The hi s t ory of Ge e b i z Since 1992, Peace Child International has worked with youth all over the world to raise awareness about the imperative of ‘sustainable development’. We have done this in many ways; through school education programmes to affect behaviour change, as well as sponsoring communication action projects that ensured sustainability. But although these personal actions were important it was not going to deliver a transition away from the brown, fossil-fuelled economy to that of a green, sustainable, resource-efficient one. For that, there needed to be wholesale government reform of regulations. And, essentially, the involvement of business. Non-governmental organizations have traditionally had a somewhat jaundiced view of private industry. Then, at the Copenhagen Climate Summit, many of us were amazed by how much private companies were investing in green initiatives, in contrast to the timidity of governments. Again, at the Rio+20 Summit, it was the private companies who were leading the charge to sustainability. Government efforts paled by comparison. Not all companies were involved. Coal, oil and gas companies were notably less enthusiastic partners than insurance and investment companies whose profit margins stand to shrink due to climate change and extreme weather.
“The Private Sector built the Brown Economy; the Private Sector will build the Green Economy as soon as governments create a regulatory environment that makes it profitable to do so.” When we started our preparations for our Road to Rio+20 awareness campaign, it was our Chinese partner, 51SIM, who pointed out the central role that the Private Sector would play in forging the transition from the Brown to the Green Economy. They ran an exhibition of Chinese youth green business start-ups in Beijing – and were happy to internationalize the concept ahead of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in 2012, June. 6