CdR Capital sponsors urban sustainability research
Share this article
CdR Capital is delighted to announce our sponsorship of SustainAbility’s latest research, Citystates II: The Case for Corporate Leadership in Urban Sustainability.
The new report from the sustainability think tank makes a compelling case for even greater corporate leadership to drive urban sustainability forward and to share in its benefits. It also considers practical challenges to such leadership and provides guidance to companies seeking to amplify their positive influence on this important agenda.
(to download the report please visit the SustainAbility website at http://bit.ly/1INwOo1.)
Why would a small, financial boutique sponsor a report on sustainability and future cities?
Because we are the 70% that will live in an urban environment by 2050. We work in London, Geneva and Dubai. Three cities with three very different, though equally proud, histories. We feel a sense of duty to each of them. They have each welcomed us and our business. We want them to thrive, because if they do, our chances improve too.
The report states that “cities are moving to the forefront of the sustainability dialogue,” driven by the extreme concentrations of people and the extreme diversity of wealth, from favelas to Silicon Valleys. Cities, whether sovereign or merely powerful, have played a role as catalyst to change throughout time. That cities would reassume this function at a time of rapid social and technological change is part of the order of human affairs. Our biggest societal challenge is to turn our gaze towards the future and this runs against the strongest force in the world today: the “now.”
So, why (again) would we sponsor this report? In short, because the families and institutions who we advise wrestle with exactly the same concerns. Explicitly or implicitly, their concerns are “future generations.” Emphatically not “now.” And maybe long-term problems are simply beyond the power (or mandate) of continents and beyond the power of countries’ governments to solve. After all, a four or five year presidential term is no time at all. Maybe the best bet is a unit of government with which 70% of us are intimately familiar, which touches our daily life and in which we feel a daily sense of pride: our cities.
Steve Smith,
Omar Ayache
