A few weeks ago, I was asked to chair one day of the Global Sustainability Partnerships Network conference in Manchester. The gathering included some of the leading sustainability professionals in the country, from Global CSOs for international brands, C-Suite directors getting their heads around sustainability, and practitioners working to drive change in their businesses.
Having been involved in sustainability in various guises for nearly 25 years, it was a good moment to reflect on the changing role of sustainability teams in modern organisations.
Much of my career has been about blazing a trail: persuading people that environmental matters were important, that there was a point to producing compelling sustainability reports, and that the business case for action was usually simpler than commonly understood.
Today, the landscape has changed. Legislative drivers, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, moves in China to impose reporting on Chinese companies, the work of the Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosures and its nature focused cousin, and the Transition Plan Taskforce all point out a landscape that will be increasing regulated and proscriptive in what companies must do.
This could easily make our work complex and inaccessible; presentations buried in an alphabet soup of acronyms that are unintelligible to the uninitiated. In some ways, this is inevitable and to be welcomed. Increasingly, sustainability professionals are like accountants.
Accountancy is a complex job, requiring years of training and formal qualifications. But the best accountants can do two things. Yes, they can dwell in the detail of impairment charges, accrued expenses, and LIFO reserves, but they can also demonstrate how the financial health of the business contributes to the strategic choices for the boardroom.
In the same way, we must keep our eye on both the detail of double materiality, data accuracy and the ambiguities in understanding human rights in supply chains, while also demonstrating to businesses just how sustainability can add value to the bottom line.
We need to be able to communicate – in simple terms – what all this complexity means, for the bottom line, for customers, for supply chain efficiency, for brand reputation. We need to be able to build compelling business cases for action and to communicate both what’s been achieved and what still needs to be done with confidence and conviction.
To that end, we need to be disciplined in our understanding of our work. There are times when we must dwell in the detail, and other moments when we need to communicate with colleagues clearly and simply, in language that everyone can understand. That isn’t always easy, but if the best accountants can do it, then so can we.
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