Corporate Sustainability Needs Better Integration, Not Another Ambition

Corporate sustainability has no shortage of ambition. 

Over the past several years, companies have set increasingly ambitious climate targets, expanded disclosures, and invested significantly in understanding and measuring their environmental impact. But working in the technology infrastructure industry has made one thing clear to me: Targets don't reduce emissions. Decisions do.

For a hardware company, those decisions happen across the lifecycle: from product design and material selection to suppliers, data center implementation, and end of life. Too often, by the time sustainability reports  the impacts, the teams making the decisions have already committed.

That is why one question followed me throughout Climate Week NYC this year: How do we move sustainability further upstream, so environmental insight helps shape business and technology decisions, rather than simply measuring their consequences?

Embedding Sustainability into Business Decisions

Across conversations with business leaders, investors, analysts, and sustainability practitioners at Climate Week, I heard variations of that question again and again. That shift is already taking shape. 

A recent World Economic Forum survey of chief sustainability officers found that sustainability is moving deeper into commercial, operational and investment decisions, with 64% citing a stronger business case as a leading accelerator of progress over the next three years. While sustainability functions have importantly built systems to measure emissions, respond to disclosure requirements, and track progress, the greater opportunity now is to bring those insights to individual teams while business choices are still being considered — not after.

In a technology company, that might mean helping product teams weigh the environmental implications of design choices, giving procurement teams relevant information for supplier decisions; or helping finance, risk, and sales teams translate environmental performance into business impact. Sustainability shouldn’t own those decisions: the accountable teams should. But they need relevant sustainability information while it can still influence the outcome.

Sustainability Risk as a Business Lever 

During Climate Week, I participated in a panel focused on “making risk decision-useful.” The phrase stuck with me because it captures one of the biggest challenges facing the sustainability profession. We can tell a business leader that emissions are increasing. But can we explain how it translates into potential implications for supply continuity, cost or customer growth, and identify what the business might reasonably do differently today?

Doing that requires more than making sustainability data available. Sustainability professionals need to understand the business decisions: who makes them, what information and constraints shape them, and what outcomes matter. Without that context, sustainability is one more data point competing for attention. 

After my Climate Week panel, a college student asked me for advice on breaking into sustainability. She was considering a master’s degree in sustainability and wanted to know if it would help. My answer surprised her: I suggested she consider a master’s degree in business instead.

Too often, sustainability professionals inadvertently reinforce the divide we’re trying to eliminate. We speak primarily in the language of carbon, climate, disclosure, biodiversity, and lifecycle assessments while our colleagues are talking about cost, performance, resilience, innovation, and growth — in other words, the level of risk the business is willing to take on. To evolve sustainability, we need expertise in both.

Sustainability Ambition Must Survive Execution 

Another, more uncomfortable theme ran through conversations around New York during Climate Week: companies are confronting the difficulty of executing on ambitious commitments made several years ago. Technologies don’t always develop at the pace companies anticipate, and value-chain emissions can depend on thousands of suppliers and customers that companies have no direct control over. The scale of that challenge is significant: CDP found that 68% of reported emissions are Scope 3, yet fewer than 30% of companies have a supplier engagement strategy.

What looks straightforward on an emissions-reduction roadmap can look very different across a complex global business.

That isn’t an argument for less ambition. It’s an argument for more integration.

Sustainability can help establish the ambition, provide expertise, connect the data, and illuminate the choices. But credible sustainability means admitting when not everything went according to plan. It’s being able to say: Here’s where we’re making progress. Here’s where we’re not. Here’s what we’ve learned. And here’s what we’re doing differently as a result.

A Seat at the Table was Never the Destination

Climate Week left me thinking that perhaps sustainability professionals have spent enough time talking about earning a seat at the table. Maybe the more important question now is: What do we contribute once we’re there?

The value of sustainability professionals won’t come from owning every sustainability-related decision, producing the most sophisticated dashboard, or knowing the most acronyms. It will come from enabling the business to make better decisions. The practice needs to evolve from reporter to translator, from coordinator to connector, and from measuring impact after decisions are made to helping inform decisions before they’re made.

In a hardware and technology infrastructure business, some of the most consequential sustainability decisions may never have “sustainability” in their title. They’re engineering, product, procurement, infrastructure, and investment decisions. They’re decisions about where and how the business spends and saves money.

The job of sustainability leaders in the hardware and technology infrastructure industry is to make sure the right insights reach the right people while those decisions can still be influenced. Because the next phase of corporate sustainability won’t be defined by how much ambition we can put on paper. It will be defined by what the business designs, builds, and acts on differently because sustainability was already in the room.

Learn more about Hitachi Vantara’s sustainability strategy and commitments here.