franceinfo: Are French companies committed to CSR as much as they claim?
Alan Fustec: I have no doubts about the sincerity. All the companies I know are sincere in their CSR commitment. Are they doing enough to save the planet? The answer is no. If I look at companies that have a real and serious commitment, we arrive at roughly 1% of French companies that are committed to CSR and it is therefore very, very insufficient.
You believe that CSR is not the alpha and omega of ecological transition. Why ?
I persist and sign: CSR is necessary but not sufficient. Today, we must return to the planetary limits. Companies doing CSR today do not fit within planetary boundaries. The planetary limits were published in 2009 by Swedish researchers who decided on a whole series of quotas not to be exceeded in order to avoid ecological disasters. In this, of course, you have CO2, water, respect for biodiversity and soil artificialisation. (…) I’m going to take another indicator than the planetary limits: the ecological footprint.
“To put it simply, if all companies operated like French companies, it would take three planets.”
Alan Fustecat franceinfo
And if all companies were committed to CSR in a real and serious way, it would always take a planet and a half or two planets. Hence the importance of speeding up the pace and modifying or inventing other tools.
You created the Lucie Positive label. What is it about ?
We have created the Lucie Positive label for companies that are committed to going within planetary boundaries, which is a ten-year project. We are setting up another accounting system. A triple accounting at the same time economic, social and environmental. For example, we know how to calculate a company’s environmental debt in euros. And I can tell you that from the moment we made this calculation, there are not many companies that are profitable today. We then recommend a change in the economic model. The third point is to push companies to implement frugal innovation approaches, we call this low tech, the antithesis of high tech”.
Are you in favor of degrowth?
The decrease in GDP, in the long term, certainly. We cannot make it grow in an unlimited way, it is an aberration. I don’t believe in so-called green growth. When you change the accounting, you can consider another growth. So we are going to grow something other than GDP.