Back in the 1980s my intuition told me that business is more powerful on the global stage than politics. At the time I was a staff member at the Findhorn Foundation. That same intuition failed to add, “and when you step up to a role in the business sector it’ll be on the European stage, based in Stockholm.”

The route there involved falling in love with a Swedish businessman, moving to Stockholm in May 1991, and gradually finding myself at an international meeting of businesspeople and academics in Prague, a gathering organised by the Social Venture Network (SVN) in 1996.

Anita Roddick of The Body Shop was an example of the calibre of participants and was not the only one who had attended events at the Findhorn Foundation. With time I learnt that the expression Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) had been coined by her and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

Very quickly my husband and I found the annual SVN international conferences attracted an exciting selection of business people who sought inspiration and fruitful new partnerships through networking. We volunteered to join the Board of the nascent SVN Europe Board and over the following six years became increasingly involved in organising the conferences. It was during this period that we worked with Paul Dickinson from the UK and Lisette Schuitemacher from the Netherlands, both of whom also joined the EU SVN Board representing their respective countries and were to play key roles as Trustees of the Findhorn Foundation.

One of the most fascinating partnerships to be born through the SVNE conferences was the Carbon Disclosure Project. Paul was one of its five founders who came up with the brilliant idea to reduce carbon emissions by putting pressure on global industry. By sending a letter, on behalf of their major shareholders, to the Chairs of the Boards of the FT 500 companies (the largest publicly-quoted companies on world stock exchanges)  requesting details of the emissions from their activities, (because emissions equate to energy and that is a cost) the corporations would then be informed and could find ways to reduce emissions, thereby cutting their costs. This would help vouchsafe the long-term viability of their operations.

“What gets measured gets managed” was our mantra.

The letter was accompanied by a questionnaire which led the corporation through every conceivable aspect of its operations. As the Chair of a corporation has a fiduciary responsibility towards its owners/shareholders to maintain share value the questionnaire had to be taken seriously and was usually passed to the environment, communications or investor relations officer.

I watched as the response rate of 47% in 2002 inched up to 59% in 2003 and when it soared to 81% in 2004 I was strongly drawn to joining forces with the CDP effort. Inside my head I ‘heard’ Eileen Caddy say “This is an idea whose time has come!” so I rang Paul in London and asked him what I could do. “Open a secretariat in Scandinavia!” came the instant reply which set me on a course for the next decade.

Thank heavens for the internet! From the comfort of my office I could access all the information required: which corporations occupied the top places in each of the countries’ stock exchanges (in the course of the first year we changed the name from ‘Scandinavian Secretariat’ to ‘Nordic Secretariat’ when Finland was included), the name of the chairman, the address, and which institutional investors owned the majority of shares. I started modestly sending the questionnaire to the top 125 companies in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and, just like the impressive first global result, had a satisfying 67% response in 2007.

One thing the CDP team found was that corporations are only too aware that emissions = energy = money being burnt. By identifying the sources they can devise ways to reduce their emissions. And there is plenty of motivation to do just that since lower costs mean a better result for the shareholders (and pension fund managers know they have huge numbers of people dependent upon them for a decent retirement). So not only was the response rate surprisingly high from the start, but because there was a scoring system the corporations became highly competitive in finding means of reducing their emissions – eager to climb higher on the Climate Leaders’ scale.

After six years the global results for the Climate Leaders were reflected in improved share value, which gave a robust business argument for the process of completing the questionnaire.

It was then that I realised the questionnaires function like modern day sphinxes, allowing progress only once their questions have been satisfactorily answered.

I worked with CDP from 2006 until 2014 when I handed the reins over to my highly competent second in command. Emma had helped in all areas including the development of annual support trainings for the corporations’ personnel, where we imported someone from head office in London who could guide them through the complex processes of harvesting the required data. Each sector has its own unique idiosyncrasies and needs to establish internal reporting systems which, once up and running, become easy to manage and invaluable sources of information.

One example of this was WalMart whose Chair had ignored the investors’ request for the first two years (possibly expecting and hoping it would fizzle out), but seeing how many of its peers were getting to grips with the process set the wheels in motion within its own massive global sphere of activities. Within two months they rang the CDP London head office to say that surprising results were already coming in: they’d expected their highest emissions to come from their logistics (fleet of trucks), but had discovered that those from their supply chain were even greater.

Consequently, WalMart proposed sending the CDP questionnaire to their most valuable suppliers because they didn’t want to lose them (the process of accepting a supplier was so onerous that the latters’ sustainability was important). The following year CDP opened up a new department which dealt exclusively with supply chains, frequently businesses not found on stock exchanges.

As the years passed CDP branched out into cities, water and forestry. It is remarkable to consider that at the start in 2001, 35 institutional investors responsible for $4.5 trillion were signatories to the CDP questionnaire, while by 2024 there were 700 signatory investors representing $142 trillion, resulting in 22,000 corporations filing their response. They represent almost two thirds of global market capitalisation!