It's taken a while for marketers to come out in support for a green agenda, but now the true costs are known, a groundswell of opinion is forming

Embarassing is the word that comes most readily to mind. I had ventured into another lion's den, in this case the Chartered Institute of Marketing's annual conference. Traditionally, this would have been hostile territory, except for a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s when we helped spark an earlier wave of consumer action with our million-selling Green Consumer Guide. So today, when I list major barriers to the business uptake of a sustainability agenda, I put the marketing profession alongside CFOs and investor relations people. Now, as I followed marketing guru Philip Kotler onto the podium, it was with a degree of trepidation-and no notion of the impending embarrassment.

True, I had had an early warning when Kotler-"the world's foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing"-took me aside and confided that if he were writing a 13th edition of his textbook Marketing Management he would include sustainability themes, which he said he had more or less ignored to date. As I was introduced as the "Father of the 'triple bottom line'," I recalled that the CIM is now cranking up to a major TBL training programme. But, while it's gratifying to see your brain-children wobbling to their feet in new areas, it did strike me as odd that it has taken the marketing profession fully a decade to embrace a concept that we first discussed in print in 1996. To date, the profession's response has been reactive-principally to the fact that many major companies have already gone down this route, with even Wal-Mart now toying with the S-word.

With discussion time squeezed, I might have escaped the conference with little idea of what the marketing folk thought of all of this, but the plenary session was followed by a series of breakout debates. Ours-as is the norm-had a motion, a proposer, an opposer and two seconds. The motion was that "the triple bottom line complicates marketing-and doesn't help." Unsurprisingly, I had been asked to oppose the motion.

We discussed many things, among them climate change. The publication of Sir Nicholas Stern's report on climate change was still several weeks in the future, but the debate made it very clear that the temperature is also rising in the world of marketing. Had I been a clairvoyant, I could have told the delegates that the Stern Review-the most comprehensive study of the economics of climate change ever conducted, commissioned by the UK Chancellor in July 2005-would turn up the heat substantially. True, Sir Nicholas would soften the blow a little by saying that, "The conclusion of the review is essentially optimistic. There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally."

But he went on to explain that "the task is urgent. Delaying action, even by a decade or two, will take us into dangerous territory." The review calculates that the costs of unabated climate change would be equivalent to at least five per cent-and perhaps as much as 20 per cent-of GDP each year. By contrast, Sir Nicholas argues, the costs of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change could be limited to around one per cent of global GDP each year. People would pay a little more for carbon-intensive goods, but our economies could continue to grow strongly. Indeed, the shift to a low-carbon economy will also bring huge opportunities. Markets for low-carbon technologies will be worth at least $500bn, and perhaps much more by 2050 if the world acts on the scale required. But all of this will need to be sold to consumers, investors and citizens-which brings us back to marketing. And that, in turn, brings me back to the embarrassing denouement. Our breakout session on the triple bottom line attracted around 100 delegates. When the final vote was taken, exactly one hand went up for the motion that the triple bottom line was unhelpful, with all other votes supporting my view of the world. Heady stuff-and one can only dream of what the vote would have been had the Stern report come out the day before the event.

John Elkington is co-founder and chief entrepreneur of SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com) and writer of books including the groundbreaking Cannibals with Forks: Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business