How can businesses drive sustainability?
Photo creds: Richard Dacker, Pexels
The debate around sustainability is no longer ‘why is it important?’ or ‘when should we integrate it?’ but is focussed on ‘how do we do it?’
The problems are far-reaching, interlinked, and the complexity is often overwhelming. This leads to well-meaning business leaders and entrepreneurs not knowing where to start or acting in the wrong way in the eyes of the public. How do we change this narrative and give businesses the tools they need to effectively drive the sustainability agenda?
Starting with the problems…
Well, let’s start with the problems. In my experience working with both large and early-stage organisations, the 5 questions that keep popping up are:
“Where should we start?”
“What should we measure and how?”
“How do we tackle our supply chain?”
“How do we bring circularity into the business?”
“How do we talk about our sustainability efforts?”
Feel familiar?
What can business do?
One great starting point to answering these questions is with the framework outlined in ‘Rewiring the Economy: Ten Tasks, Ten years’ (produced by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership).
The report takes the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals and turns them into actions that businesses, governments, and investors can take to help reach them. For the sake of this piece, I’m going to focus on the actions that businesses can take and why they’re a good start point for you.
From: Rewiring the Economy: Ten Tasks, Ten Years
‘Align organisational purpose, strategy & business models’
In answer to the question ‘where should I start?”, here is a great place. It’ll be harder for you to justify why you’re making sustainability decisions for your business if you don’t recognise it within your purpose and strategy.
Strong examples of this are Patagonia and Unilever who have sustainability considerations at the core of why they exist:
Patagonia - ‘We’re in business to save our home planet’
Unilever - ‘Our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace’
Likewise, IKEA’s purpose of ‘creating a better everyday life for the many people’ has led them to develop healthy vegetarian food options for their restaurants, consider sustainability in their designs and launch new products like home solar panels.
So to begin with, look at your business’s purpose and strategy and integrate sustainability at the core. Two resources to help you kick start this process are:
A handy video introducing the concept of ‘creating shared value’
Verity London’s Purpose toolkit - asking useful questions to help you think through what purpose means for your business
‘Set evidence-based targets, measure and be transparent’
Michael Porter says we’re at ‘a low-point in the respect for business’. The economy has been structured for a long time to seek profit at the expense of everything else, and so the public is quite rightly skeptical of business intentions when talking about doing good for people and the planet.
This makes it really important to set clear goals and transparently communicate these and your progress towards them with your stakeholders.
Exactly what your goals are and what it is you should be measuring will depend on your business, but a few helpful resources to start thinking about this are:
The UN Global Compact’s corporate goal-setting advice
EcoEnclose’s guide to setting your sustainability goals
Info on the SBTi’s (science-based target initiative)
‘Embed sustainability in practice and decisions’
Sustainability can’t sit in isolation in one area of the business, but instead, new attitudes and actions have to flow through the whole company. Change needs to be seen in decision-making, supply chain, policies, management tools, governance, and communications.
To ‘anchor’ sustainability goals within the business, the SDG Compass Guide makes three things clear:
The business needs a shared understanding of how to achieve the goals’ (so everyone needs to understand how you’re going to do it)
Sustainability goals need to be integrated into performance reviews and remuneration schemes across the organisation (people need to feel it’s relevant and important to them)
Ownership is key, while sustainability teams can help push the agenda and play an important role in the transformation of a company, ownership, and responsibility for relevant change needs to sit within the different functions (e.g. supply chain management, R&D, HR) so that it becomes core to how they operate. As these different functions focus on their areas of influence, often sustainability boards/councils are set up to ensure alignment.
There are a few topics that frequently come up in discussion around embedding sustainability, so these could be interesting to start thinking about:
Exploring the circular economy and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation is a great place to start if you’re looking for resources
Educating the workforce / communicating the importance of change
Working with partners and suppliers, sustainability issues can’t be tackled in isolation
‘Engage, collaborate & advocate change’
Sustainability issues are systemic, they can’t be tackled by one person or business in isolation, so look at the opportunities that you have to collaborate and advocate for change. This could be with your supply chain, customers, governments, universities, charities, or other businesses.
A few examples are below:
Royal Dutch Skating Association partnered with Coolrec recycling to develop medals created from precious metals from old mobile phones.
Johnson & Johnson partnered with WWF to explore the connection between deforestation and human health, a topic important to both businesses.
Patagonia advocates change with their customers, both through campaigns around reducing consumption and also through providing customers with the opportunity to trade in their old Patagonia gear for credits and offering a ‘used gear’ section of the store.
I worked on the EY team leading the Climate Business Forum, this forum was a group of business and future leaders that came together over the course of a couple of months to generate 11 commitments the businesses would sign up to and a supporting 8 asks that were presented to the UK government, this was an example of cross-sector collaboration and working with the government to encourage change.
Conclusion
This topic is huge, no one person has the answer to how we solve the sustainability challenge. However, there are some great frameworks, tools and specialists around to get you going. If you have an opinion on the topic, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
