| OUR BUSINESSES |
 |
The challenges of sustainable development
print
send
share
Share this website with some of your firends.
contact us
Development and environmental challenges create pressures at various levels. The growing awareness of these issues is manifested in the high expectations companies now face. Practices in tomorrow’s economic world will be subject to increasingly stringent regulations and stricter ethical and community requirements. As a provider of essential life services, GDF SUEZ has a responsibility, as part of its activities, to contribute to building a sustainable society.
The 21st century is facing numerous challenges
- Demographic and territorial
- The world’s population is growing very unevenly between developed and less developed regions.
- Increasing urbanization will affect 65%(1) of the population in 2025 and up to 80% in some countries.
- Environmental: these challenges are illustrated in particular by climate change, whiwh is happening at unprecedented speed. This phenomenon has been recognized by the European Commission and has been the subject of decisions at European level in the Climate-Energy Pact.
- Fossil fuel and water resources
- Increasingly volatile energy prices.
- 1 billion people do not have access to drinking water, 2.6 billion do not have access to sanitation systems.
- Economic and geopolitical
- Inequalities within developing countries, amplified by demographic growth.
- Increasing power of major new fast growing economic players (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
- Somewhat weak European growth along with declining energy intensity, especially in Western Europe.
- Financial crisis and uncertain economic context: the present economic system, highly focused on financial considerations, will probably orient itself to social and environmental dimensions. Financial rating agencies in particular are increasingly incorporating extra-financial ratings in their overall assessment of companies.
- Social
- Poverty and inequality.
- Pressure on purchasing power in western countries.
- Consequences in terms of access to energy.
The challenges for GDF SUEZ
As a global industrial operator, GDF SUEZ wishes to present the ways and means by which it will contribute to resolving these challenges with full transparency.
For GDF SUEZ, Sustainable Development means:
- anticipating economic, social and environmental change;
- integrating the sustainable development dimension into its commercial offers, to respond to the market’s new demands;
- ensuring the durability of its business activities by taking into account Sustainable Development issues in its growth and management;
- establishing relationships of trust with all stakeholders by insisting on transparency and readability;
- offering proposals to put the company’s growth on the path of a Low Carbon Economy(2) now emerging in the 21st century;
- optimizing the current energy mix, developing renewable energy, new products and services for energy control and energy efficiency; and product offerings focusing on CO2, the "new city” and eco-neighborhoods;
- strengthening the appeal and social cohesion of the Group by making Sustainable Development the cornerstone of its business plan, in particular through human resource management;
- promoting energy conservation among the Group’s employees in their day-to-day activities (eco-friendly actions).
(1) GEO-4 Global Environment Outlook 4 (2007) of the United Nations Program for the Environment.
(2) An economy based on low carbon production.
| OUR BUSINESSES |
 |
