August 7, 2023
This post first appeared in SR Inc’s Q2 Newsletter as the Service Leader Comment.
Directors of Sustainability at globally scaling businesses have one of the most interesting and challenging professional jobs available. Because ever more companies and market regulators are beginning to grapple in earnest with the impacts of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown.
What has been developing for 30+ years as a field of volunteered leadership is becoming, in 2023, legally required. And now more than ever, professionals world-wide are beginning to understand climate science and its breathtaking implications for business, politics and even geo-politics. As all this comes bearing down on new Directors of Sustainability, it’s helpful to remember Calvin Coolidge’s brilliant advice: “Don’t hesitate to be as revolutionary as science; don’t hesitate to be as reactionary as a multiplication table.”
Directors of Sustainability must wear many hats. As they lead their small teams to influence their 5 or 50 or, indeed, 100 thousand person firms towards more sustainable value creation, the most important hat they don may be as their firm’s: “Ambassador to Reality.” It fairly falls onto the sustainability team to ensure the CEO, Board and the entire global organization, understand what science is increasingly revealing about the likely impacts of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown on the firm’s businesses and markets. All in a world that is – in Professor Rebecca Henderson of Harvard Business School’s memorable line – “increasingly on fire.”
The sustainability team must also message to the firm’s most sought-after customers, talent, investors, and host communities what the enterprise is doing to respond to this challenge. Which their regularly younger and more educated most sought-after stakeholders increasingly perceive as an ever more obvious threat to the quality of their lives and futures.
Rise of Sustainability Directors: The European Union’s recent adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directives (CSRD) marks a pivotal moment in the move to more sustainable business. More than 10,000 publicly traded firms, including almost all SR Inc Member-clients are now required to measure and report on dozens of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations, including their global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Additionally, the SEC climate disclosure rule expected this fall will dramatically increase the number of firms required to report; creating a tsunami of new sustainability professionals. This is after the number of super empowered Chief Sustainability Officers (CSO) already tripled in 2021, according to a PWC study.
Scenario Planning & Realistic Guidance: The emergence of hundreds of CSOs and thousands of Directors of Sustainability creates an immense opportunity for global businesses and markets to become better acquainted with the realities of human-caused climate and environmental breakdown that has been unfolding for decades. Which UNICEF, in its 2021 Children’s Climate Risk Index Report, recognized has already placed more than a billion children at deadly risk due to the increasing frequency of “once in a thousand year” floods, droughts, famines, wild-fires and extreme weather in the 33 most climate vulnerable nations that have collectively contributed less than 9% of the heat trapping gasses (that last for centuries) dumped into the thin band of life we call our biosphere.
One of the critically important task sustainability teams must help their enterprise’s with is the increasingly mandated need to conduct “scenario planning” that considers different levels of increased global heating. Unfortunately, current practices in corporate “Climate Scenario Planning” would be darkly humorous – if it were not so important.
In July, Tim Lenton from University of Exeter led a team of expert authors in publishing an article, The Emperor’s New Climate Scenario, on how current climate-change scenario modeling fails to be realistic about the expected dangers associated with a warming world. Even as SR Inc continues to help Member-clients understand and implement accepted best practices in Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) scenario analysis, SR Inc team encourages Member-clients to review this and related articles and ultimately specifically acknowledge the limitations of linear financial models in scenario planning. Learn more in SR Inc’s Thought Leadership on “Integrating Systemic Impacts into Climate Scenario Analysis.”
In 2023, it’s clear that to be an enterprise’s “Ambassador to Reality,” Directors of Sustainability, must familiarize themselves with Earth Systems Science. As Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, stated at the 2023 Innovation Zero Congress, “There’s one conclusion without any uncertainty whatsoever, and that is that a 2.5C global mean surface temperature rise is a disaster. It’s something that humanity has absolutely no evidence that we can cope with. It would actually exceed the warmest temperature on Earth over the past four million years.”
Prompted, in-part, by a world that has never needed it more, a new global community of 10s of thousands of full-time, professional, Directors of Sustainability is emerging. It’s mission critical for this new and burgeoning community to recognize that nothing stands between us and unprecedented levels of courage, collaboration and creativity. This new, digitally connected, global community of Directors of Sustainability shares a respect for science; and we have an historic opportunity to fulfill our roles as “Ambassadors to Reality.”
I once heard Paul Hawken say, “if a history of this time is written, it will be a history of heroes and shared triumphs.” I am 100% confident that regardless of the ultimate outcome, we have a chance to make this moment one of outstanding and growing courage, collaboration, and creativity. Directors of Sustainability across every racial, religious, and regional difference and across every sector, industry and enterprise size, can step forward in this thin and beautiful band of life we call our biosphere and, together, triumph.
Jim Boyle is the CEO & Founder of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc. For more than a dozen years, Jim has led full-time teams of diverse experts to assist nearly 100 Fortune 500 and growth companies in their move to more sustainable high-performance. Specifically, SR Inc has helped world-leading corporations, real estate owners, and federal agencies to set goals, drive progress, and report results in their move to greater Corporate Sustainability. Mr. Boyle led in the creation of SR Inc’s Net Zero Consortium for Buyers (NZCB), which advises and represents Fortune 500 and fast growth companies across the U.S. and internationally in the development of renewable energy strategies and the procurement of both on and off-site advanced energy solutions. Before founding SR Inc, Mr. Boyle co-led Trammell Crow Company Corporate Advisory Services in San Francisco and returned to his native Boston and Trammell Crow Company’s market leading team in Greater Boston where he received the Commercial Brokers Association’s Platinum Award for the highest level of commercial real estate transactions. Earlier, he advised companies on real estate and environmental matters as an attorney at a large law firm based in Boston. Jim is a graduate of Middlebury College, where he co-captained the football team, and Boston College Law School. Early in his career, he served as a federal law clerk, an aide to John F. Kerry in the U. S. Senate, and on Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for President. Jim lives in Concord, MA with his wife and kids a half mile across the street from Emerson’s house and museum on the route to Walden Pond.
