2022: Top Biz. challenges

When discussing business challenges of 2022, Reuters and McKinsey have one common word to say and that’s the environment. Bloomberg also mentioned other challenges.

After more than two years facing Corona virus, now the world reacts to Omicron and Reuters unites 150+ global leaders early December to tackle the biggest challenges facing business, society and environment in the year ahead. These are Omicron, climate and political reform.

About variants of Corona, including Omicron, many articles have been issued. Also, the political issues are out of our scope. While according to the UN, the environment is a complicated issue, we selected the latest article by McKinsey on ESG and elaborate a little about Trust Conference held by Reuters, then.

McKinsey’s article has been selected as article of the month by Internal Consulting Group (ICG) in their last edition. It is called “Putting Carbon Markets to Work on the Path to Net Zero”.

At the recently concluded United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow (COP26), thousands of politicians and business leaders pledged to reduce their collective carbon emissions, protect the world’s forests, quit their addiction to coal, invest in clean energy, and plant a lot of trees. But how would it be happening?

According to McKinsey, of the five or six big ticket items to emerge from COP26, none was more important than the debate around carbon. A thorough understanding of the role of compliance and voluntary global carbon markets is, therefore, a sine qua non for the governments, institutions and corporations when planning a net zero emissions pathway.

Latest McKinsey paper helps to demystify the carbon markets topic and is worth scanning for that purpose alone. The authors highlight the hidden potential in the voluntary carbon markets and recommend three ways in which it can be leveraged by investors in the fight against climate change:

the allocation of more venture capital to stimulate the supply of innovative climate solutions,

support for high standards of market integrity and governance,

and

use of their influence to force corporate disclosures around CO2e performance and their net zero carbon plans.

2021 Trust Conference: Net zero and ESG — it’s a complicated issue.

At the Thomson Reuters Foundation's flagship Trust Conference, holding corporations and financial institutions accountable for their promises on the environment and social change was a hot topic.

It has been discussed for committing to ESG, accountability should be addressed, make clean corporations, Keeping them honest with data and diversity and finally applying the principles of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) to corporate enterprises.

None of this is easy, of course. Meaningful movement on these issues will require rapid, widespread changes in policy and investment across many sectors of society, as well as participation, commitments, and cooperation by governments, industries, and individuals all over the world.

Even if it is technically feasible to achieve net zero emissions and universal social equity by 2050, whether it is politically, socially, and economically feasible is another question entirely.

Sources: McKinsey, UNEP and Reuters websites

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Update 1: Bloomberg also published 10 top business challenges for the word’s main economies, like US, EU, China and Middle East on 13.Dec.2021, including the above items. In case you are interested in reading the article, please follow this link.

Update 2: Attacking Ukraine by Russia on 24th of Feb. has not been anticipated by most of the analysts above, except for one Iranian Professor who reffered to the Oil war in Oct./ Nov. 2021. If you would like to read the the above stuff and Dr. Adib's analysis in Persian, please have a look at this link.