Corporate Initiatives and Strategies to Meet the Environmental Challenges – Contributions Towards a Green Economic Development

The paper aims to emphasize, based on an interdisciplinary and multi-level approach, on the actual and potential contributions of businesses towards a green economic development - through the positive integration of the environmental challenges within their initiatives and strategies. The main objectives that the paper will target in order to accomplish this mission are: (1). to outline the general framework of the green economic development; (2). to identify the specific environmental challenges businesses could and have to address in order to support the green economic development; (3). to analyze particular initiatives and strategies which have been successfully developed by companies aiming at internalizing the environmental imperative - and to argue in favor of a new business model, able to end, through the green economic development, a virtuous circle of co-evolution between businesses and the environment.