In Friday's Financial Times, Fiona Harvey has an interesting interview with Jared Diamond, the biologist and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Diamond says that businesses have an important role in remedying environmental problems - and that it can be good for delivering shareholder value, too:

A few years ago he went to Papua New Guinea with WWF, the conservation group, to look at some oil works. "I went expecting to see the usual oil company mess," he says.

"It shocked me when I arrived there to find that the oilfield had been managed more scrupulously than most national parks. If you want to see tree kangaroos by daylight in Papua New Guinea, go to the Chevron oilfield. You'll find the shyest and most beautiful animals there."

Chevron's part in preserving the local flora and fauna was born not of altruism, but of business sense, Prof Diamond says. "They want to make money. And they discovered that they could make more money by being clean than by making messes."

Once businesses have realised it generally costs little more, and can often end up costing less, to behave in a responsible manner, those practices propagate through the company and into the corporate world.

Prof Diamond's message will resonate with business leaders who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, where they were told by the organisers that they had an "important role to play in upholding and advancing principles on human rights, labour, environmental and anti-corruption practices, [particularly] in countries with weak regulatory capacity". More and more, businesses have been drawn into collaboration with governments and the green movement on key environmental issues, whereas before they were the subject of attacks.