Low carbon economy: what role for businesses’ environmental communication?

by Silvia Musso

Tomorrow, Tuesday, February 22th, the conference Low Carbon Economy: The state of the art on strategies, tools, and boundaries. The seminar on the implications of CSR Manager Network to rethink the corporate social responsibility will be held in Milan.

The event has been organized by Italy CSR Manager Network, an association that brings together the leaders of the sustainability policies of the major Italian companies and promoted by ALTIS (High School Business and Society at the Catholic University of Milan) and ISVI (Institute for company values).

The conference will focus on companies that are implementing mechanisms of carbon neutrality to measure, reduce and offset emissions from the production cycle, in line with the objectives set by the European Union in 2020. While not lacking, in fact, excellent experiences, there are still many technical, regulatory, efficiency and transparency difficulties that characterize the many tools available to businesses today.

The objective of the meeting is therefore to take stock of opportunities and challenges of low-carbon economy, since the existing instruments and the most innovative experiences, and investigate how this road can become a central element of a new policy of corporate social responsibility really geared to sustainable development. This will also require to implement a transformation in terms of vision and mission, to look more to the size and territorial logics of development partnerships among local businesses, citizens, local institutions and other stakeholders.

Today, the real issue for companies is to fully realize the transition to a low carbon economy. The question is then to define a strategic framework of support that will encourage companies to undertake the work of real long-term innovation and fresh thinking in this key, the concept of corporate social responsibility.

The strength of the conference lies in the heterogeneity of interventions: many and varying size of the companies represented. The day will also be opened and closed by two great people at both levels: institutions, with Edo Ronchi, former environment minister and president of the Foundation for Sustainable Development, and academic Stefano Pareglio, Professor of Environmental Economics at the Catholic University.
Among the companies presenting their case histories, we stress, among others, San Pellegrino, Tetra Pak and Barilla.

We have reached Caterina Torcia, President CSR Manager Network, who tomorrow will have the task of opening the conference, and we tried to understand how environmental communication would fit into the discourse of low-carbon economy and corporate social responsibility:

«In recent years a number of communication campaigns have had the advantage of focusing attention and spread on a large scale issues related to CO2 emissions - said Dr. Torcia. Environmental communication related to the energy topic is therefore essential, but it is time to make a qualitative leap in moving from focusing on the neutralization and compensation, such as through reforestation or planting new trees projects, to the reduction. For the next years, the mission of environmental communication as well as of businesses will put more stress and give more appeal to what should be a primary goal: making energy efficiency and reduce emissions of CO2».