Our understanding of the global climate, economic system and world has

changed dramatically over the past decade. And with it, the roles and
responsibilities of businesses have also changed.

But even amid this rapid disruption, there are certainties. Businesses, in
agreement with scientists and national leaders, know it's critical that we limit
global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or, better still,
1.5 C (2.7 F) to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.
We also know that we have to change our mind-set and habits in an increasingly
resource-constrained world, where there is pressure on resources, ranging from
water to wood.
Irreversible change
2015 gave us the frameworks and momentum we need to address these
problems. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide a global
policy framework to eradicate poverty without putting natural resources at risk,
and the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, agreed to by 195 nations,
set a new direction and scale for global climate action.
But frameworks are only the starting point. It is up to everyone governments,
businesses and communities included to take action to end extreme poverty
and shift to a zero-carbon economy.
As the head of a company operating in more than 190 countries and whose
products are used by 2 billion people every day, I'm convinced that businesses
have both a responsibility and an interest in supporting sustainability.
There is overwhelming evidence that the transition to a thriving, clean economy
is inevitable, irreversible and irresistible.
Last year, for the first time, the global economy grew without materially
increasing carbon dioxide emissions. In many of the world's major economies,
including China, India, France and the United States, renewable energy is now
able to produce electricity for the same cost as traditional technologies. [The
True Costs of Renewable Energy ]
Businesses around the world have started to change their mind-set. Whereas
many used to see sustainability as an environmental or development issue, they
now understand it's also a business and economic imperative.
Peter Bakker of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development recently
noted that there were 13 business attendees at the first U.N. conference to
address climate change in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. In Paris last year, there were
more than 1,000 business representatives.
This new generation of business leaders has realized that supporting the
sustainable development agenda will help them protect their long-term
performance and grow their businesses.

Responsible businesses gain the advantage

Business can help speed up implementation, and unleash the investment,

innovation and economic transformation required to achieve this ambitious
agenda.

According to "Towards the Circular Economy" (Ellen MacArthur Foundation,

2014), if we shift to a circular economy model, it can generate more than $1
trillion each year and create 100,000 new jobs in the next five years, while
reducing both waste and emissions.

Moreover, investments in energy efficiency could boost world economic output

by up to $18 trillion by 2035, according to the report "Capturing the Multiple
Benefits of Energy Efficiency" from the OECD/IEA, and also contribute to our goal
of keeping global warming below 2 degrees C.

If we create a more equitable workforce, in which women participate in the

economy identically to men, the annual global GDP would increase by an
estimated $28 trillion in 2025, according to the 2015 McKinsey Global Institute
report "The Power of Parity."

And we know that $90 trillion will be spent on infrastructure in the world's cities,
land use and energy systems over the next 15 years according to the 2014 New
Climate Economy report "Better Growth, Better Climate."

If we make all the right choices now, it won't cost more to make those
investment choices low-carbon, which will have major economic and climate
benefits. The financial market is already showing interest in doing so, which is a
sign that the transformation is happening.

To grasp these opportunities, business leaders have realized that they need to
collaborate, not just compete. So, we've seen a groundswell of partnerships and
coalitions to support business action for sustainable development.

Companies in the We Mean Business coalition with combined revenues of $6

trillion, as well as 144 investors with $20 billion in assets have made nearly
800 commitments to climate action.
Individual companies are also making ambitious commitments Unilever will
become carbon positive in its operation by 2030, which means directly
supporting the generation of more renewable energy than we consume and
making the surplus available to the markets and communities in which we
operate. To achieve this and other targets, businesses will need to source from
renewable sources and work in partnership with their supply chains.

But there's a lot more businesses can do to grasp and promote the economic
case for sustainability. That's why business and civil society leaders have formed
the Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development, launched
recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. We will work over
the next year to articulate and quantify the compelling economic case for
businesses to support the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, mapping the
ways that businesses can get involved, build competitive advantage and flourish
even as the world shifts to a different trajectory.

Our message is a simple one: Business interests and the human imperatives at
the heart of sustainable development both pull in the same direction. Business
investments and actions are already underway, but we need to come together
with governments and civil society in an unprecedented partnership if we want
to achieve the scale and ambition of the change needed.

Done right, and done together, these actions will power our economies and
sustain the world's people for generations to come.

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 2013 (IPS) - As Barack Obama renews his lease on the
White House for another four years, his administration is debating how best to
respond to a growing internal and public controversy over his first terms nonbattlefield counter-terrorist weapon of choice: armed drones.

Armed Predator drone firing Hellfire missile. Credit: public domain

For months, senior administration officials have reportedly been haggling over
the terms of a so-called playbook for the use of drones against suspected
terrorists that will provide detailed rules for who will be included on so-called kill
lists, under what circumstances drones can be used to kill them, and what
agency can do the killing.
The debate has also included whether or not and to what extent the
government should make those rules, and the legal justifications that
purportedly underlie them, public.
How the debate turns out could be critical to Obamas hopes of reducing the size
of Washingtons military footprint in the Middle East, notably by withdrawing
ground forces while still pursuing a counter-terrorist strategy to disrupt and
destroy Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Over the past four years, drone strikes have
played the pre-eminent role in that strategy.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which operates the drone programme in
Pakistan and shares responsibility for drone operations with Pentagon forces in
Yemen, has reportedly argued for greater leeway in carrying out strikes.
On the other hand, Obamas counter-terrorism chief and, significantly, his
nominee to head the CIA, John Brennan, has reportedly called for tighter rules,
greater restraint, and more transparency.

According to a Washington Post account published Monday, the haggling is now

coming to an end in a series of compromises that, among other things, will
permit the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to continue its controversial
Afghanistan-based drone programme against targets in neighbouring Pakistan for
the next one to two years under the existing rules.
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That covers the period when Washington is expected to draw down its military
presence in Afghanistan from the current 66,000 troops to 10,000 or less.
One prominent critic of drone warfare has already criticised the anticipated
exclusion of Pakistan from the so-called playbook.
(I)f the United States decides not to apply the, quote, playbook to Pakistan,
its essentially meaningless, because 85 percent of all the targeted killings that
the U.S. has conducted in non-battlefield settings since 9/11 have occurred in
Pakistan, said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
whose recently published report, Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies, is
shaping much of the current debate.
So the vast majority of targeted killings and drone strikes will not be covered
under the playbook, he told a press teleconference convened by CFR Tuesday.
Since 9/11, U.S. forces have conducted some 425 targeted killings all but a few
through drone strikes in at least three countries Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia.
Altogether, they are believed to have killed more than 3,000 people more than
the 9/11 death toll itself. How many of those killed have been actual members of
terrorist organisations, as opposed to civilians, has itself been a matter of intense
debate.
The resort to drone strikes evoked controversy from the outset, not only because
it marked a reversal of the policy against assassinations upheld by Republican
and Democratic presidents alike since CIA assassinations were first exposed in
the early 1970s, but also because of the novelty of long-distance killing.
Typically, the operator of an armed drone sits before a video screen in a secure
facility as far away as the state of Nevada, as much as 13,000 kms from the
target.
Particularly controversial has been so-called signature strikes. While early
drone strikes targeted specific identified suspected terrorists included on a kill
list compiled by various U.S. agencies, signature strikes, which have been
carried out to devastating effect in Pakistan, in particular, have targeted groups
of suspected terrorists whose precise identity is unknown.
According to the former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Adm. Dennis Blair,
the distance between the drone operator and the target should not by itself be

controversial. Drones, he told the same CFR teleconference, should be thought of

as long-range snipers, in the military sense.
Depending on the specific circumstances, he also defended signature strikes. If
we are fighting in Afghanistan, for example, and we know that across the border
in Pakistan there are Taliban groups who are gathering and training, I think we
could authorise either snipers people with rifles or drones to shoot at armed
men who we see getting into pickup trucks and heading towards the Afghanistan
border.
At the same time, however, Blair expressed strong reservations about several
aspects of current policy, notably the involvement of the CIA which, due to its
covert nature, is precluded from speaking publicly about or defending its
operations.
I strongly believe that a great majority of the use of drones should be done
under military command, he said. The reason that we have covert action is to
be able to deny it. But that pretence is not sustainable in long campaigns such
as the one in Pakistan, he noted.
The current open-secret, covert-action drone programme in Pakistan does not
nothing except to enable the Pakistanis to allow to do it (kill targets), unofficially,
and then officially to attack us for it and thereby make us extremely unpopular in
Pakistan and interferes with all sorts of other objectives (we have) with Pakistan.
Zenko agreed, noting that drone policy is poorly co-ordinated with other
elements of national power in the countries where its being used, he said.
And you can talk to the U.S. ambassadors to Pakistan or Yemen (and) to the
USAID contractors who are trying to do sort of soft-power efforts there, and they
will tell you that when you go to the tribal areas of Pakistan or southern Yemen,
drones are the face of U.S. foreign policy.
Because we dont articulate and describe our vision for how these are used very
well, we essentially allow the Taliban and the Pakistani government to tell our
story about drones, which is a tremendous strategic communications lapse.
Both men called for the playbook to be made public when it is completed. A
classified playbook does not reassure the American people who I think are the
primary ones that need to be convinced that their government is doing the right
thing, said Blair.
While Zenko said the playbook itself could be useful, other critics have
described it worrisome.
Paul Pillar, a former top CIA analyst for the Middle East and South Asia,
also questioned its value on his blog.
Having a playbook on assassinations sounds like it is apt to be a useful guide for
making the quick decision whether to pull the trigger on a Hellfire missile when a
suspected terrorist is in the sights of a drone. But it probably will not, as far as
we know, be of any help in weighing larger important issues such as whether
such a killing is likely to generate more future anti-U.S. terrorism because of the
anger over collateral casualties than it will prevent taking a bad guy out of
commission.

By routinizing and institutionalizing a case-by-case set of criteria, there is even

the hazard that officials will devote less deliberation than they otherwise would
have to such larger considerations because they have the comfort and
reassurance of following a manual, he wrote.

RFID tags are watching you. Not surprising for a technology whose origins can be
traced back to Cold War era Soviet Russia. These technologies are now being
used in everything from clothing to passports.

One could argue that the presence of these tags in clothing, books, or any of the
other thousands of things found in a store is quite harmless. It is the utilization of
this information that causes the controversy.

Ultimately, these ubiquitously, ostensibly innocuous RFID tags could be found in

all purchased products. They could't possibly come to an ill use, could they?

Many are afraid that the identification of the product could be tied to a persons
credit card or bank accounts if the product was purchased in such a manner.

Most people are not even aware of the presence of such tags. And these tags,
once taken home, do not magically cease functioning. These tags will continue to
function, that is, broadcast their existence, until they are destroyed. Presumably,
if a burglar had the proper equipment, they would be able to scan a house like a
cashier at a register.

An RFID tag that would be in a passport would have all manner of sensitive
information attached to it. How would one be able to protect their personal data
from being read by an outside source? One answer is that one could carry their
personal documents in a metal case that could block the blind sending of data.

Concerning these tags with sensitive information, what happens if the object with
the tag is discarded? Potentially the item could be traced back to the individual
that originally purchased the object. What about an RFID chip in my dog or
children? There have been studies, only cursory because these uses are not yet
common,that have found that RFID causes malignant tumors. Aside from the
insertion of an RFID tag into a living being, the security implications seem rather
overblown. The risk of losing ones identity is an omnipresent threat, with or
without RFID tags. The benefit of having a RFID tag in a bicycle, computer, or
automobile is well worth the added threat to privacy. RFID tags are present in
society, and their presence will only proliferate as the price of their manufacture
decreases.