Blog

June 21, 2022

SBER Q2 Symposium – Part 1 – Aligning Sustainability Strategy with Corporate Purpose & Superpower

Our Second Quarter Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) Symposium was held both in person at the Biogen Headquarters in Cambridge and virtually on Thursday, June 16th.  We heard from six fantastic presenters: Jennifer Wright, Director of Global EHS & Sustainability at Biogen; Johanna Jobin, Global Head of Reputation & Responsibility and Executive Director of the Biogen Foundation; Annette Kuhn, Director of Compliance & ESG Operations at UKG; Bekah Heath, ESG Operations Manager at UKG; and Clara Ohakim and Hallie Sacks, MBA students at Georgetown University.

The theme of the first half of the Symposium was Aligning a CEO-Backed Sustainability Strategy with Corporate Purpose & Superpower.  We discussed how sustainability executives can leverage this type of sustainability strategy to highlight the URGENCY the world’s most sought-after Talent, Customers, Investors, and Host Communities know we face in human-caused climate breakdown.

Key takeaways from this first session include:

1. Urgency: Human-caused climate breakdown is both a current and pressing health issue and an unprecedented global human rights catastrophe; the UN IPCC is pressing for a swift change in human activity and UNICEF has identified a billion children at “deadly risk” in the 33 most climate vulnerable countries.
2. Purpose: A CEO messaging strategy grounded in climate science can transcend partisanship and even politics to offer needed societal leadership about the existential challenge facing all stakeholders.
3. Superpower: Companies should harness their unique strengths to bring their entire value chains into the fight against human caused climate breakdown.
4. The U.S. SEC’s March proposed Climate-Related Disclosures rule and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive move corporates towards mandatory investor-quality integrated reporting by 2024, requiring preparation in 2022.
5. The inflection in investor interest has driven corporates to implement growing cross-functional ESG governance structures and processes that report to both senior management and the Board.
6. News from Biogen: Shortly after the pandemic hit, Biogen evolved its carbon neutrality and 100% renewable energy goals to an industry-leading Fossil Fuel Free commitment as part of its Healthy Climate, Healthy Lives initiative that aligns with Biogen’s purpose of serving humanity through science.
7. Key Advice from Jennifer Wright and Johanna Jobin: To prepare for the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule, ESG professionals should engage their legal and finance teams as soon as possible and work on incrementally improving their public disclosures leading up to the expected 2024 implementation deadline.
8. News from UKG: In the short time since Kronos and Ultimate Software have merged, UKG has steadily grown its ESG program, now with a cross-functional governance structure led by the Chief Legal Officer, a newly public ESG Policy, a just-released ESG report, and an expanding number of employees solely devoted to ESG.
9. Key Advice from Annette Kuhn and Bekah Heath: Work on getting buy-in from your Board and Executive Committee so that responsibility for ESG and your material ESG strategic priorities can be distributed throughout your entire company.

We look forward to deepening our Member-Client based guidance on global ESG leadership throughout 2022.  Our next Symposium will be held in New York City on September 22^nd as part of Climate Week.  Member-Clients can find a copy of the presentation deck from our Q2 Symposium in our Digital Library.