BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
GUEST COLUMNL
Building careers that put sustainability first
here is a lot of misunderstanding about sustainability. However, the simple fact is that to recognise there is a
3. Challenge traditional takes on productivity : today’s constant cycle of production is fed by outdated ideas of productivity and efficiency. In a truly sustainable world, we need to rethink all these choices. 4. Real sustainability work adapts to people : sustainability is ultimately about protecting people’s dignity and purpose for living even when life is difficult. People should not adapt to work, instead we need a diversity of work to fit our different abilities. It is about experimenting with 'rewilding' our human economy just as we are learning to rewild our natural environments. 5. Challenge norms : how can businesses collaborate so that we can have a natural means of preventing too many activities from happening? The emphasis must be on treating resources as precious, and not as a means for greater output. 6. Purpose before profit : the biggest challenge is to be practical. Sustainability is about a company's survival. How can it thrive when there is no volume growth? This requires a focus on the company’s real work – what is its natural niche so that it can rein back the financial, operational and climate leverages? It is about thinking beyond the gimmicks of doing good to focus on what is necessary, so that in the face of rising costs and hardship, the business will still have something to make it stand out. David Ko (above, left) and Richard Busellato are Co-Founders of Rethinking Choices and authors of The Unsustainable Truth (2021).
achieve so its members can avoid living in poverty when they retire. In practice, this means returning over $11 trillion USD a year, more than the value of all economic activities of Germany, France, the UK, and Italy combined. This money exists on top of what we already need each year to pay wages and taxes, to spend on business’ development, and of course, to top up our pensions and savings. Growing by 10% means doubling output every seven years. At this pace, we cannot recycle enough to support a circular economy. If a clothing company produces one million items today and aims to make two million items in seven years, there will not be enough recycled materials to make the extra one million items. New materials will be required. So, if we grow by more than about 1%, then our need for new materials will exceed our planet’s ability to provide. Six things for us all to consider 1. Growth targets : look at the policies of companies and ask, ‘is it targeting annual growth of more than 1%’? Beyond that, you can be pretty sure its policies are free-riding off someone behaving badly. 2. ‘Recycled materials’ : Patagonia, for example, has a very sensible policy to move to using only recycled materials. However, if it is only able to recycle the extra million items because another company has produced them from new materials first, then what have we actually achieved? Sustainability needs us to look at the whole planet; what everyone else is doing.
sustainability problem, we must first accept that resources are limited. Today, we have a skewed outlook on sustainability, convinced that it's about finding a way to continue to produce what we can without damaging the world and its people. This is a business perspective where the objective is to meet targets on financial returns. The approach aims to persuade people that sustainability can be achieved either by perpetually reusing what we already have, or that technology will help find new resources. Today’s business owners, the driving force behind this pursuit, are pension and savings institutions who operate on behalf of ordinary people – the same ones who are calling for a sustainable world. The wish of business owners is to look after the prospects of our future. It is all done with good intentions, but the truth is, when too much money is involved, good intentions become harmful. That is why no matter what we do, as long as we rely on money from our investments to provide for our futures, we cannot be sustainable. Some basic facts that will help explain: in 2020, the pensions and savings from ordinary people worldwide already totalled over $100 trillion USD and required more than a 10% return on that figure. It is even higher today. The 10% number is what pensions need to
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