Next month, the Swiss will vote on one of the country’s periodic policy referendums, this time on an initiative to foster biodiversity. A counterproposal from the government has already been defeated in the Senate on the grounds that it would have too great an impact on agriculture, energy production and tourism.
While some asset managers are disgruntled at the burden and costs of all the new environmental and sustainability compliance regulations imposed on them, they broadly accept the need for these. They certainly accept the realities of global warming and environmental degradation. What they find harder to stomach is the growing tendency of politicians to throw the onus of sustainability onto them, because the politicians aren’t ready to take the political and electoral consequences.
“The more the planet is degraded, the more it pays politically to deny the situation,” according to the headline of an article published in France’s influential Le Monde newspaper over the weekend.
Political blocs such as France’s leading right-wing National Rally party maintain that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is exaggerating the situation, while provincial politicians are blaming ecologists for triggering local climate-related disasters. Gérald Darmanin, the controversial outgoing interior minister, has previously dubbed ecology activists as “terrorists”.
Politicians accept in private the impact of climate change and the need to address it: they just balk at explaining the costs involved to the electorate – and of paying the further cost of likely losing their seats if they tell their constituents the grim truth.
Swiss news media have reported fairly accurately on the costs that would be involved for the proposal that’s up for referendum in September. The government would probably have to pay around US$242 million to implement the requested policies. According to the committee responsible for floating the referendum initiative, the potential losses could amount to some $16 billion-$18 billion every year by 2050.
All in all, the cost/benefit analysis doesn’t look too bad. But that reckons without an electorate that is increasingly being wilfully misled by their ostensible representatives.
According to a recent article in Fortune, despite growth in so-called “greenhushing”, or companies going quiet on their sustainability and social policies to avoid triggering right-wing politicians, corporate sustainability “will be back, and with a vengeance, for a few core reasons”.
“Most importantly, contrary to what talking heads and politicians may say, the drivers of sustainability have not been primarily political or progressive. The issues companies and governments are responding to are very real – and growing more serious,” it warns.
It’s a shame that politicians, unlike asset managers, are not judged by objective, quantifiable measurements of performance and accountability.
