OECD to business: Scientific uncertainty is not a reason to ignore climate change
The latest version of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, a central text in defining the relationship between business and government, has been revised to state that businesses should no longer use scientific uncertainty to avoid action on environmental issues, including climate change.
The Guidelines are a set of recommendations made by governments to multinational companies covering business ethics. They include advice on how businesses should ensure that they’re operating in an ethical way, which includes being environmentally responsible. The OECD includes much of Europe, North America and Australia.
The latest version of the guidelines have just been agreed by the OECD Ministerial Council. Newly added is a section suggesting the business should
Consistent with the scientific and technical understanding of the risks, where there are threats of serious damage to the environment, taking also into account human health and safety, not use the lack of full scientific certainty as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent or minimise such damage
In their commentary on the guidelines, the OECD also note:
The basic premise of the Guidelines is that enterprises should act as soon as possible, and in a proactive way, to avoid, for instance, serious or irreversible environmental damages resulting from their activities.
This comes in the same week that a Greenpeace USA report showed that ExxonMobil has dramatically cut funding to organisations which use scientific uncertainty to dispute that global warming is occurring, as reported by the New York Times, which noted that according to Greenpeace research
Exxon has reduced its donations to such groups from a peak of $3.4 million in 2005 to less than $800,000 for 2010.
The NYT also reported the comments of an Exxon spokesman:
Mr. Jeffers of Exxon also acknowledged a shift in his company’s funding strategy. “I am not prepared to talk about the individual grant requirements, but if their positions are distracting to how we are going to meet the energy needs of the world, then we didn’t want to fund them,” he said.
The OECD guidelines are supported by the private sector and trade unions representatives, both groups of which were part of the revision process. Although non-binding, they are regarded as the most important legal instrument governing corporate conduct internationally.