Society needs to innovate processes and policies to face climate change

"I believe that we have no more time to make gradual changes, we need a rupture", he said. "We have moved forward considerably in terms of awareness, but in practice we are still very far behind".

According to Almeida, facing these issues means looking for solutions to the urgent problems of climate, water, poverty and human rights that bring suffering to large parts of the world's population, and which in the end will restrict the performance of businesses.

"We are using 125% of the natural resources of the planet, draining its capacity for recovery", he said.

Almeida steers the debate within the council to discuss the issues of profit reinvestment and innovation.

According to the environmentalist, businesses need to start to reinvest their profits to resolve these issues and to include policies within their research, development and innovation strategies which are able to make patents work for the public good.

That is, instead of protecting their innovations, they need to be made available to everybody, increasing the speed of their implementation throughout the world, said Almeida.

A clear example are technologies for the generation of renewable energy, such as aeolic and solar, the patents of which are controlled by businesses located in the developed countries, making their cost inaccessible for developing countries.

"Even within CEBDS these issues are very polemic" he said. "But this is a question of survival for companies, because if they don't do this they will see a reduction in the number of their consumers and clients [in the future], and therefore we only want businesses in the council that want to survive into the next 100 and 150 years".

But for him, before focusing on technological innovation, companies need to modernise their vision and management of their businesses.

Therefore, CEBDS invests in partnerships with business schools, such as Fundação Dom Cabral, in the state of Minas Gerais, and Fundação Getúlio Vargas and in events such as the Annual Sustainable Congress which counts on the participation of business leaders and academics committed to this issue.

These initiatives are funded by their members which are multilateral companies and national giants, such as Ambev, Alcoa, Petrobras, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Souza Cruz, Banco Real, among others.

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On the other hand, Almeida thinks that the public sector is only now becoming aware of these issues, as the preservation of natural resources is still confined to a few limited areas of government, with both the executive and the legislative still taking very slow steps.

"The government does not have a global vision and lacks capillarity in relation to environmental issues", he said.

For him, recent policies of incentives, such as the Industrialised Product Tax for electronic goods and vehicles, are going in the opposite direction to environmental preservation, since the reduction in taxes on renewable energy were not taken into account, for example solar heating systems and aeolic generators.

Thus, Almeida's assessment is that positive experiences are few and far between, adversely affecting the speed of change.

For him, changes need to take place at a regional, national and even at an international level.

"Changes will happen, but the question is, will they happen in time to prevent disaster", he warned. "Those that have been affected by tornados [in southern Brazil recently] are well aware of what sustainability is, but we, who are in the centres [of decision making centes] such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, don't".

Almeida, however, admits that conceptual changes are occurring in both the business and public sectors, but to increase the pace of the changes - which according to him must take place within the next five years - there is still something missing: the emergence of a new leadership.

"We need thousands of new sustainability Mandelas", he concluded.