Keep your eye on the prize: businesses must stay the course on sustainability

A year ago I was riding a crest of optimism after COP26 in Glasgow. Sustainability was high on every agenda, and we were all confident we could make a difference. Other events have stolen the headlines in recent months, and many are making our sustainability commitments much harder to keep. But the urgency hasn’t gone away, even if it’s been crowded out of the headlines. Business can make a difference, and we must.

There’s a business imperative for sustainability, doing the right thing for people and the planet is ultimately the most profitable thing. Technological advances – particularly in AI – are driving progress and delivering measurable impact today.

It’s brilliant that so many of us are finding ways to address our own – and our families’ – carbon emissions, whether that’s through recycling, buying fewer consumer goods, eating less meat, walking and cycling more or taking fewer long-haul flights. But we can’t get to where we need to be without businesses ramping up the pace and finding solutions that will scale.

Leaders must act decisively within the next five years, otherwise, the damage we’re doing is likely to be irreversible. I don’t want to paint a doomsday scenario; I believe we’re entering an era of both responsibility and possibility. Doing the right thing for people and the planet is the best way for businesses to thrive today and for the long term, but only when your climate change action is authentic – and strategic. That means ensuring you’re basing your plans on robust data and actionable insight.

With data being so crucial, it’s not surprising that the organisations that made strategic investments in Cloud technologies are already gaining the most. But data alone can’t unlock value, you need sophisticated AI tools and statistical techniques that can garner the insight it holds to achieve sustainability. And you must bring your people with you too. After all, technology can only be transformative if it’s combined with human ingenuity.

Governments must act quickly, providing regulation and a common standardised approach so that a company’s sustainability and inequality commitments are reported in the same way their company’s Profits and Loss Statement is – a way that everyone understands. And any sustainability strategy must be fully inclusive. Yes, scientists are critical – after all, many sustainability challenges are science problems at their core. But we know from our own experience at Accenture that diversity sparks creativity and innovation. It’s only by bringing together multi-disciplinary teams made up of people with diverse skill sets and different approaches to problem-solving that we’ll get the best outcomes. Collectively we can do this. We just need to get on with it.