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In response to that, I published a piece on the "Triangle of Stakeholder Capitalism", enabling us to redirect capitalism to truly accelerate the required transformations needed now.
However, at the time, COVID-19 didn't appear to be a threat; but it then went on to catch us all woefully unprepared. The notion of "super year" has now ironically reached a whole different meaning overnight, and so did "business as usual".
COVID-19 is stress testing everything dramatically: people, politics, health and economic systems, our capitalist model, but also the way we live and work, socially and environmentally. The "collateral damage" is massive and containment efforts have had severe consequences for people, companies and economies, resulting in social inequality sadly being on a steep rise. The virus will be a reality for the foreseeable future, and it is vital we start tackling the challenge of living with it in our midst.
Now is a pivotal moment for business to demonstrate leadership towards society. The initial priority is ensuring the safety and health of our employees and customers, as well as getting those who lost their jobs back into the economy. As a second priority, we need to ensure that we map the return to a "new normal", with business recovery plans, employee health safeguards and economic stimulus packages that create a better world. Thirdly, we need to focus on pressing hard on creating a more sustainable long-term world with improved risk awareness and resilience in our supply chains, operations and business models.
Unless we use the rebuilding phase of the new normal to create focus on these three priorities, we will miss a massive opportunity to do better and accomplish the change that's needed, reflecting how connected our world and systems are.
This is why WBCSD has been working with its members to launch a COVID-19 Response Program, to provide solutions and actions on:
The outcomes are designed to enable us to shape the present and the future. To support the three projects of our Response Program, work is done on advocacy, for example by working with our partner Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) to publish a call to action for world leaders to prevent COVID-19 from resulting in a food security crisis, and supporting the Green Recovery Alliance to reboot and reboost our economies for a sustainable future.
In addition, we have worked with our advisor David Nabarro, who is also Special Envoy to the World Health Organization's on COVID-19, on outlining how social and economic stability go hand in hand, and how business leadership can contribute in the new COVID reality.
As stock markets around the world have taken a dire turn for the last two months, we have been analyzing how companies that take sustainability seriously perform compared to those companies who don't. Our analysis shows that our member companies outperform the major stock indexes by about 10%. We will continue this analysis and include more markets - stay tuned for more on this.
