Singapore meeting takes on climate change

SINGAPORE (AFP) - More than 600 business executives and experts began meeting in Singapore on Thursday to discuss how the corporate world can help tackle the threat of climate change.
The two-day Global Business Summit for the Environment is the first major international conference focusing on business and the environment in Asia, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
UNEP organised the event with the
United Nations' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> United Nations Global Compact, an initiative that brings companies together with UN and other agencies to support environmental and social principles.
The meeting comes two days after the UN Security Council held a groundbreaking debate on the security implications of climate change.
Delegates in Singapore plan to examine how the private sector, governments and non-government organisations (NGOs) can cooperate to ensure development that balances economic, social and environmental factors, organisers said.
"The systematic damage and destruction of the world's forests, freshwaters, fisheries and other economically important ecosystems are failures of policy and failures of markets to capture the true value of these nature-based assets," UNEP executive director Achim Steiner said ahead of the meeting.
"Some companies now realise that future profits, if not future viability as businesses... will be based on ensuring the sustainability of these finite natural resources," Steiner said.
A key UN report released this month warned that billions would face a higher risk of water scarcity and millions more would likely go hungry as damage to the Earth's weather systems from greenhouse gases changed rainfall patterns, powered up storms and boosted the risk of drought, flooding and water stress.
More than 1.2 billion people, or about one-fifth of the world's population, lack access to drinking water, the organisers said, warning that without any action this could rise to 2.3 billion people by 2023.
Among other subjects for discussion are "green investment and financing", sustainable tourism and environmentally-sound building and construction.
A special session on Friday will be devoted to discussing solutions to the forest-fire haze that blankets parts of Southeast Asia each year.
Last year a report commissioned by the British government warned that climate change could bring economic disaster on the scale of the world wars and the 1930s Great Depression unless urgent action was taken.
Among the organisations to be represented at the Singapore meeting are the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), World Resources Institute and the Carbon Disclosure Fund.
Scheduled speakers include Kirsi Sormunen, Nokia's vice president of environmental affairs, Diana Bell, a senior vice president at Hewlett-Packard, Greenpeace International director Steve Sawyer and actress and environmental activist Daryl Hannah