Sweden is a country known for its clean and green policies and practice, but behind the action it is people who make the difference. That’s why this week’s publication by MiljöAktuellt of the top 100 individuals in the country voted as having the most ‘environmental influence’ is so interesting.

Reflecting on 2011, we at The Natural Step Canada are struck by the year's events that illustrate the global sustainability challenge and the growing sentiment that systemic change is required. To name but a few…

The Arab Spring saw revolution and widespread protest across the Middle East in an effort to combat dictatorship, concentration of wealth and power in few hands, corruption, human rights violations, economic decline, unemployment, and rising food prices.

The United States experienced a record of more than $12 billion of weather disaster-related damage, showing the real and immediate costs of extreme weather related to our changing global climate.

The earthquake, tsunami, and resulting nuclear meltdown in Japan prompted worldwide debate about whether nuclear power should be part of our energy mix in a sustainable future.

And, of course, the Occupy Movement demonstrated a democratic awakening that addresses corporate greed, a growing disparity of wealth, inadequate financial regulation, and corporate influence on politics.

The circumstances that preceded each of these events may seem disparate, but the responses show a growing awareness that a systemic approach will be required to achieve the desired social changes. For example, to develop solutions to the climate change issue, democracy, human rights, and energy issues will all be implicated. In other words, everything is interrelated.

The following editorial by Chad Park, Executive Director of The Natural Step Canada, appeared in the Corporate Citizens Mediaplanet Special Report in the National Post on December 28, 2011.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is outdated and counterproductive to successful enterprise and the global sustainability imperative.

CSR encourages us to incorporate environmental and social considerations into a business-as-usual scenario. This is the triple-bottom-line approach and is often depicted with three overlapping circles representing economy, society, and environment.

This is a flawed paradigm.

There has been a lot of conversation over the past couple of years around bringing sustainability and accountability into business schools. The MBA Oath for responsible value creation is a good attempt at this – the movement was started by Harvard students in 2009 and has since been adopted by over 250 schools internationally and had been broadly lauded. The oath itself underlines the responsibility of business leaders to act in an ethically responsible fashion that goes beyond compliance and speaks to future generations and building trust within their own organizations and throughout society. I would prefer more specifics on some of the definitions (specifically around sustainability and healthy planet), but I would otherwise happily jump on the bandwagon.

My question to those who take the oath and more pointedly at the schools who are churning out MBA graduates: How do you expect students to uphold the tenants of this oath when they have been explicitly trained otherwise?