Bibhu Mishra of Humboldt University, Berlin elaborates on Transitioning towards sustainable economy: Role of financial institutions such as Central Banks and financial systems in The Times of India.
Transitioning towards sustainable economy: Role of Central Banks and financial systems
Bibhu Mishra
“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first”, said Kant.
Climate change is real; it affects and will affect everyone. Mother Nature sends its signals regularly, and most recently through the flash floods in western Germany. These signals are an urgent reminder that we need to take action now. The action must be collective, significant, timely, and futuristic because, in the long term, the risks outweigh the costs.
The Paris climate accord is one such step in the right direction. A holistic and stakeholder-driven approach would be required to achieve the target of maintaining temperature rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius. One of the most significant stakeholders in such efforts is the global financial system. The financial system’s role is pivotal because they provide finance and steer economic growth. Their actions have a significant impact on ESG, i.e., Environment, Society, and Governance.
There is a tremendous surge in investments which keeps ESG at the core of investment decisions. According to Bloomberg, ‘ESG assets may hit $53 trillion by 2025, a third of global AUM’. Despite a phenomenal rise in ESG assets in the past decade, the financial system still faces challenges like ‘short-termism’ and ‘greenwashing.’
Therefore, the role of Central Banks is vital. They look at the financial system of a country as a whole. Former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney coined the concept ‘Tragedy of the Horizon’ to explain this. He argued, “the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most banks, investors and financial policymakers, imposing costs on future generations that the current one has no direct incentives to fix.” It is a tricky paradox where the current system has little or no benefits but to save the planet in its current state or better for the coming generations.
Realizing the importance of its role, eight central banks and supervisors created (In December 2017) a ‘Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS).’The NGFS is aimed to make coordinated efforts to combat climate change. As of June 30, 2021, the NGFS has grown to a network of 95 members and 15 observers. The Network’s purpose, in their own words; “to help strengthen the global response required to meet the Paris agreement’s goals and enhance the role of the financial system to manage risks and mobilize capital for green and low-carbon investments in the broader context of environmentally sustainable development.”
The NGFS is a significant step towards bringing central banks of different countries together and ensuring that central banks take the leadership role in fighting against the climate crisis. In its first comprehensive report (Pub 2019), It came up with the following six suggestions and floated the idea of global collective leadership.
Integrating climate-related risks into financial stability monitoring and micro-supervision
Integrating sustainability factors into own-portfolio management
Bridging the data gaps
Building awareness and intellectual capacity and encouraging technical assistance and knowledge sharing
Achieving robust and internationally consistent climate and environment-related disclosure
Supporting the development of a taxonomy of economic activities
Additionally, the steps taken by the Central Banks of England (Bank of England) and France (Banque de France) are noteworthy and worth a mention.
Recently, the [Central] Bank of England launched a stress test for banks and insurers to understand the ability of the UK Financial system to cope with climate change. The test is aimed to examine the resilience of the UK’s 19 biggest banks and insurers. The stress test can also be looked at as an acknowledgement that Climate Change poses significant financial risks to the existing financial system. Therefore, early planning of a transition is necessary.
Moreover, ‘Banque de France,’ the central bank of France, took several initiatives to transition the financial industry into zero carbon. In June 2021, the French ACPR (Autorité de contrôle prudential et de résolution, English translation: French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority) published the first climate pilot exercise report an overall ‘moderate’ exposure to climate risks.
Let’s understand the risk through an example. Investing in fossil fuels may generate returns in the short term,’ but it will accelerate climate change and, hence, negatively impact the ESG. The negative impact on climate could cause erratic rains or severe drought, leading to an adverse effect on investments made in agriculture and allied sectors. One sector’s gain can be the loss of another sector, posing a significant risk before the overall financial system.
To ensure a smooth transition of the financial system towards sustainability and make it resilient from other systemic risks, early and coordinated action is needed. Central Banks and financial systems have a significant role to play in our journey towards sustainability.
Bibhu Mishra is a German Chancellor Fellow at Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a researcher with Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin.
It’s all about Value. It’s the name of the game. Create it economically; capture it distinctively. So, a ‘value proposition framework’ for sustainable development is put forward here by Green Biz authors.
A ‘value proposition framework’ for sustainable development
Whatever theoretical economic framework (such as game theory or decision analysis) or business model you want to select, value is at the heart of it. Individuals, organizations businesses and governments act to increase value — also referred to as utility — from their perspectives.
We believe this is a key to understanding the actions of various stakeholders in sustainable development, developing new strategies for making sustainability progress and, most important, for building effective collaborations across and between stakeholders upon which real sustainability rests and relies.
Collaboration requires a desire for shared value — finding the commonalities in seeking defined outcomes, then working together to increase utility or value propositions for all involved stakeholders. Not everyone needs to like each other or agree on every outcome to build effective collaborations, but they also can’t be at odds. This requires all parties to understand perspectives and find the common ground.
Businesses — with their human, financial and capital wealth — represent an enormous (or potentially enormous) powerful force when it comes to sustainable development. Therefore, we think it critical to understand the value propositions that all businesses face — both danger and opportunity — in terms of sustainability. In the long run, their viability and success also depend upon it.Collaboration requires a desire for shared value — finding the commonalities in seeking defined outcomes, then working together to increase utility or value propositions for all involved stakeholders.
All companies have in common five primary value propositions, although not everyone regards them as a set. Each has a direct connection to sustainability:
Profit
Revenue
Talent
Capital
Collaboration
Growing the bottom line: Profit
It’s the bottom line — revenues minus the costs — that still makes the ultimate business case.
It’s also one of the easiest cases to make for sustainability. A company can increase its profit directly by reducing costs, and for many companies, energy, water and waste costs can be significant.
Reducing these through focused measurement, process improvement and/or specific projects can directly improve the bottom line while also improving the sustainability of the overall enterprise. It is where many companies start their sustainability engagement and with good reason: The economics can be enormous.
Dow Inc., in its first set of 10-year sustainability goals, returned $4 billion to the company on a $1 billion investment in projects. Energy reduction also reduces costs and carbon emissions. Reducing its environmental “footprint” is also often the most immediate way for a company to build credibility for its sustainability efforts. Companies that talk a good game about sustainability but don’t take meaningful action to reduce their own footprint lose credibility and reputation, which hurts them in markets for products and services, talent and investment.
Growing the top line: Revenue
Revenues grow through increasing market share or successful development of new products and services in response to society’s needs and desires, and it’s clear that sustainability trends have become big drivers.
Tesla is one example of visionary and bold investment in a single, although major, sustainability driver: electrification of mobility. Tesla has been very successful in this regard, but looking across all auto companies, you see the accelerating interest — and new product announcements — to capitalize on this incredibly important driver. (It will be interesting to see if GM and Ford can make the transition to become leaders in the future of electric mobility; we like their chances).
In the water area, companies such as EcoLab have built entire platforms around the management of water, cleaning water and recycling of water. The list goes on, but the key principle here is to identify the trends, invest in R&D and new products and processes, and ride the wave all the way to successful business growth.
Attracting, developing and retaining top talent
Employees are the core of any successful company. Top talent is drawn to — and kept in — companies that are successful in developing and implementing the kind of proactive sustainability strategies for their companies that make a material and purposeful difference.
Very few top students want to join a company whose activities are viewed as making climate change worse or polluting rivers and oceans or harming biodiversity and nature. Sustainability is the new “table stakes” for attracting top talent today.
When Neil was CSO at Dow, Dow attracted thousands of new employees in China from top universities with a “Green Jobs” program where recruits could join Dow to have real sustainability impact in applying their degrees (and Dow’s retention rates for these students was much higher than peer companies). When Laura was director of communication/citizenship at Dow Corning, top students didn’t wait for on-campus recruiting. When the company launched its first Citizen Service Corps, students started calling the company’s media center.
Look at any companies on campus these days and you will see that their efforts in sustainability are featured prominently. What is more interesting is the importance of sustainability to developing and retaining top leadership talent.
Like a customer you don’t want to lose, retaining the most valuable employees is critical. The drivers for hiring new talent are really the same as “rehiring” current employees. Dow very successfully used sustainability experiences — special projects, in-field assignments, academies and simulations — to develop leadership and strategy skills, while integrating sustainability across the company. Many of these future leaders remained because of the skills that Dow invested in for them in sustainability.
Attracting and retaining investors
All companies require capital. And the pace of acceleration for consideration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors has increased significantly. Virtually no company can survive and thrive anymore with its investor base without addressing sustainability concerns as an enterprise.
Dow started third-party verified Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) reporting more than 15 years ago, and it learned and grew along the way; it worked with other reporting programs such as CDP as well. In 2020, Dow was named to the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI) by S&P Global, the 21st year Dow has achieved this prestigious ranking due to its comprehensive sustainability programs. Dow became much more involved more than five years ago after the Paris climate talks when Michael Bloomberg and Mark Carney appointed Neil (then Dow’s CSO) to join the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, part of the Financial Stability Board.
Dow helped establish the reporting criteria, but beyond that, the experience provided Dow real learning and insight into where banks, financial institutions, insurance companies, bond underwriters and investors were headed. All companies today need to pay careful attention because investors are paying careful attention. One has only to read BlackRock CEO Lawrence Fink’s growing expectations in his annual letter or observe ExxonMobil’s abrupt board member changes to see that the term “activist investor” has been redefined. Times have changed.
Collaborating for mutual success while addressing key challenges
Finding safe places to collaborate to create the healthy ecosystems in which enterprise thrives is critical: supply chains, marketplaces, workforces, communities, industries — no company goes it alone.
Finding safe places to collaborate is neither easy nor simple. Competitors have antitrust concerns. Customers and suppliers have adversarial positions relative to costs. NGOs often have adversarial advocacy positions to individual companies or to whole industry sectors, and governments view their roles as to regulate and tax companies.
All of that adversarial energy can be put to better use if the focus is on more narrow objectives, especially those that involve sustainable development of regions, countries and the world as a whole. There is usually widespread agreement that we cannot regulate or litigate to stop negative trends in nature, public health, social equity and ecosystems, and that if we work together we can accelerate progress. But to do that requires a maturity of perspective on the part of stakeholders that we can agree to disagree on many things, but still find common ground to solve more narrow challenges.Adversarial energy can be put to better use if the focus is on more narrow objectives, especially those that involve sustainable development of regions, countries and the world as a whole.
The collaboration between The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Dow, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, is one such example. Finding ways to incorporate the value of nature inside the company to better inform strategic decisions was of interest to Dow, and TNC was interested in preserving nature. Both saw that valuing the services of nature would help them to meet their respective goals, and they could collaborate with integrity. It set a new standard and example for collaboration, which continues to benefit both organizations, serve as an example to companies and organizations across industries, and preserve and enhance nature, using the power of capital in a way that no mere philanthropic strategy ever could.
When Dow worked with the University of Michigan to establish the Dow Graduate Sustainability Fellows more than a decade ago, significant faculty concerns were raised about their independence and intellectual academic freedom. Together, the company and the university put in place safeguards in response to those concerns, and hundreds of Dow Sustainability Fellows have benefitted, as have the University and those communities whose projects were addressed and implemented.
Neither example would have occurred without a strong platform for collaborating on sustainability challenges. These collaborations have helped Dow advance its business strategies and helped it learn and grow, positioning the company for future success. At the same time, these stakeholders also thrived. Win-win.
Value propositions for corporate sustainability
What company does not want top- and bottom-line growth? What company does not want top talent in their sector? What company does not want access to capital that is lower cost and more plentiful? And what company does not need platforms to collaborate with their value chain, in their communities and with their governments?
This five-part value proposition framework holds that promise for companies. Nothing short of their survival and growth is at stake today.
But we also believe that the other major stakeholder groups can benefit from understanding this framework for companies, by surfacing new ideas and creating proposals for collaboration that are more sophisticated in understanding the aspirations of their prospective company partners. At the end of the day, we all want to drive more sustainable action and bringing all stakeholders into collaborations will help us accelerate progress. Show comments for this story.
In a Khaleej Times‘ OPINION AND EDITORIAL, Michael Jennings of the University of London comes up with criticism of the now well-established labels of First World, Third World, suggesting that it is time for coining new binaries. Then First World, Third World? Let’s coin new binaries; but what about the MENA region’s stand, one would ask. The answer is below per the IMF’s Economic Overview.
First, the illiteracy and educational indicators are significantly more unfavorable for women than for men. Second, MENA countries compare poorly to other countries when account is taken of spending on the social sectors, highlighting the impact of distorted labor markets, an inefficient educational delivery system, and neglect of female education. Third, when various human development indicators are combined (e.g., as in the UNDP human development index) the region’s ranking among countries in the world is less favorable than that based on income criteria alone.
The picture above is for illustration and is of the World Bank Blog.
First World, Third World? Let’s coin new binaries
22 June 2021
All too often, these terms have played into wider prejudices about places that reflect and are fed by the values ascribed to each.
For anyone living in ancient China’s Zhou empire in the first millennium BCE, the world was simple: they were in the “Zhongguo”, or Middle Kingdom, and everything outside was barbaric. Understanding the world at the height of European imperialism also was easy. On maps, vast swaths of territory were coloured in hues denoting each empire. Human nature strives for simplicity, and today we have come up with a multitude of descriptions for the world’s regions. But terms such as North/South and First World/Third World have flattened diversity and complexity through a simplistic binary gaze.
It isn’t just a problem of simplicity, though. All too often, these terms have played into wider prejudices about places that reflect and are fed by the values ascribed to each.
We can see this on social media, where the rise of intemperate comments and put downs against others can often be based on the implied superiority of where one lives or comes from. Social media weaponises and reinforces prejudices and racism that come from a facile understanding of the world. More than ever before, in an age of parity between the informed and the less-so, we must be careful of the words we use to describe each other.
Trying to analyse and explain the world has always required some generalisation. We lump together countries or regions that share some similarities and gloss over details and important differences. But describing the world is not just about looking for objective points of commonality or difference. It involves recognising different world views, assumptions and values. The problems come when one side of that binary division of the world gets to decide what is the norm, reflecting the realities of global power and ongoing colonial legacies.
Since the end of empires, two dominant ways of dividing up the world have emerged. The first reflected the Cold War, seeing the world through the prism of an existential conflict between the democratic-capitalist West and the communist East, comprised of the Soviet Union and China. The “rest” — which related closely to maps of former colonial territories — were the regions in Africa, Asia and Latin America that together comprised the arena for this battle of ideas and influence.
The second way took a more economic perspective, categorising regions through their GDP or level of “development,” and allocated various terms to describe those differences. Some — such as the terms “low-,” “middle-” (or “emerging-”) or “high-income countries” — are unapologetically economic in their focus, based on levels of GDP that still conceal great diversity within populations. These remain widely in use but at least have the virtue of being a label one can escape: Tanzania and Benin recently moved into middle-income status, while Mauritius has now joined the group of high-income countries. But other terms have attained wider reach within popular and analytical vernacular. The terms “North” and “South” were always less about geographical location than about distinguishing between the rich and globally powerful regions and the poorer, less powerful ones. “Developed” and “un-/under-developed” have similarly focused on poverty.
The term I grew up with, the “Third World”, was originally coined in the 1950s by the French demographer, Alfred Sauvy, to describe those nations that were part of neither the Western nor Eastern blocs. By the 1960s it had become firmly linked to poverty, under-development and poor governance. In a world that still contained third-class train carriages, in which “third” was inevitably less good than “first”, the term was applied to those parts of the world where the majority of citizens were people of colour — and which, coincidentally, had been under imperial rule. The racism and patronising undertones of the term were readily noted and understood by those on the receiving end.
What underpins all these ways of compartmentalising the world is the assumption that the European and North American models of development, with the same governance and other values, are the end-goal for all global regions. The closer you resemble these two, the more you can claim entry to the North, the First World and to “developed” status. These terms assume that emulating Europe and North America makes a country better, so it’s what every other nation should aspire to.
Yet rich Middle East states like the UAE or Asian nations like Singapore have no desire to replicate Western norms. In the 1990s, Malaysia’s then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, sought to articulate the “Asian Values” that marked a departure from a Western paradigm that twins development with liberalism.
Clearly, the binaries and indexes we are left with are not objective or scientifically indisputable. They are based on what counts most to a minority (albeit powerful) portion of the world. Is a nation’s GDP the sine qua non of being “developed”? What about Costa Rica and Cuba? Both are significantly poorer than the (very much “developed”) US, yet both enjoy better health and quality of life across a number of different indexes than their First World neighbour. As the past year has shown, rich countries contain enormous pockets of inequality and poverty — residents of a poor housing estate in Manchester might share more with those from a working-class area of Hong Kong than they care to admit.
Over the past couple of decades, the terms “Global North” and “Global South” have emerged in reference to global regions. While there is still some overlap with old terms, they do attempt to acknowledge how important discrepancies in power are in shaping relations and opportunities. They are at least an attempt to do away with disparaging terms for particular regions.
I use those terms myself, but with significant reservations. Do they really avoid the division of the world according to colonial legacies?
While that might make sense from the perspective of the Global North, would someone in India, for example, see themselves as more aligned with, say, Kenya, than with Thailand or even South Korea? It all depends, of course, on what you’re comparing with and on what the context is. It solves some problems, but not all — and it certainly does not distance you from a perspective and values that are far from universal. Perhaps it’s time for voices from outside Europe and North America to come up with new terms and for politicians, academics and journalists within Europe and North America to listen. There is much talk these days of decolonising education, development aid and global health, among other things. So how about decolonising our perspective on the world?
Michael Jennings is reader in international development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, or SOAS University of London, where he works on issues related to global health and the politics and history of global development.
SmartCitiesWorldNews team informs that AI is used to examine construction following earthquakes in its vital assessment concerning quality, safety and potential risks in its future usage.
The picture above is about how an App helps engineers identify structural issues. Photo courtesy: Build Change
AI used to examine construction following earthquakes
An open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation with support from IBM and Call for Code will use machine learning to help inform quality assurance for construction in emerging nations.
A new open source machine learning tool has been developed to help inform quality assurance for construction in emerging nations.
Build Change, with support from IBM as part of the Call for Code initiative, created the Intelligent Supervision Assistant for Construction (ISAC-SIMO) tool to feedback on specific construction elements such as masonry walls and reinforced concrete columns.
Structural issues
The aim is to help engineers identify structural issues in masonry walls or concrete columns, especially in areas affected by disasters.
Users can choose a building element check and upload a photo from the site to receive a quick assessment.
“ISAC-SIMO has amazing potential to radically improve construction quality and ensure that homes are built or strengthened to a resilient standard, especially in areas affected by earthquakes, windstorms, and climate change,” said Dr Elizabeth Hausler, founder and CEO of Build Change.
“We’ve created a foundation from which the open source community can develop and contribute different models to enable this tool to reach its full potential. The Linux Foundation, building on the support of IBM over these past three years, will help us build this community.”
The ISAC-SIMO project, hosted by the Linux Foundation, was imagined as a solution to help bridge gaps in technical knowledge that were apparent in the field. It packages important construction quality assurance checks into a mobile app.
“ISAC-SIMO has amazing potential to radically improve construction quality and ensure that homes are built or strengthened to a resilient standard, especially in areas affected by earthquakes, windstorms, and climate change”
The app ensures that workmanship issues can be more easily identified by anyone with a phone, instead of solely relying on technical staff. It does this by comparing user-uploaded images against trained models to assess whether the work done is broadly acceptable (go) or not (no go) along with a specific score.
Workmanship issues can be identified by anyone with a phone. Photo courtesy: Build Change
“Due to the pandemic, the project deliverables and target audience have evolved. Rather than sharing information and workflows between separate users within the app, the app has pivoted to provide tools for each user to perform their own checks based on their role and location,” added Daniel Krook, IBM chief technology officer for the Call for Code initiative.
“This has led to a general framework that is well-suited for plugging in models from the open source community, beyond Build Change’s original use case.”
Construction elements
According to Build Change, the project encourages new users to contribute and to deploy the software in new environments around the world. Priorities for short term updates include improvements in user interface, contributions to the image dataset for different construction elements, and support to automatically detect if the perspective of an image is flawed.
Build Change seeks to help save lives in earthquakes and windstorms. Its mission is to prevent housing loss caused by disasters by transforming the systems that regulate, finance, build, and improve houses around the world.
Arina Kok of The Edge Malaysia in My Say: Sustainable finance a lever for growth, demonstrates how sustainability should be omnipresent in all development plans thinking as well as implementation.
Recent studies show that future years will be hotter than ever, and growing pressure from all sides to go beyond beautifully designed sustainability reports would be a must. Consumers and suppliers ought not to just value sustainability; they should prepare to pay for it. For instance, assets in dedicated sustainable investment strategies went over $1 trillion by June 2020.
In January, the country was badly hit by floods that displaced nearly 50,000 people. This exacerbated the impact of Covid-19 on struggling businesses, livelihoods, the healthcare system and the economy.
My Say: Sustainable finance a lever for growth
The pandemic aside, the Malaysian economy had suffered RM8 billion worth of damages, owing to climate-related events between 1998 and 2018. Given the rising magnitude and frequency of climate risks and their impact on businesses and society, the call to action is clear — strong cooperation between financial institutions and policymakers, businesses and society will be critical to drive the coordinated transition to a resilient and low-carbon economy.
To accelerate the transition, increased mobilisation of sustainable finance is needed to fund mitigation initiatives such as clean energy, energy efficiency and sustainable transport, and adaptation initiatives such as disaster management, infrastructure upgrade and sustainable land use.
Sustainable finance can be defined as any form of financial service that incentivises the integration of long-term environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria into business decisions, with the goal of providing more equitable, sustainable and inclusive benefits to companies, communities and society.
While negative screening, such as absolute avoidance of activities, and thematic investing in selected sectors, such as clean energy, are commonly practised in sustainable finance, there is also a growing focus on diversifying sustainable financial practices into three other areas:
ESG integration — incorporating ESG information and analysis into investment decisions with the objective of enhancing risk-adjusted returns;
Norm-based screening and best-in-class (positive) screening according to defined ESG criteria.
Risk aside, climate change also presents opportunities to increase the range of financial products and services for renewable energy, green buildings and climate-smart agriculture and cities. The International Energy Agency projects the need for US$3.5 trillion (RM14.4 trillion) in annual global investments to build the infrastructure for a green economy.
Our World in Data, publisher of research and date of the world’s largest problems, found that the cost of solar and wind power plummeted at a staggering rate between 2009 and 2019, with the price of new solar falling by 89% and the price of onshore wind by 70%. It is now cheaper to invest in new renewables than in new coal power in every major energy market in the world, and soon it will be cheaper to build new renewables than to continue operating existing coal plants.
As markets advance in factoring ESG into risk-adjusted returns and more sustainable funds build competitive performance records, the lingering doubts about sustainable finance will diminish. According to S&P Global Trucost, over the past six years, the Standard & Poor’s 500 SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) portfolio increased by 136.2%. This compares with the S&P 500 portfolio, which generated a return of 125.8%. The research also indicated that companies with a higher proportion of their revenues coming from SDG-related products and services tend to outperform those with a lower proportion of their revenues.
Challenges
The challenges in driving sustainable finance lie in having a clear direction and incentives to pivot from traditional investing strategies. The availability of quality ESG information is also an ongoing challenge, as most businesses are at different maturity levels in managing and reporting on ESG practices. While regulatory and market standards continue to be developed, a coordinated transition requires a system-wide engagement and effective reporting policies to be implemented.
In response to the need for common industry standards and frameworks, Bank Negara Malaysia is collaborating with the local financial industry to issue Value-based Intermediation Financing and Investment Impact Assessment Framework (VBIAF) guides for the different sectors.
The sectoral guides will facilitate the practical implementation measures pursued by the Joint Committee on Climate Change, including the Climate Change and Principle-Based Taxonomy that will be finalised soon. The first set of VBIAF sectoral guides on palm oil, renewable energy and energy efficiency was issued on March 31, while the second set for the oil and gas, manufacturing, construction and infrastructure industries will be issued by year end.
The right strategy
With increasing pressure from the regulators, investors, organisations and society need to clearly define their sustainable finance strategies, resilience to emerging risks and their role in the global transition to the green economy. Successful sustainable finance strategies will be those that are actionable.
Setting the right strategy starts with defining just where and how organisations should engage in sustainability. It is not just a matter of figuring out the right policies, but of identifying the right actions to make sustainable finance a lever for growth. The board and senior management will have to think about the organisation’s purpose and mission. The right answers will help define sustainability goals that suit the organisation — those that are measurable, authentic, achievable, meaningful and aligned with stakeholders’ needs.
The right strategy is essential because greening the economy has huge potential upsides and may be the greatest commercial opportunity of our age.
This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly of 10 to 16 May 2021.
Arina Kok is a director of Ernst & Young Advisory Services Sdn Bhd’s climate change and sustainability services (CCaSS) practice. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organisation or its member firms. This is the second of a three-part series on sustainability in conjunction with Earth Day 2021.
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