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How can boards bridge the gap between sustainability ambition and action?

Boards can drive delivery on sustainability ambitions by focusing on the dynamics of key executive roles and five strategic areas.


In brief:

  • With the easy wins secured, delivering on sustainability ambitions requires integrating sustainability into core business practices.
  • The Board/CFO/CSO relationship is key. Collaboration, empathy, and "multilingual" storytelling supports effective sustainability outcomes.
  • Boards should act in five strategic areas to augment and accelerate their organizations’ sustainability impact.

Boards globally confront a complex challenge: How can their organizations fulfil ambitious sustainability commitments despite systemic challenges and economic and geopolitical headwinds?

Until recently, we were in a period of global target-setting, when stakeholders looked to companies to declare their sustainability ambitions. Now stakeholders expect companies to deliver on them. Any gap between ambition and action undermines credibility and exposes organizations to accusations of greenwashing.

Most companies started their sustainability journey by completing easy wins. But now, faced with much more radical needs to change whole energy and resource systems, many are dialing down targets and pushing out timelines. The 2023 EY Sustainable Value Study showed that many leaders are daunted by the sheer scale of transformation, putting action on hold.

Yet, despite the challenges, others have maintained their ambitions or even increased them, making sustainability an integral part of their business strategy. So, how and why?

To find out, we conducted in-depth interviews with Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) and board members –what we call the sustainability trifecta – from six companies ramping up their sustainability actions.

Our interviews with this trifecta of executives reveal key lessons for cross-functional collaboration and essential interdependent traits for board and management that drive sustainable business outcomes. Several factors stand out:

  • Silo busting and inclusion: Strategy and metrics must be co-created and socialized with all members of the C-suite, and across functions, business units and geographies to break down silos and create buy-in. Sustainability topics touch every governance committee, and the full board must ensure that all relevant sub-committee inputs are included to provide a comprehensive, not siloed perspective. The board’s role is to ensure the right people, with the right information are in the room and every voice is heard when decisions are made - collaboration is key.
  • Empathy and listening: Each of the three roles must understand the lens that the others apply to sustainability, what success means in their terms, and speak a common language – then listen carefully to sometimes differing views on the path to achieve the same goals.
  • “Multilingual” storytelling: Together, these three roles must master the art of authentic storytelling for the organization’s stakeholders – internal and external – using the language each responds to best. Purpose provides the foundation for storytelling; strategy that works back from a desired future creates the motivating vision.
  • Momentum: In a time when many companies are reconsidering the time and resources needed to achieve commitments, going bigger is not necessarily more impactful. True ecosystem collaboration, rather than siloed efforts, provides the catalyst for acceleration.

At the end of this report, we include five key actions that boards can take to ensure sustainability is at the heart of a growth strategy for resilient organizations.

modern bridge and river
1

Chapter 1

Move fast and break silos

Harness the power of C-suite and board unity to turbocharge sustainability action for strategic business success.

Too often sustainability sits apart, siloed in the CSO’s team or another group who struggle to influence the rest of the organization. Little more than half (54%) of CSOs in the EY Sustainable Value Study say that they have the authority to hold others accountable for their performance on sustainability initiatives.
 

Lack of accountability can be symptomatic of a broader lack of alignment and cross-functional collaboration. The EY Sustainable Value Study reveals that 41% of organizations want significant improvement in collaboration between C-suite and board to effectively execute their climate strategy.
 

Gaps such as these frequently result in the creation of a sustainability strategy that is separate from the overall business strategy, relegating it to the margins. However, by integrating sustainability into the organization’s overarching strategy, leaders can bring functions together in a common goal.
 

Top-down leadership
 

Avoiding these disconnects starts with a drive for integration from the top, led and sponsored by the CEO with the support of the board. The whole executive team needs to be engaged and committed to driving the right internal and external conversations. By co-creating strategy and metrics and socializing them across functions, business units and geographies, companies can achieve widescale buy-in and alignment.
 

Take, for example, one of Australia’s largest property developer, Stockland. The CSO and Head of Development, Petie Walker recalls when CEO, Tarun Gupta, “made sustainability a core part of the new business strategy he implemented when he assumed the role few years ago, triggering an 18-month process to refresh the company’s approach to sustainability that engaged the entire organization”.  

“The CEO's role is absolutely crucial,” adds Andrew Stevens, a non-executive director of Stockland’s board, and Chair of the Sustainability Committee. “It's very difficult for enthusiastic people to move the needle on sustainability if that's not matched at the top in the leadership.”
 

At Mahindra, the automobile manufacturer, the sustainability committee is chaired by the group CEO, Anish Shah, giving its decisions the weight of his office. “Silos are perforated,” says Vikram Mehta, lead independent director of Mahindra’s board.
 

Strategic and future looking
 

In this process, collaboration among the CSO/CFO/Board trifecta is essential for making sustainability strategic and future-looking. This is perhaps nowhere more important than at Asahi, whose business, as a major beverage company, depends heavily on natural products. “We believe that sustainability is an investment in our future. We try to quantify the risk and the impact and try to avoid future cost,” says Kaoru Sakita, Asahi’s Group CFO.
 

For Kayoko Kondo, the company’s previous Head of Sustainability, the growing imperative to demonstrate the value of sustainability to future financial outcomes will require the CSO and CFO to “work as just one team”. Keizo Tanimura, the company’s Director EVP and Group CPO, adds: “It's important to think about the future and what kind of culture, strategy and day-to-day leadership you seek. It all comes down to crafting dynamics and governance frameworks that are fit for the company, and creating the foundations and supporting mechanisms that allow those frameworks to evolve continuously and remain effective.”
 

Expanding beyond the trifecta
 

While the trifecta remains central, as the team driving change, all a company’s leaders need to come together to cascade a sustainability strategy throughout the organization.
 

“Everyone in our executive team sponsors a part of the sustainability strategy,” says Alison Harrop, Stockland’s CFO. “It's very much a spiderweb sitting across our organization with many intersecting points but driven by the people in the business who can deliver the outcomes.”
 

The demands of more robust and regulatory-driven non-financial reporting are another important catalyst. For example, at the e-commerce company eBay, the sustainability team is increasingly collaborating with the company’s Chief Accounting Officer and SEC reporting team, “we have tremendous partnership across the whole of the finance organization” says Steve Priest, CFO of eBay.
 

Technology change is also creating need to expand the sustainability team. The dramatic adoption of generative AI (GenAI) has sparked a spike in both energy consumption and data center buildouts globally. Whether an organization is maintaining its own data centers or using cloud providers, the need to understand the climate and nature impacts of GenAI brings the Chief Information Officer to the table.

Everyone in our executive team sponsors a part of the sustainability strategy

“The biggest party missing here is the CRO [Chief Risk Officer],” says Deon Raju, Absa’s Group Financial Director. For the bank, “there's a very natural agreement between strategy, sustainability, finance and risk that comes together in all the strategic and integrated planning that we do.” Insights from the EY Sustainable Value Study show that 38% of CSOs and 39% of CFOs said that there is a need for improved collaboration with CROs to effectively execute sustainability strategy.

As organizations consider sustainability risk, it’s important to keep a view of the upsides, not just the downsides, notes Dominik Asam, Member of the Executive Board and Chief Financial Officer, SAP SE. “For us, climate is of course an existential threat, but we must not ignore the fact that it is also an opportunity. Supervisory board meetings often focus more on the risks and not on the opportunities. We don't even have an opportunity register at SAP. We only have a risk register for audit committee, for instance.” 

Amy Brachio, EY Global Vice Chair – Sustainability adds, “Climate and nature underpin growth and innovation, risk management, lives and livelihoods – making sustainability a whole organization issue underpinning almost all the decisions the C-suite faces.”

While issues of risk, reporting and resilience are front of mind, sustainability is also a forward-looking lens for organizations to challenge how short-term actions and decisions are building the organizations’ capacity in the long term for new markets, products and service.  The same material sustainability topics that are core to the business and inform the risk register can point to business opportunities when viewed through a different lens.


Most highly resilient boards (78%) view ESG as more of an opportunity than a risk for their organizations in the longer term (vs. 50% of less resilient boards).

2023 EY Global Board Risk Survey

No board silos

The Board can’t have silos any more than the broader organization. While some companies do have dedicated sustainability board committees, sustainability topics touch every part of governance: e.g., Governance & Nominating Committee (ESG), Compensation Committee (DE&I, incentives), Audit Committee (reporting), Risk Committee (climate). Boards need to connect these dots intentionally because it won’t happen organically.

Stockland’s Stevens explains how committee cross-membership makes important sustainability linkages: “We have a very good discussion and alignment between the sustainability committee and the people and culture committee. And likewise, members of the sustainability committee are also members of the audit committee.”

While breaking down silos and making linkages across the Board can increase its effectiveness on sustainability topics, it’s important to maintain clear lines of responsibility, advises Carol Hayles, eBay Board Director. “I'm always thinking about gaps and overlaps – making sure that things are covered in the appropriate committee, and they are coordinated and communicated so you don't miss a piece because you didn't connect properly,” she says. “But also that you don't have a lot of overlap. The responsibility in the oversight of controls and disclosure between Audit committee and Nominating and Governance is key for me.”

Silo busting will be key to shaping the future – and “while we can’t predict the future, we can collaborate – working together to adapt, grow and innovate with confidence” adds Hanne Jesca Bax, EY Global Vice Chair – Markets.

Aerial view of green bridge corridor for wildlife to cross highway safely
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Chapter 2

Create an ambition that will change everything

Shared visions: the critical convergence of CSOs, CFOs, and Boards to cultivate empathy for each perspective.

The integration of sustainability into strategy must come with a deep understanding of the organizational implications and impacts inherent in realizing your ambitions.

Daniel Schmid, CSO of SAP, notes that once you have established the ambition you must then “decide differently” – everything from budgets and investments to innovation and governance. “It’s very important that it's not an isolated approach, but a connected approach — an integrated and embedded approach.”

The CSO, CFO and Board working together are essential for driving these differential decisions in a way that ensures a financially responsible and robust sustainable business strategy is aligned with the company’s growth ambitions.

These roles each have unique responsibilities, but they should bring complementary perspectives that ensure the business orients toward a shared growth ambition and makes the incremental, day-to-day decisions needed to get there.

However, effective collaboration among this trifecta is not a given. Unlocking the power of the CSO/CFO/Board relationship depends on a key leadership quality of the new economy: empathy. 

This entails stepping outside the business relationship to consider the person and how they approach their role based on their experiences, relationships, ideals and expectations. 

But empathy must come with a common purpose. The complementary power of these three roles will only be realized if sustainability is core to the business strategy and a clear part of the dimension each one of them owns.

CSO perspective

The CSO aims to be transformational and brings the outside in through stakeholder perspectives, sustainability insights and technical capabilities to catalyze organizational change. Focused on generating measurable impact against climate and other sustainability goals, the CSO works across the organization on delivery.

“I need to be the most insightful person at the table because this is what I do day in and day out. I bring an understanding of the stakeholder lens – who cares about this externally? My team helps guide and point out ahead of time what different positions and roles need to be aware of, so that the business can decide on priorities and focus,” says Renee Morin, CSO of eBay.

“I make sure that the business case is financially sound, but also that it will deliver significant impact,” says Absa’s CSO, Punki Modise.

Voices from the field: CSO

 

Watch chief sustainability officers of leading organizations talk about how they drive sustainability goals forward.

CFO perspective

Focused on delivering financial performance, the CFO works to ensure the defensibility of sustainability investments. At the same time, the CFO monitors the company’s competitive position, including its sustainability dimension. The role speaks to both the Board and the market on performance and addresses risk in the organization.

Stockland’s Harrop sees her role as CFO as “providing a bit of challenge to what's being put forward by the sustainability team, almost as a go-between from the Board to the sustainability team. I have to be conscious of what's happening in the organization, but I'm also conscious of how we explain things externally. So, there's a healthy tension in diving deep with the sustainability team, really getting to the heart of what we're doing and understanding the impact on our financials.”

Harrop adds, ‘“sustainability has changed my role quite significantly. When I am presenting externally and positioning us, I need to have a really, really good understanding of what our sustainability strategy is, which was not happening previously.”

From the perspective of Absa’s Raju, the CFO “checks and challenges that to make sure that these are meaningful things that actually can make a difference to our stakeholders, and that we actually have influence over in terms of execution and implementation. And that whatever we promise from a sustainability perspective is achievable.”

“We have to be realistic about investors,” says Dominik Asam of SAP. “They care about money, so you have to make the link between the environmental topic and the money impact.”

Voices from the field: CFO

 

Watch chief financial officers of leading organizations talk about the integration of sustainability into finance.

Board perspective

The Board stewards a long-term sustainable business by protecting purpose and challenging the organization’s ambition. Answering to shareholders and stakeholders, the Board holds the CEO accountable.

“The Board's role is to set the direction of travel, the framework, and then challenge the CEO, CFO and CSO to construct the pathway to develop the detail,” says Ihron Rensburg, Board Director for Absa. “This is not a tick box exercise. It can't be – the stakes are far too high. It must be transformational in the sense that we are reimagining the corporate as a responsible social actor. It's impossible to imagine achieving this without a CSO.”

“The Board, sitting over the top, provides an outsider view,” notes Harrop of Stockland. Positioning and disclosure items are really what the Board is focused on. While they are very keen to understand the strategy itself and what that means for us, their lens is much more of a “How is this going to land?”

“The most common thing I've heard on this from the Board is: Will we be leaders in the space we want to be in? From a positioning perspective and from a brand perspective, is the goal reflective of our aspirations?” says Mahindra’s CFO, Manoj Bhat.

The Board plays an essential role in making this sustainability trifecta work effectively by ensuring that all three roles operate with a common purpose.

Voices from the field: Board Director

 

Watch board directors of leading organizations explain how they are bridging the sustainability ambition-action gap.


84% of highly resilient boards agree that their company should address ESG issues, even if doing so reduces short-term financial performance.

2023 EY Global Board Risk Survey

A common language

It is important to understand the lens that the others apply to sustainability, what success means in their terms, and speak a common language.

eBay’s Morin shares that “one of the challenges that CSOs face is translating concepts and value into business language, because that's what the CFO speaks. We have to step back as CSO professionals and realize this is not the world that a CFO lives in day in, day out. And that's what the Board ultimately wants to hear in a much more condensed version.”

Ultimately, understanding and empathy come down to human fundamentals. “Relationships are key,” says Morin. “Make sure that you have strong relationships in the sense that it's not a once-a-year thing, or it's not just a once-a-year email. There's actual dialogue happening, especially between the CSO and the CFO.”

Listen reflectively

Working hard to arrive at a common language born from intentional listening can accelerate progress in achieving common goals. Abanti Sankaranarayanan, Mahindra’s Group Executive board member overseeing sustainability, says she connects with “particular board members regularly to use them as a sounding board." Similarly, Asahi’s Kondo says, “when we listen to the feedback from the board members with a wider range of backgrounds, we often learn new perspectives.” Jennifer Li, supervisory board member at SAP agrees: “having senior management engage the Board might provide a perspective that could be a paradigm shift and help the organization take the next leap into sustainability achievements.”

Empathy and listening can’t stop at C-suite or even the boundaries of the organization. “It's important to include a wide range of perspectives, such as various department members, a wider range of people with different age groups, including younger people and external stakeholders who make up our ecosystem,” says Asahi’s Sakita “doing so provides us with stronger, more nourishing foundations from which to generate new initiatives and value for society.”

Stevens, of Stockland, shares the powerful impact of taking a listening approach with Indigenous stakeholders: “When we first engaged with First Nations people I’ll admit we used to go out with a set of PowerPoint slides. We’ve come a long way since then and the reality now is very much to listen and receive – which is the heart of reconciliation in the Australian context. The depth of emotion and creativity that results is quite staggering.” 

Leshan Giant Buddha bridge
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Chapter 3

Numbers are important, but so is authentic storytelling

Beyond the numbers: craft a human-centered narrative that aligns purpose with business strategy, inspiring action at all levels.

Sustainability must make sense commercially and meet the test of a successful business case, but numbers alone rarely change minds or move hearts. As with other corporate transformations, sustainable business transformation needs to be human-centered and inspiring to mobilize the organization and stakeholders. “It's not just about numbers, goals and progress, it's the why.” says eBay’s Morin. Effective storytelling becomes central, not just the right stories, but also the language they’re told in.

It's not just about numbers, goals and progress, it's the why

Purpose provides a foundation

Purpose provides the foundational story for sustainability, the organization’s ‘why’. “If you have a purpose, then you can rally your team and the company together to solve problems. Because setting goals by themselves without purpose is meaningless,” says Li, of SAP.

Mahindra’s ‘Together we rise’ purpose has been instrumental in enabling progress on sustainability. “I think the fact that we have a philosophy that is about helping our communities rise is what makes the business naturally absorb and execute sustainability strategies,” says Sankaranarayanan.

Stevens, of Stockland’s board, notes that the organization doesn’t need to have a large sustainability team because purpose steers the company: “When you have a purpose that says we believe there's a better way to live, sustainability locks hand-in-hand with that purpose and everybody is involved in executing and pursuing that purpose on behalf of our customers, our stakeholders and our investors.”

Share a view of the future and the stakes

A future-back vision helps frame strategy and investments and the story behind them. Work back from the preferable future, given different scenarios. Focus on short-term performance but keep a medium and long-term view. 

“When we consider the future in 30 to 50 years, we need to be sensitive about what kind of environmental change it would cause. And based on that perspective, we conduct back casting to define the risks and opportunities” says Asahi’s Sakita. 

Tanimura, on Asahi’s board, adds: “To be honest, it's not easy to prove upfront that our goals are achievable as it takes time to conduct long-term investments. That's why it's important to provide the story of how these can help solve social issues and business problems.”

Understanding the stakes in sustainability can help reframe how teams view their role and purpose. That’s what happened at Stockland, says Stevens: “We’re getting into nature and what biodiversity means, nature-positive climate transition, respecting the land as a curator of the land and a custodian rather than just an owner and a developer, that's how deep it is.”

Be an authentic, multilingual storyteller

CSOs must be fluent in ‘multilingual’ storytelling – speaking the language of the CFO, the Board, investors, and other stakeholders. “The stark realization for me that is that the role also is about change management and the criticality of taking people along with you,” says Absa’s Modise.

Morin of eBay advises: “Don't forget the storytelling, especially when you're at that board level. How are you going to make them want to actually understand and think and pay attention to what you're speaking about? And it can't just be charts and numbers.”

CFOs, too, need to find the right language for critical audiences. “For every number we report, I, as a CFO, should be able to explain to my investors why that matters to you and why it matters to the society,” says SAP’s Asam.

Transformations with humans at center can double your success
chance of a successful transformation outcome if human-centered drivers were adopted, 2.6 times more than if those drivers were not adopted.
Source: Research by EY and the University of Oxford Saïd Business School, The Future of transformation is human
Wildlife crossing
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Chapter 4

Bigger is not always better

Realizing ambitions: leaders navigate complex challenges to accelerate sustainability, aligning deeply with core values.

Sustainability leadership today means delivering on commitments. As easy wins become scarcer, progress depends on deeper and oftentimes more capital-intensive and systemic change. Geopolitical tensions, global policy uncertainty, economic headwinds and the need for systemic change only add to the delivery challenge.

The EY Sustainable Value Study shows that many organizations are responding by pushing back their commitment dates significantly, with the median deadline moving back 14 years from 2036 to 2050.

The leaders in this study have each found a way forward, focused on the impact they can and need to have based on the unique imperatives of their businesses. For Stockland, for example, greater impact comes not by expanding their commitments but accelerating the delivery of their existing ones. “Go faster because this is working,” is how Stevens describes Stockland’s approach. “The benefits are great. It's not ‘do more’, it's do what we're doing and do it earlier. This is a game changer for us.”

Align to the core business

Impact also depends on aligning sustainability initiatives to the core value drivers of the business. “It has to be very closely linked to the business that we naturally do, then converting that natural business activity into a set of real commitments and metrics,” says Absa’s Raju. “The minute it's not linked I would question the execution ability around something like that.”

When you achieve this alignment it drives value, observes Steve Priest of eBay “You do get a really great return on the investment, because guess what, when you do the right thing on the platform, when you invest in the right areas, it creates momentum and stability, and customers continue to come back.”

Accelerate with technology

Technology will be a critical accelerator for delivering on climate commitments. Indeed, the EY Sustainable Value Study shows that 66% of CSOs say that they are investing in-house to develop new climate-related technology. The majority of study participants (63%) also said that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have significant potential to optimize their supply chains and reduce carbon emissions.

‘AI will change the way we do business, making more impact than the internet. The technology is a huge paradigm shifter when it comes to productivity improvement, quality of life, and I think AI will also play a huge role in sustainability,’ says Li of SAP. The broad business and sustainability impacts of AI underscore the need to involve the whole leadership team, including CIOs and CTOs, in delivering a sustainable business strategy.

As discussed in How can AI help us accelerate the pace of change the world needs?, AI enables business leaders to address the pace, scale and complexity of change and take bold steps on sustainability, but stakeholders must have confidence in AI as an exponential technology for good.

Addressing the environmental impact of exponential AI energy use by data centers is an immediate stakeholder concern. Schmid, CSO of SAP observes, ‘The energy consumption to cool data centers is immense: the entire IT industry has a clear responsibility for this’.

However leaders need to address the ethical considerations on the responsible use of AI – clarity on the use of data, by whom and for what purpose, as well as the broader workforce impacts of AI. “In this structural transformation process, there will be winners and losers and how to manage those potential impacts will be a very important task for us,” acknowledges Asam, CFO of SAP.

Focus on equity to enable acceleration

For organizations in the Global South, such as Absa and Mahindra, sustainability must incorporate both the need to meet the development aspirations of their communities – long-term growth depends on it – while addressing the climate impacts they are disproportionately experiencing. Absa’s Rensburg argues “for a balanced approach that demonstrates a response to the social dimension of these communities who are impoverished and looking for interventions. And on the other hand, a deep concern about our planet about our climate and about the sustainability of humanity in the next 50 to 70 years.”

I think AI will also play a huge role in sustainability.
Tianjin Cityscape
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Chapter 5

The Board action agenda

Five strategic areas for boards to enhance sustainability

Our interviews with these global leaders uncovered five key areas for boards to add to their action agenda to augment and accelerate their organizations’ impact.

 1. Reimagine the use of technology as an accelerator

Step up their role as a challenger to urge management to embrace sustainability as a true business imperative and utilize policy and technology developments to accelerate progress. Support management in prioritizing opportunities to harness AI and disruptive tech while ensuring a tight relationship between operational gains, environmental impacts and ethical considerations.

2. Rethink business models

Push management to identify opportunities for growth and value creation – driving a bold program of sustainable business transformation. Insist on a more ambitious, strategic approach to the policy and regulatory agenda to move beyond compliance and pinpoint where the company can find a strategic competitive advantage, such as planning for likely scenarios around circularity . In parallel, develop and tell an authentic story to shareholders and stakeholders around short-term repercussions for mid- and long- run scenarios. Weigh the risks of inaction.


Less than a quarter (24%) of boards are “completely satisfied” that they have a clear strategic view, backed by credible analysis, of how tackling their material ESG priorities will achieve their value-creating objectives.

2024 EY Europe Long-Term Value and Corporate Governance Survey

3. Reframe time horizons and ROI

Develop business cases for medium- and long-term investments that meet the simultaneous imperatives of short-term performance and an era that requires major transformation. Get comfortable with uncertainty on time horizons while challenging management to do the math on funding commitments around climate and biodiversity. Consider an internal carbon price across the entire business and ask management to re-run scenarios consistently.  Develop clear roadmaps with long time horizons. Crucially, have a clear view of your rationale, grounded in organizational purpose, to support making long-term investments where returns are unclear.

4. Expand your ecosystem

Cultivate and orchestrate external ecosystem partnerships in a pre-competitive manner with peers, and across your value chain to accelerate sustainability progress and upsides. The EY Sustainable Value Study research indicates that companies “leading on climate action” have pursued partnerships more actively (96%) to address climate change. Encourage comfort with partnering with competitors to solve problems faced in common –  57% of climate leaders partnered with direct competitors in a pre-competitive manner.

Some companies naturally will be the trailblazers, and these companies will help enable the other companies to also get on the path to deliver sustainability.

5. Rethink governance

Embrace representative stakeholder engagement to truly give the full range of voices (such as nature) a seat at the board table. The Board, and particularly the chair, should consider the following structural builds into the way they govern:

  • Increase the number, quality and medium of touchpoints between the Board and the CSO as a center of excellence, while establishing board champions for different dimensions of sustainability. 
  • Address internal factors that limit companies’ ability to unlock value from sustainability (e.g., limited board diversity and knowledge of key sustainability issues, siloed or inflexible organization structures, misaligned culture, strategy). 
  • Fully integrate sustainability issues into board structures and decision-making processes: have sustainability as a standing agenda item.
  • Insist on executive compensation weighted toward growing sustainable social and environmental value.

Only 7% of directors feel sustainability issues are fully integrated into their board’s structures and decision-making processes.

2023 EY Europe Long-Term Value and Corporate Governance Survey

A final thought

Sharon Sutherland, EY Global Center for Board Matters Leader, offers a final thought “Innovators don’t say why, they say why not? Like these leaders who are actively challenging the status quo it's time for us all to stop expending time and energy on why and instead be the visionaries who are committed and passionate to affecting change through collaboration to redefine and rewrite a sustainable future.”

Summary

Boards are tasked with aligning sustainability ambitions with concrete actions, despite facing economic and systemic challenges. To achieve success, it's essential to weave sustainability into the fabric of core business strategies, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and engage in collective efforts that span the entire ecosystem. This integrated approach ensures that sustainability is not just a goal but a driving force for actionable change.

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