Building a Culture of Long-Term Investment and Growth

The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, has teamed up with nonprofit sustainability leader Ceres to create guidance for institutional investors on engaging with companies and policymakers on sustainability issues. The guide “21st Century Engagement: Investor Strategies for Incorporating ESG Considerations into Corporate Interactions” includes tactics and case studies from 37 experts spanning 6 countries.

12 Questions to Test Your Sustainability Strategy

Sustainability strategy is a notion easily used, but hard to capture. The fact that only 37 percent of CEO’s trust they have a clear business case for sustainability triggered us, as many companies claim to be sustainable. Projecting an image that differs from the real situation leads to an ‘authenticity gap’ where stakeholders receive insufficient or wrong information regarding your sustainability efforts. So how to design an accurate sustainability strategy that is part of the regular business and not functions as an add-on for communications?

Creating Shareholder Value Key for Aligning CSR and Financial Performance

Many corporations have initiated sustainability programs: they’re using renewable energy, recycling waste materials or supporting charitable projects in Africa. Yet only a fraction of these companies have developed a truly strategic approach to sustainability which takes the interest of all stakeholders into account and addresses the material issues that are surrounding the organization.

Unfolding the Materiality Matrix - A Consulting Approach

In 1999, many of us got to know ‘The Matrix’ as the world we humans live in, and the real world, which is a layer around the Matrix that is controlled by machines. Was this spectacular science fiction movie the inspiration for many organizations to think beyond their small world, to start interacting with stakeholders and develop a materiality matrix? Probably not. However, since the beginning of the new millenium, we have seen a spectacular increase in the use of the materiality matrix in sustainability strategy design and reporting.

Institutional Investors Are Becoming More Sustainable

The estimated size of the global market for Responsible Investing (RI) was €7,6 billion in 2010 (EUROSIF). Some more key facts: Europe owns 66% of the global RI assets, USA 28% and Canada 5%. European RI assets are for 92% owned by institutional investors and the top 5 countries in Responsible Investing are France, UK, Norway, Netherlands and Italy. But what exactly is RI?

Impact of a Corporate Culture of Sustainability

Harvard Business School tested the performance of a sample of 90 companies that had adopted sustainability policies since the early 1990s when CSR was still at nascent stage, against a control peer group of 90 companies that only adopted sustainability more recently. Next, they used selected SAM/Dow Jones Sustainability Index data and found several interesting correlations.

Building the business case for sustainability

How do you ensure that your sustainability strategy actually is implemented at all levels in the organization? The core is in motivating and involving managers and employees with a core message which aligns with their targets and reality. Concurrently this often happens from the passion of the GreenTeam which communicates too much from their own world. It is key also to fulfill the financial wishes of the organization. David Bent of Forum for the Future recently published a shortlist with seven steps to support the business case for sustainability, rooted in his experiences at British Telecom.