Berlin, 23 May 2012. The Business for the Environment (B4E) Summit agreed today on strong messages to the Rio+20 negotiators, including calls for clear sustainability goals, setting best practices as basic standards, subsidy and tax reform, and green public procurement. The conference showed that business increasingly sees itself as key leader in achieving sustainability.
This was also recognised by Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Coordinator of Rio+20, Luisa Diogo, former Prime Minister Mozambique and member of the UN High Level Panel on Global Sustainability ("the private sector is the engine for change"), and Helen Clark, Administrator of UNDP.
St. Gallen, 23 May 2013. "There are no technical barriers for a future without oil, gas or coal", Martin Faulstich, Chair of the German Advisory Council on the Environment, said in his speech for the WRF Energy Conference, held at the "Energiemesse" in St. Gallen.
Bern, 7 November 2012 “Sustainability is about behavior, things that people feel, think and do. We cannot solve this issue with natural and technical science alone. We can go on publishing our analyses and organizing our UN conferences for another forty years, but we need social science to make real progress.” This was said by WRF Managing Director Bas de Leeuw in a podium discussion, organised by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences.
