I S S P B l o g

Bringing you the resources, the inspiration, and the insights to ensure that your work advances sustainability and your career at speed and scale.

Contributing Editor: Trisha Bauman, CEO & Founder of TJBauman and VP, ISSP Governing Board

Today we have a surplus of multilateral challenges and a deficit of multilateral solutions.

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General at the marking of the
75th Anniversary of the United Nations, 21 September 2020

It is important to put this blog in today’s context where we are battling the simultaneous challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequalities. The 75th anniversary of the United Nations that was celebrated last month on September 21st could not have come at a better time as it reaffirmed the United Nations as the only global organization that can give hope to people and deliver the future we want. The urgency for all countries and all stakeholders, including the private and business sectors, to come together and to fulfil the promise of the nations united has rarely been greater. COVID-19 exposes both the weaknesses of our socioeconomic and health systems and the devastating effects of inequality on the most vulnerable people in a time of crisis. As we also celebrate this week the 72nd anniversary of the United Nations Day (October 24th), we have more than ever a reason to mark the ratification in 1945 of the UN Charter. COVID-19 has shown that global problems can be addressed effectively only through multilateralism and global solidarity.

We, as sustainability professionals, need to ask ourselves how we can contribute to building back better and putting us on the path to sustainable development. We need to use this crisis as an opportunity not to go back to unsustainable ways of producing and consuming. For a company to remain competitive even over the next five years, it needs to define policies and strategies that will put it on a sustainable path right now. COVID-19 has made us all aware that something was horribly wrong with the world pre-COVID. Successful businesses will be those that meet the needs of as many people as possible, utilize as few resources as possible, and engage in meaningful, ongoing dialogue with their stakeholders.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), if achieved, would create a world that is sustainable: socially fair, environmentally secure, economically prosperous, inclusive, and more predictable. They have also shown that to achieve sustainability, we need to tackle all three dimensions of sustainable development together — economic, social, and environmental — to establish synergies among the SDGs and related targets, but also to look at trade-offs.

Sustainability is a long-term trajectory. For a company to pursue sustainability, the SDGs need to be part of its business model and aim toward sustainable solutions through strategic planning and innovation, and not as a public relations add-on. A company needs to use a sustainability lens for every aspect of strategy, from appointing board members and senior executives to prioritizing and driving execution. A long-term systemic view, incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, is essential to establishing shareholder value, marketing products and services that inspire consumers to make sustainable choices, and to using the Goals to guide regulatory policy, capital allocation, and leadership development — including women’s empowerment — at every level.

All of this would strengthen the position of sustainable development professionals working in companies. Sustainability professionals can drive synergies and work across sectors and teams so that sustainability really becomes a leading principle in all aspects of business strategy and not a public relations exercise. But they can only be empowered if board members firmly stand behind them. And only if they are given senior executive positions in companies. It is not enough that a few larger companies are doing it. It is important that all companies, including small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) do it as well. Throughout SMEs, sustainability professionals can then work with their peers in other companies to drive sustainability of markets and value chains. And policy makers need to create an enabling environment for such companies to be able to invest in sustainability through preferential loans and tax breaks. It has never been more important than now to encourage and instigate this type of a business model when COVID-19 has given us this opportunity to reset our world. This will be then a real contribution to building back better and greener.

Both policy makers and companies need to do their part as equal partners in achieving the SDGs. Policy makers need to create an enabling environment through legislation and public-private partnerships so that true cost can be paid for natural and human resources and longer-term investment is encouraged. Companies, on the other hand, need to create sustainable value chains, respect human rights, be transparent in their work — including paying taxes — and drive innovation and technologies that would benefit everyone. Only the whole of these multisector efforts can successfully drive sustainable economic growth, create more just and inclusive societies, and ensure environmental protection and stewardship of natural resources.

COVID-19 And The Longer Horizon

I really feel that sustainability, survival, the planet, our health — has all become one issue in our times. In a way, what the pandemic
has done is collapse all of these false separations. It's literally made the divisions disappear.

Dr. Vandana Shiva
Director, Navdanya
ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame

Within this global landscape of evolving points of view and changing behaviors, all of us at ISSP wondered how best to support our sector during the uncertain timeline of COVID and its multiple impacts. No better place to inquire than among the esteemed honorees of our ISSP Hall of Fame. With Fabian Sack, my Governing Board colleague who was then serving as our president, we asked each of our fourteen Sustainability Hall of Fame honorees if they would share their thoughts on where we are, what we're facing, and how our sector might most effectively advance the work to be done. Our Sustainability Hall of Fame video series, COVID-19 And The Longer Horizon, fully released this week, offers their insights.

In COVID-19 And The Longer Horizon, Hall of Fame honoree Bob Willard, ISSP-CSP, describes our current reality as the first time in human history that we confront a "perfect storm" of sustainability crises: the ever escalating climate crisis, a public health crisis, and an economic crisis. And he adds, "It's important that all three of them be in the mix as we try to figure out how we come out of this, and what the lessons learned from this incredibly challenging situation are."

In the face of this "perfect storm," changing attitudes and behaviors in communities around the world are impacting both our work and our potential for influence as sustainability professionals. The facts of science and the insights of experts now receive increasing attention from a broader public. The values of social justice galvanize hundreds of thousands to speak out for diversity, inclusion, and equity around the globe. The spheres of professional life and personal life blur as digital devices serve as one of our few portals to the COVID-19 world outside. We can see these social, political, and professional shifts beginning to dismantle the siloed thinking and siloed values that for too long have shaped the systemic issues underneath the crises we face. These systemic disconnections are the very issues that we, as sustainability professionals, work to solve.

The right voices at the right time can foster uncommon cooperation and galvanize extraordinary action. Never before have global cooperation and global action been more necessary. The overwhelming take-away from COVID-19 And The Longer Horizon is the interconnectedness across both the challenges as well as the opportunities of this unprecedented moment. The global framework reflecting this interdependency is of course the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The intrinsic power of the SDGs is their interdependency: any enduring progress in sustainability is interdependent with the progress across each and every of the seventeen global goals. And the very interdependency of the SDGs also presents the complexity — and often the dilemma — to today's problem-solving and decision-making, across sectors and across the world.

Navigating that complexity is the distinct strength of sustainability professionals. As we enter the decisive decade leading up to the 2030 SDGs, the problems our sector seeks to meet and solve are daunting. Yet, the opportunities have never been greater.

As ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame honoree John Elkington, Founder and Chief Pollinator at Volan Ventures, Ltd., states in our video series, "We’re in a period where the old order is coming apart." He continues, "But that’s the most extraordinarily exciting time to be alive and working in an area like this. Because if you can get your agenda coherent enough and clear enough to key people, by God, you can move in the right direction at a very much greater speed and a very much greater scale than in normal times, when most people think they know what they’re doing."

Stay connected to this space, our ISSPBlog. Here, our contributors bring you the resources, the inspiration, and the insights to ensure that your work advances at "a very much greater speed and a very much greater scale." Both are necessary to what we need to accomplish.