Dealing with climate change: the sphere of behavior or culture?

On 21 June of this year, the first event of the series Let’Z Talk Live took place at the MUSE - Science Museum in Trento. Zordan’s idea in putting together this series of events was to start a debate on some key issues in retail and business. In this first encounter, we tackled the challenge of sustainability and the need to urgently deal with climate change, without waiting for legislation to start evolutionary processes.

From the Holocene to the Anthropocene. CO2 is one of the markers that separate geological eras.

The impact of our species on ecosystems has been a subject of study since 1970 when the Club di Roma commissioned a study from MIT which resulted in the publication of the volume “The limits of growth”. This study simulated, among other things, the effects of economic and demographic growth on an exponential scale, forecasting the collapse of the system. In the 1980s the biologist Eugene Stroemer introduced the concept of Anthropocene to indicate a geological era of the earth in which the action of the human race radically modifies the systems of the planet. The beginning of this era is considered to coincide with the end of the Second World War, a point in history shaped by a strong acceleration in demographic growth, land use, and the use of fossil fuels.

From this time not only is it possible to detect the presence of radionuclides in the rocks from the detonation of nuclear bombs but there is also evidence of alteration of the carbon cycle, which will also be detectable in the rocks for millions of years. The level of CO2, therefore, becomes one of the demarcation criteria of geological eras. It can be argued that the advent of the Anthropocene put an end to the previous era, the Holocene, a period of great climatic stability that made possible the development of our species and the rise of agriculture. The worrying aspect of the advent of the Anthropocene is not only the increase in temperature but the absence of this climatic stability, which affects human life in every way. “The challenge we are currently facing is no longer to leave our children a world like the one inherited by our generation” - declares David Tombolato, scientific curator of the Sustainability Gallery - “but to carry out a regeneration of it, drastically reducing the levels of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, among other things.”

Climate change. The pioneering role of companies.

“We’re aware that we’re inside a problem” states Alfredo Zordan, sales director of Zordan - “Companies however have a leading role in finding solutions and applying them to our production systems. We have also declared our commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2030, in line with the sixth IPCC report, which recommends halving global emissions by that date in order to contain the increase in temperature below 1.5°C. The existing laws and regulations are a starting point but it’s important to go further, not waiting to act for all laws to be already in place. Companies have the responsibility of pioneering new ways to combat climate change (as well as numerous environmental and social problems) to show the institutions that it can be done and to spur them to create behavioral frameworks.” More than ever before, climate change is perceived by the public no longer as a scientific phenomenon but as an undisputed reality and a problem requiring urgent solution. The duty of those companies and institutions addressing the problem is therefore to transform scientific notions into general culture so that everyone can contribute to countering it.

“In the Sustainability Gallery” - continues Alfredo Zordan - “we find not only scientific content expressed in an intuitive way, but also real information from companies who show that change is possible. As a B Corp I think it’s fundamental that these concepts don’t stay closed inside the companies. With our example we want not only to contaminate our competitive context but also to spur private citizens to exercise their power in their buying choices. Our dream? That every product, every consumer, can also have their own Carbon Footprint.”

Since 2021 Zordan has been a partner of the MUSE Science Museum in Trento, contributing to the new Sustainability Gallery to show that carrying out change is not only possible but is also the responsibility of everyone. To change direction it’s essential that this remains the focus of our political and business decisions, even when the grave world crises that we are experiencing force us to make choices for the short term.

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