Sustainability has broken into the top of enterprise priority lists

• Global 2000 enterprise leaders have outlined that environmental sustainability is breaking into their top priorities. Sustainability, across environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, is also a core part of many other priorities like optimizing processes (including energy, water, and resource consumption), supply chain resiliency and transparency, and incorporating diversity and inclusion into ethics and values.
• The sustainability demands of regulators, the public, and shareholders are only going up – creating a demand on enterprises to measure, monitor, report, and improve their sustainability performance across a wide variety of metrics: At a high level, this means decarbonizing enterprise emissions footprints – but also pushing towards all 17 UN Sustainability Development Goals. Sustainability must incorporate the full range of ESG factors and recognize how they are intertwined.
• Enterprises need to access and collate their data to get them to a starting point – then it’s a case of moving towards these sustainability targets along a roadmap with concrete interim targets and available budget. A high-level enterprise champion is also essential: sustainability transformations must be top-down, bottom-up, and involve all ecosystem partners.
• Technology and services are being combined to create holistic sustainability offerings: measuring, monitoring, reporting, and means of optimization are being brought together on platforms, and they’re also combining suites of emerging technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), analytics, blockchain, and much more… and adding to that are strategy, design, technical, and managed services which many service providers are bringing to the table.

The Bottom Line: Start on your sustainability roadmap by mastering your data, planning your route to decarbonization, and improving your corporate social responsibility (CSR) on all three ESG fronts.