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Acknowledging the rising popularity around environmental and social issues, corporate responsibility campaigns have become very popular in recent years. Companies want to remind consumers what good they have done to promote their environmentally friendly products or to attract and hire new employees. A few of the corporate sustainability, socially-responsible marketing and “social strategy” firms expecting to grow by between 50-75% in the next few months include: Ethos JWT, BluSkye, Brown Flynn, and one of the field’s pioneers, our neighbor across the bay in Berkeley, Natural Logic.(See The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2007: “Agency Finds Social Responsibility Niche. Ethos Helps Companies Gain Marketing Benefit from Do-Good Efforts”). SVT and HIP Investor are collaborating with Brown Flynn to provide strategic insight on impact measurement and systems.  We’ll be expanding our list of collaborations this fall.
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A dispute over a European emissions-trading proposal has caught U.S. airlines and airplane makers by surprise, spurring them to launch a public relations blitz highlighting their green bona fides, even if most of their work has been aimed at boosting their bottom lines. (See The Washington Post, July 28, 2007: “U.S. Airlines Under Pressure To Fly Greener; Carriers Already Trying to Save Fuel as Europe Proposes Plan”). Nancy N. Young, the new vice president of environmental affairs at the Air Transport Association, U.S. carriers’ main trade group said “We know that it’s coming here. . .Aviation has lost the public square in this debate. We need to do a better job of letting people know that our environmental interests are directly aligned with our business interests.”

It is evident that people inside and outside of the U.S. airline industry are looking at what is going in other parts of the  world, Europe in particular, to address environmental concerns, specifically global warming, and show that environmental interests are real interests that need to be addressed in every sector.

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The New York Times (July 6, 2007: “In London’s Financial World, Carbon Trading Is the New Big Thing”) reported that within three years carbon dioxide trading has become very popular in London’s financial world. It noted that managing emissions has become one of the fastest-growing specialties in financial services, and companies are scrambling to find workers – their goal is a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion and that could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. More carbon was traded in London than in any other city – this is largely the result of a decision by European governments to start limiting the amounts that industries emit. Numerous investment banks are increasing the numbers of staff on their emission trading teams to keep up with this expanding market. Prospects for the industry are good, especially if the United States joins the Europeans in establishing a trading system.

Since carbon dioxide trading has become very popular in the London financial market and as a result companies are looking to expand their emission trading teams, we should continue to monitor this trend as it will likely spread to markets outside of London and become a big industry. It is evident that the financial world is finding environmental issues to be useful and important when evaluating businesses.

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