisis, does nature do bailouts.

Sustainability isn’t, like ‘beauty’, in the eye of the beholder.

The surprise of yet another article arguing that companies can't serve both shareholders and society effectively.

In early July SustainAbility’s work with one of Tata Group companies brought me to India.

Geoff Lye comments on Yvo de Boer's direct challenge to the business community at COP15.