Embedding Sustainability in Company DNA

Great leaders are said to be of the essence in driving change and embedding sustainability in the core of the business. However, organizational commitment is vital in creating a true sustainability culture and facilitate effective execution of sustainability strategies. In this article we highlight what defines a company’s culture of sustainability and how this can be made measurable.

Accelerating your Sustainability Strategy in 2019

The composer of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, RobecoSAM, broadcasted four webcasts by the end of 2018 in which key trends and developments of the Corporate Sustainability Assessment questionnaire (CSA) were discussed. In addition, RobecoSAM's expectations on reporting and performance were disclosed to help facilitate company preparations for the next DJSI cycle.

Developing a Roadmap for Sustainability

When sustainability becomes an integral part of business, its legacy is ensured for future generations and stakeholders to enjoy. Plotting the Future is a holistic tool to facilitate the development of a high-level roadmap for the implementation planning of a company’s sustainability strategy. It is based on back-casting, a technique that starts by projecting a future objective on a time horizon and then plans backwards towards the present.

Designing a Purposeful Business

Many firms fail to successfully implement their sustainability strategies, not because they lack the desire, the willingness or even the belief in the impact of sustainability on their businesses, but because they fail to identify proper objectives for their efforts. Setting a clear and meaningful purpose can help an organization to coalesce various efforts and goodwill and gives a shared sense of direction. The Bob’s Burgers workshop and Cover Story exercise can help to define a sustainability-based purpose.

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Conducting a Materiality Scan

Companies and individuals frequently must cope with limited bandwidth in terms of attention and resources. Hence, it is important to select a limited number of high-impact sustainability efforts, instead of the all-too-common machine gun approach of spraying efforts large and thin. Effective implementation requires sniper precision in the definition of sustainability targets and dedicated efforts in execution. A materiality analysis provides guidance for focus, and the Materiality Map makes it possible to develop this in a quick-and-dirty fashion.

Winning Sustainability Strategies: Free Downloads

Co-authored by Jan van der Kaaij, Managing Partner at Finch & Beak, and Benoit Leleux, Stephan Schmidheiny Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at business school IMD, Winning Sustainability Strategies (Palgrave, 2019) is a book that offers practical suggestions for improved effectiveness of sustainability strategies based upon practitioner cases and data analysis from the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

Bettering Decisions with Portfolio Sustainability Assessments

Through Portfolio Sustainability Assessments (PSAs) companies are able to collect insights into the sustainability performance of existing product portfolios. But how can companies capture the full value from these results? In general, PSAs determine hotspots of products that provide the most potential to capture additional value through improved decisions on key business processes. Perhaps surprisingly, the powerful PSA tool is not widely applied yet in the global business environment.

Keeping Up with the Rise of ESG Investing Strategies

As their customers are increasingly asking for greener portfolio options, investors are left struggling to integrate sustainability into their portfolio management strategies. The main challenge for investors is coming from ESG data itself, which has remained scattered, incomplete, incoherent, and unstructured.

Sustainability and the Art of Doing Less

Temperatures keep rising at an alarming pace. According to the UN weather agency, CO2 levels are at their highest in the last 650,000 years, and so are the average temperatures, with the world’s nine warmest years all having occurred since 2005. With the battle for sustainability heating up, banks such as ING and DBS are rolling out sustainability-linked loans and investors are increasingly factoring in sustainability performance in their investment decisions. As BlackRock, the globes biggest investment firm concludes: “There can be little downside to gradually incorporating climate factors into the investment process — and even potential upside”.