[Editor's Note: This article is part of GreenBiz.com's coverage of the 2009 Business for Social Responsibility conference. To read all our coverage, visit GreenBiz.com/BSR2009.]
China holds an undeniably important role in the global discussion about the environment, as well as the role that business can play in addressing global warming.
Not only does the country have the world's largest population and fastest-growing economy, but it is also the source of a huge number of multinational companies' supply chains -- and the largest source of global greenhouse gas emissions.
At the 2009 Business for Social Responsibility conference, an hour-long session was devoted to the topic of sustainability in China. I sat down with Wei Dong Zhou, BSR's China director, to find out more details.
"With Deng Xiaoping, no one was talking about [sustainability]," Zhou said, with government leaders instead following the mantra that "'development is the only way for growth in China.'"
That has been changing for the past few years, especially since 2007, Zhou explained. "In the early 2000s, peopled talked about CSR as mostly being pushed through multinational companies' codes of conduct," Zhou said. "At that time there was a lot of debate and argument about whether CSR is good for China or bad for China." Zhou said that the Chinese government even considered filing claims against supplier codes of conduct as possible barriers to trade.
But as of now, the country has definitely begun embracing environmental, social and labor best practices, although of course there is still plenty of room for improvement.
One example Zhou offered was the Chinese National Textile Council's CSC-9000 standard, a set of guidelines for following social, labor, and environmental best practices in the country's textile industries.
Other signposts of note on China's way to sustainability include the development of a DJSI-like sustainability index for the Shanghai and Shenzen stock exchanges -- in Shanghai all 100 companies that make the list are required to publish their CSR activities every year; in 2008, there were 290 sustainability reports filed in China.
Which is not to say, obviously, that all is well and good in China. Zhou laid out a handful of challenges that the country currently faces in its sustainability goals:
1. Population. Having 1.3 billion people poses any number of problems. Zhou paraphrased the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao's statement in a 2003 interview with the Washington Post thusly: "Any small problem, if you multiply it by 1.3 billion, it becomes a huge problem. Any big achievement you have in China, if divided by 1.3 billion people, it's so small as to be nothing."
2. Urbanization and its use of resources. Much of the Chinese population is moving to cities, which creates any number of social and health problems, as well as concentrates resource use in a country whose supply already falls short of its demand for resources: Zhou said that 70 percent of the country's rivers are polluted, and only one-fourth of the population currently has access to safe drinking water.
3. Pollution. The country's fast growth -- its average GDP increase was 9 percent per year in the last 20 years (compared with 1 to 4 percent growth in the U.S. over the last seven years) -- is highly resource intensive, and the rise of a Chinese middle class and its increased consumption will be one of the world's biggest challenges in the coming years.
