The green turning point? Inevitable, but also risky, Censis claims that in a survey for Confcooperative carried out on the occasion of the second edition of the Sustainability Day, it raises the alarm: just under 17,000 companies that have won the challenge of ecological transition, while there are 1 , 5 million, with 5.6 million employees, at risk. In practice, this is 3 out of 10 companies.
In fact, there are over 932,000 companies at “high risk”. They are 17.6% of the total and employ a little less than 2 million workers, equal to 11.6% of total employment and weigh heavily on them: in fact, they risk incurring considerable financial losses as a result of the necessary investments to adapt to the strategies of a zero-emission and environmentally sustainable economy.
The “risk” is to be considered medium, however, for those 600,000 companies (11% of the total) which employ 3.7 million workers of these over 1.5 million in SMEs. Companies that belong to the manufacturing sector, such as, for example, the fashion system, the home system, mechanics. In this case, the adaptation of production processes to reduce the environmental impact of the activities nevertheless requires significant investments.
The remaining 70.9%, 3.7 million companies, on the other hand, present a negligible risk: for these companies, in fact, the Censis study notes the investments to adapt or reconvert production into an economic system with zero net emissions and sustainable from from an environmental point of view they would not affect costs, employment and access to financial markets. The structures active in services to businesses and families and in the Construction sector fall into this segment.
In contrast to the share of totally green companies (waste disposal and management activities, distribution of electricity and gas), the companies that in recent years have accepted and won the challenge of ecological transition are still a great number: to be already in line with the requirements of a zero-emission system envisaged by EU standards are in fact just 16,354 and employ 267,000 people.
What are the obstacles they face? The SMEs that require high investments to reconvert production plants and make them sustainable, on pain of leaving the market, are 10.6% of the total of SMEs. In terms of belonging to the sector, the companies with a high degree of risk are those engaged in activities of extraction, processing and marketing of fossil fuels, in the production of electricity from non-renewable sources and, in general, in “energy-intensive” activities such as steel industry, but also part of the agricultural supply chain such as livestock.
«For businesses, sustainability is no longer a choice, but an obligatory path. Without a real ecological transition, accompanied by bureaucratic simplification, sustainable times and the right fiscal measures “comments the president of Confcooperative Maurizio Gardini, president of Confcooperative, commenting on the focus Censis Confcooperative” Sustainability, investing today to grow tomorrow “presented
«Our cooperatives in 2021 alone – says Gardini – invested 1.2 billion euros in sustainability. Green cooperatives are ready to invest more, the PNRR can still represent the green fuel of the transition, but support measures and above all less bureaucracy are needed to build renewable energy production plants in a shorter time.