The Impact of Global Trends on Sustainability

Global sustainability trends are no longer merely a corporate afterthought, they are rapidly transforming the business landscape. It’s for this reason that corporate leaders need to understand the impact of these trends, and how to secure future sustainability for their organisations, to ensure business longevity.

Find out more about the impact of global trends on sustainability from William Day, Guest Lecturer on the High Impact Leadership online short course from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL).

Transcript

So there are clearly a set of really big global trends impacting us all, but high impact leaders need to understand them really well. They are, of course, a connected system: food, water, energy, soil, resource scarcity are the obvious environmental ones. Climate change, sea levels, all of those things are clearly impacting business in one way. But just as important are the social demographic issues and some of the consequences, those around the growth of nationalism, a decline in trust in systems, decline in trust in organisations, in democratic systems, in the law – these are a set of very complicated issues often connected with population movements, with political and will and, in due course, regulatory outcomes.

So, a high impact leader is really going to have to understand the context within which they and their organisations are operating, within which their staff are working, their customers are working, and to ensure that their product or their service is fit for purpose with a light footprint, ideally part of the solution and not contributing.

My real worry, of course, is that organisations look at those things and see the price of change is too high. They will continue to do the wrong thing a little better, rather than identify what the right thing is and aim for that.

Well, I think if they’re going to address these challenges, the starting point is that business leaders need to understand them well. And that means understanding their customers better, their supply chains really well, the political, environmental, and social context within which they’re doing business. They’re going to need to decarbonise. They’re going to need to address waste in a completely different way. They’re going to need to understand the impact of inequality. They’re going to need to report different things and differently. The expectations on them and their businesses will be different.

So the starting point is: understand what the challenges are, understand where the opportunities are, and then work out how your organisation is going to respond to them. And it may be fundamental – it may not just be doing the wrong thing a little better, it might be actually understanding what the right thing is and doing that.