Sustainability strategy is business strategy
The new climate reality is what is driving Walford’s perspective. This new reality touches all aspects of business from supply chains to compliance, and with that comes the need for a renewed approach to business leadership.
“Future business planning can no longer be based on the paradigms of the past; instead, organisations must be re-engineered with transparency and adaptability at their core. This will allow them to meet new climate regulations, and rapidly respond to climate and wider geopolitical shifts in the real world. Sustainability actions have moved beyond doing the ‘right thing’ from a values perspective alone, they are now aligned with doing the right thing for your business commercially too.” continues Walford.
Ultimately this requires the sustainability strategy and business strategy of every organisation to be one and the same. Systemically embedding sustainability into business plans prevents it being in direct tension with other KPIs, and avoids one of the greatest associated risks: the cost of taking no action at all.
“My biggest piece of advice for fellow sustainability officers is to really work with the business to understand what their drivers are, what they're looking to achieve, and then work with them to understand how sustainability is actually a core piece to that,” states Walford.
Zubin Randeria, ESG Leader, PwC UK, has a clear view of how the alternative to this approach would play out. “Your sustainability strategy must be fully integrated into your whole business strategy, as if you have two business strategies, one of them is going to fail.”