Corporate social responsibility is likely to gain growing importance Essay

Corporate social responsibility is likely to gain growing importance for business, Discuss this statement and relate your answer to ENVIRONMENT - Essay Example This paper defines as â€Å"the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, working with employees, their families, their local community and society at large to improve their quality of life in ways that are both good for business and development†1 especially as it is framed to accommodate the aspirations of the corporations and the local communities in which they operate. This paper further adds that, since in every society infrastructure basically represents a luxury, corporations should strive at meeting the human standards of the society in which they operate by giving back to that society all that can be considered as humanly from an ethical standpoint. But hardly this is the case. Take the case of CSR problems that arise between SHELL and the indigenes of the Niger-Delta area in Nigeria in which during operations, their main sources of livelihood (i.e. rivers and farmlands) are polluted and destroyed. These damages often lead to conflicts b etween the oil firms and the host communities. Today, the environment is facing increasing pressure from large scale and rapid industrialisation due to modernisation and globalisation that is causing heavy damage all due to mass consumption of the earth’s resources. In a bit to purify the environment, the western world government’s have enacted new environmental legislation aimed at an introduction of major new regulatory regimes such as Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) in England & Wales, where the Environment Agency (EA) is developing new methods of environmental risk screening and targeting of regulatory effort based on the better regulation principles. Under the dynamics of globalisation, economic integration, and global environmental governance, issues of global warming and CO2 emissions have been increasing receiving attention today. This evolution has been unfolding since the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development, through the 2002