3 Sustainability Trends Transforming Your Business
Businesses are starting to turn the question of why sustainability matters into a question of how they can achieve it. Corporate ideas of sustainability have evolved from the early notions of regulation and integration into the current tide of market transformation. At the heart of this paradigm shift are corporations themselves. With 90% of CEOs believing that sustainability measures are important to achieving overall business success, there is an active pursuit to shift the market towards supporting long-term sustainable development.
So how can companies support these changes? After much research, three major sustainability transformation trends have been identified that can help any business pursue sustainable practices and growth opportunities.
Three Sustainability Transformation Trends
Look ahead at long-term business growth
In order to ensure that business can sustainably thrive in the future, companies need to look ahead and incorporate a long-term approach to their strategies. By extending corporate outlooks and planning for long-term growth strategies, companies can shape their goals around sustainability measures that will future-proof their operations.
It’s important to think beyond the pressures of quarterly performances and urge shareholders to think ahead in order to successfully mitigate risks. In fact, investors around the globe are already pushing for climate change action.
In 2019, Goldman Sachs announced a US$750 billion initiative to advance global climate change transitions. In that same year, 450 global investors that represent more than US$40 trillion AUM signed the Climate Action 100+ initiative, encouraging the largest carbon emitting corporations to curb their own emissions and innovate more sustainably (sign our software carbon pledge here).
The sooner a company can look ahead, the faster it turns its problems into opportunities for innovative solutions. Investors are already demanding that business take a long-term and sustainably focused approach to planning-- it’s up to companies themselves to recognize and adopt these sentiments.
Look inward and adopt a bottom-up approach
Deep-seeded change involves all levels of a corporation, not just the higher-ups. By bringing employees into the conversation and creating a bottom-up approach, companies can expedite the innovation process. Incorporating the collective power of ideas and involving stakeholders that create and uphold business decisions will make it easier to ensure the lasting impact of sustainability initiatives.
At BASF, a chemical company, every scientist, sales person, and factory floor member has individual sustainability objectives and are encouraged to articulate sustainability ideas for their own roles. A Stanford study on building culture for sustainability suggests that this top-down approach actually unearths bottom-up thinking and the contribution of worthwhile ideas.
By looking inward, companies can take advantage of all their resources to accelerate the innovation agenda.
Co-development and leveraging the business ecosystem
In line with the previous idea of looking inward, this trend suggests that companies look outward for co-development and co-creation opportunities. Not all businesses have the capabilities to create sustainable transformation; by leveraging their ecosystems, companies can tap into and take advantage of already available resources.
A Deloitte review on ‘Sustainability Transformation’ notes that executives can think of this through two lenses: leveraging other’s capabilities, or leveraging others' influence. The former utilizes capabilities already available to accelerate sustainability transformation, while the latter leverages the power of influence and persuasion to create a favorable environment for this transformation.
A prime example of this trend can be seen in Nestle’s initiative to have 100% of their packaging be reusable or recyclable by 2025. Knowing that this would be a large feat on their end, they proceeded to build the Institute of Packaging Sciences in 2019 in order to co-develop packaging advances with research institutions, suppliers, and innovating start-ups. Not only did Nestle leverage the innovation ecosystem’s capabilities, they were able to build out the sustainable packaging landscape for other corporations as well.
The world is changing, and keeping up with this market shift is imperative to ensuring that businesses not only survive in the future, but thrive. By looking at future growth, utilizing a bottom-up approach, and leveraging the current ecosystem, companies can achieve substantial progress by being at the forefront of this sustainable movement.
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About RyeStrategy
Based in Seattle, RyeStrategy is a CDP-accredited, mission-oriented company specialized in carbon accounting, mitigation coaching, and climate disclosure solutions for organizations at any point in their sustainability journey. Learn how RyeStrategy helped Salesforce, Ideascale, and Wazoku achieve their sustainability goals.
From exhaustive carbon footprinting and mitigation coaching, to setting science-based targets and reporting climate data to CDP, SBTi or custom reporting platforms, RyeStrategy acts as a hands-on extension of the team, custom-tailoring services to fulfill climate disclosure requirements easily and accurately.
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