Generation Newborn babies in a maternity hospital, China. “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable - to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Brundtland Report, 1987
President’s Message “After a decade and a half of standstill or even deterioration in global co-operation, I believe the time has come for higher expectations, for common goals pursued together, for an increased political will to address our common future.” Those <strong>ar</strong>e not my words, though they <strong>ar</strong>e appropriate for today, especially if said by those concerned with managing energy and climate, development and ecosystems. None of these has benefited greatly from “common goals pursued together”. These <strong>ar</strong>e the words of Norwegian Prime Minister Gro H<strong>ar</strong>lem Brundtland, in the foreword to Our Common Future, which was produced by a commission she chaired that first defined “sustainable development”, and which led indirectly to the establishment of the <strong>WBCSD</strong>. We dedicate this report to the 20 th annivers<strong>ar</strong>y of the “Brundtland Report”. In his message preceding mine, our Chairman, Travis Engen, has <strong>ar</strong>gued that in some aspects business has surpassed government in the pursuit of sustainable development, described how this led us to focus on advocacy, and briefly laid out some examples of our success in the first ye<strong>ar</strong> of doing so. <strong>WBCSD</strong> President Bjorn Stigson. It has been a very successful ye<strong>ar</strong>. This may be due in p<strong>ar</strong>t to a growing global acceptance that the sustainability issues affecting our common future <strong>ar</strong>e the most urgent issues of today. Our membership rose to <strong>ar</strong>ound 190 and we added p<strong>ar</strong>tners in Chile, Denm<strong>ar</strong>k, Nic<strong>ar</strong>agua, Pakistan and Uruguay to our Regional Network. We held successful meetings in two very disp<strong>ar</strong>ate global centers: Beijing and New York City. The rubber of economic development meets the road on rapid economic development in China, as resource use and pollution accelerate at globe-girdling rates. Yet our members and the Chinese BCSD assured us that they <strong>ar</strong>e working with a concerned government to make national progress on sustainable progress. In the over 60 sep<strong>ar</strong>ate meetings at our <strong>Annual</strong> Meeting in New York we he<strong>ar</strong>d and celebrated the ways our members <strong>ar</strong>e implementing sustainable development in their core businesses. The news encouraged us to establish Implementing Sustainable Development as a core activity of the Council. Major publications of the ye<strong>ar</strong> included a history of the Council, sponsored by our founder Stephan Schmidheiny and founding member Erling Lorentzen, which describes how a small group of business leaders had the vision to turn an ideal – sustainable development – into a business practice. We published the results of the ye<strong>ar</strong>-long work of the Tomorrow’s Leaders group, eight corporate leaders who studied what business success would look like in the future and concluded that it would be tied to ways of doing business that helped society cope with challenges such as poverty, globalization, environmental decline and demographic change. They wrestled with the question of what can business do on its own, what should we not do and what can we accomplish with others. This effort underpins the work of The Business Role Focus Area, and indeed was launched at the first of our major <strong>2006</strong> dialogues organized by that group among all sectors on business and society, this one held in Geneva. Others followed in New York and Buenos Aires. Ecosystem Challenges and Business Implications set the stage for our establishment of a new Ecosystems Focus Area, one in which our members work closely with 5
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