Prime Minister Freundel Stuart on Friday praised several companies, including the Rum Refinery at Mount Gay, Arawak Cement Co., Foursquare Rum Distillery & Heritage Park, and Barbados Bottlers, on attaining the 14000 designation for institutionalising Environmental Management Systems. 

He added that some other businesses were repositioning themselves to benefit from niche markets in environment-related fields such as solar power, energy efficiency and water conservation.

Addressing participants at the CGA’s International Sustainability Conference at Hilton Barbados, the prime minister noted that not all businesses were incorporating environment-related goals into their business models, and urged the orgabnisation to help. “The accounting profession is ideally placed to assist the Caribbean region in valuing and pricing the environmental and social costs that attach to this or that policy decision, as called for by the report of the Global Panel on Sustainability,” he told participants.

The prime minister said that the concept of a ‘Triple Bottom Line’ in annual financial reports was on the rise in other parts of the world, and the CGA and other accounting organisations should partner with regional and national associations in piloting such an initiative in the region. “Your umbrella association, through its professional development programmes, can perhaps consider satisfying this need,” Mr. Stuart noted.

According to Wikipedia, “The triple bottom line (abbreviated as TBL or 3BL, and also known as people, planet, profit or the three pillars) captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success: economic, ecological, and social.”  It notes that the TBL standard for urban and community accounting was ratified by the United Nations and the ICLEI (founded in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, under which local governments work together on environmental sustainability) in early 2007. Since then it has become the dominant approach to public sector accounting, says Wikipedia. It adds that “In the private sector, a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) implies a commitment to some form of TBL reporting. This is distinct from the more limited changes required to deal only with ecological issues.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line)

For its part, the prime minister said that government had been paying close attention to climate change and the economic downturn, and it had formulated several policy responses as a means of “mitigating effects and strengthening our social and economic resilience to such challenges, while at the same time, identifying opportunities for growth and further development”.

Prime Minister revealed that progress had been made on a National Policy Framework as well as a Sustainable Energy Framework, the latter being financed by the Global Environmental Facility and the Inter-American Development Bank; and the establishment of a Barbados Sustainable Finance Group.

He also praised the social partnership’s commitment to Protocol VI and the Barbados Programme of Action and their willingness to “chart a path of an advanced green country in Latin America and the Caribbean”. He praised labour and business leaders for moving the “environment discourse to the centre of the national development debate.” (BGIS)