Paul Hohnen Sustainability Strategies

This letter was published in Financial Times on January 2, 2008.

If sustainability isn't the Next Big Thing we're in trouble

From Mr PAUL HOHNEN

Sir, Let us all hope that Stefan Stern's prediction of “sustainability” as the Next Big Thing in management comes to pass in 2008 (“Goodbye to corporate social responsibility?”, Comment & Analysis, December 31). The prospects for sustainable enterprise will be bleak indeed if the world is not able to tackle successfully issues such as climate change, collapsing ecosystems and endemic poverty and the social, political and economic consequences these imply.

Some of the auguries are good. Leading companies now recognise the growing markets for cleaner energy, water, food, transportation and the like, and are already seeing bottom-line benefits from business strategies and innovation based on sustainable development. Indeed, it seems likely that climate change and sustainability issues are already defining what history will describe as the next industrial revolution, based on increased material efficiency and the production of public goods.

The CSR/sustainability dichotomy, however, is a misleading one. For many experts, CSR is just “sustainability lite”: a preliminary phase where valuable lessons about the impacts of business on employees and other stakeholders can be explored. While CSR is still observed worldwide more in the breach than the observance, the maturity of the issue is underlined by the fact that an international standard is being developed by the International Standards Organisation on “social responsibility”. In short, it's still too early to write off CSR, whatever its limitations.

But the history of CSR suggests that sustainability won't happen without focused and sustained government engagement. Resource- and pollution-intensive practices will continue unabated as long as governments allow markets to undervalue such things as carbon emissions, forests and fish, not to mention labour. Simpler and more effective regulation is needed. But so too will be measurement — by all organisations — of their sustainability profile. To know where we're going, we all need to face up squarely to where we are now.

Paul Hohnen, Sustainability Strategies, Amsterdam 1017 SL, The Netherlands