Five critical sustainability challenges to address in 2022

We’ve identified 5 key areas of sustainability that desperately need to be addressed in 2022. On the back of COP26, the UN climate summit, there’s a growing consensus of “the why”, “the what”, and honestly, I think “the how” of sustainability too… but there’s another layer… call it “the doing”, or whatever, but you get the point…

1. Transition planning must align across organizations, industries, and ecosystems under the global context. Over 80% of organizations don’t have the plan they need for sustainability (see our separate take). Yes, COP26 marked a move from ambition and goal setting to transition planning and delivery… but the gold standard examples are the top 20%, if not the top 10%. We’re talking about basic roadmapping: a goal, a starting point benchmark, and a journey plan. Transition plans must be the sustainability focus for 2022 (see our separate outline).
2. Whose responsibility is sustainability? Organizational-level roadmaps must break down throughout the organization into metrics, targets, incentives, and accountability for all functions i.e., supply chain, finance, operations etc. But there is a large disconnect between CEOs and boards and the rest of organizations; this was a central conclusion of our presentation to COP26 (see here).
3. Methodologies and scale: we can’t afford for all organizations to start from scratch. Given how far behind organizations, industries, and governments are in addressing the global sustainability context—if everyone starts from scratch, we’ve lost. Consulting, technology, and services firms work with numerous clients, and are plugged into all manner of global networks and ecosystems; they have the license to scale best practice. We need them to.
4. Transparency and trust: Transparency across value chains and ecosystems facilitates supply chain resilience, emissions benchmarking, visibility into labor practices, establishing trust in organizations, and much more besides. One additional point on transparency is as a route for firms to reestablish trust. For example, the oil and gas industry is responsible for much of the dire state of climate change. But by being ultra-transparent into what still happens that is less-than-great, there’s more chance of their being able to collaborate with governments and organizations and realize the investment and innovation they can contribute to solving the problem they helped create.
5. The tech we have and tech we don’t: Organizations and technology firms must determine: how much of sustainability can we address with the tech and capability we have now, and what do we need to develop? The interviews which fed our COP26 presentation were clear: the technology exists. The challenges lie around getting data onto platforms from the value chain. Sustainability literacy and culture must also be addressed.

The Bottom Line: To address these 5 themes, we’re launching our Sustainability Services Top 10 ecosystem analysis (see our announcement here) on the back of last year’s Sustainability Services Ecosystem Mapping study and presentation to COP26 (see above). We’ll be putting our consulting, technology, and services partners to the test. We’ll also be engaging in separate research angles to delve deep into the 5 themes above. Let me know if you want in while the chance is there!

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