Private investment is now replacing official development assistance as the principle source of financial flows to developing countries, particularly to the most rapidly growing and developing countries. If these countries are going to move onto the sustainable pathway, it is essential that private investment become a vehicle for sustainable development. It is not easy for individual countries to enforce this, because they all are competing to attract investment. Therefore, a number of us, including the Earth Council, are taking the initiative to work with developing countries to help them develop a system of voluntary criteria and guidelines for private investment, particularly in environmentally sensitive areas like forestry, energy development, tourism, and transportation. Business cannot do this alone.
Governments provide the policy and fiscal framework which motivates private investment.
And all governments continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on direct and indirect subsidies for activities which run counter to sustainable development as for example, chemically-intensive agriculture and fossil fuels. These impose costly burdens on people as taxpayers and consumers as well as encouraging environmentally unsound and unsustainable practices. A massive reorientation and redeployment of these resources would provide all the financing required to effect a transition to sustainable development, at home and abroad, while improving economic efficiency and effecting budgetary savings. I am persuaded that the 21st Century will be decisive for the human species. For all the evidences of environmental degradation, social tension and inter-communal conflict have occurred at levels of population and human activity that are a great deal less than they will be in the 21st Century.