John Elkington's work has bridged the gap between business and the environment for the past 30 years. He introduced the idea of the green consumer in 1988, as co-author of the million-selling Green Consumer Guide, and he coined the phrase "triple bottom line" in the mid 1990s to refer to companies who took people, planet and profits into account.

The climate change debate has intensified in recent years; it is a sparring ground for mainstream politicians, a selling point for businesses, and a fashionable cause to care about. But it is not all new. In an interview for Times Online's Green Rush series Mr Elkington, founder of the SustainAbility consultancy, and co-founder and director of Volans Ventures, said concern for the environment and the social impact of business can be charted back to the era of the slave trade. He divided the more recent engagement with the issue into waves, starting in the 1960s. Later, he said, the science which revealed the hole in the ozone layer captured the public conscience.

"Suddenly people felt that there was real scientific evidence that things they were doing everyday, particularly using things like aerosol cans with CFC components, were actually tearing at the global fabric. And they didn't want to continue just sub-contracting their conscience to Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace or whoever it might be. They wanted to do something themselves, they wanted to choose the right product, and in a way to vote for the environment."

Different industries, Mr Elkington said, have "switched on" to the environment at different times during these waves of concern. He pointed to a current growing awareness in the financial sector.

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"You've increasingly got people like the insurers and reinsurers suddenly fighting a huge upward shift in the costs to them of the natural disasters that they're having to compensate people for, and a growing proportion of those natural disasters are linked to climate change."

He argued that the current corporate momentum behind environmentalism was being driven by entrepreneurs, and what he termed "disruptive innovation". He cited the example of venture capitalists in California, who have worked with IT firms such as Amazon and Google since the early days of the internet revolution, who are now investing heavily in devising solutions to sustainability problems.

"They now see another huge opportunity space, in many ways a much bigger opportunity space in terms of investing in and helping the development of cleaner, more climate-friendly technologies," he said.

His own consultancy, SustainAbility, has been supported by the Skoll Foundation, the organisation set up by the co-founder of eBay, Jeff Skoll, to champion social entrepreneurs.

Mr Elkington spoke to Times Online earlier this year, before the most recent financial turmoil, but he said it was likely that the increasingly difficult economic climate would squeeze businesses and prompt them to drop corporate social responsibility spending. He said the same had happened in the 1980s, when chemical and oil companies abandoned health, safety and environment initiatives as recession set in. But he said this time the pressure on companies to act responsibly was going to intensify, not fade away, in the downturn.

"If what we find is that companies cut back on corporate citizenship activities, the pressures won't be held out of companies, they'll go even deeper in," he said.

Looking ahead, he said it was crucial that the ageing populations of the West did not ignore environmental problems and leave them for future generations to address. He also stressed the importance of political leadership.

"We need politicians who are up to the scale of the challenge that we face, and as Al Gore said relatively recently, the one thing you can say about political leadership is it's at least a renewable resource."