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This set of resources helps you to develop a credible strategy for sustainability.
If you are just getting started, or want to help others to understand how to get started, here is blog post that you can read and share:
May 18, 2021 · By Brandon Toews
To achieve the societal transformation we need, companies must do their part to embed sustainability into their core strategy. And that means focusing on more than shareholder value or even stakeholder value… It means focusing on systems value. We've created a straight-forward five-step process to help companies develop a truly embedded strategy.
Once you are ready to dive in, we suggest reading our embedded strategies guide where we provide more detail on the five-step process to embed sustainability into your strategy:
It is time for companies to take a very different approach to corporate strategy.
Our Embedded Strategies guide helps companies respond to the growing calls for businesses to articulate their purpose and their strategy in alignment with the need to shift the global economy towards the reduction of inequality, a rapid climate transition, the preservation of biodiversity, and the elimination of waste.
This guide will help you to develop a contextual strategy and goals that ensure your company is doing its part to maintain the resilience of key social and environmental systems.
Building on our Road to Context guide with insights from 300+ interviews with senior executives, CEOs, board chairs, and directors, as well as our experiences supporting companies around the world, it outlines resources and tactics that can help your company to scan for emerging issues and risks; understand their implications for your business; understand your impacts and your potential for positive influence; prioritise where it makes sense to direct your efforts; and set your strategy and goals in alignment with delivering systems value.
Your company is expected to have a robust understanding of its material sustainability impacts and topics. Unfortunately, conventional approaches to materiality assessments often take significant time and resources without providing much value beyond disclosure.
Our Radar Prioritisation Process helps your company to systematically explore a range of environmental, social and governance issues, understand the impacts from your operations and your value chain, assess the strategic relevance for your business, and identify where your company is best placed to support positive change. Our radar process is comprehensive, grounded in an understanding of your context and impacts, and yields useful insights for your corporate strategy process that help you prioritise where to take action.
Companies are increasingly being asked to clarify their position on key issues.
Our resources on position statements can help you to articulate a credible public position.
This short blog helps you understand why you may want to develop a position on key issues.
November 21, 2023 · By Stephanie Bertels and Rachel Dekker
Wondering if taking a corporate position on key sustainability issues is worth your organisation's time and effort? This blog post discusses how position statements can be an important avenue for productive debate, work to clarify expectations, and provide accountability for your sustainability commitments.
This blog helps you understand how to develop a position on key issues.
April 20, 2021 · By Brandon Toews
More than ever before, the public has turned its attention to business leaders and said “how are you going to be a part of the solution?” To help companies take a credible position, we have created a straight-forward eight-step approach that will help you to craft a comprehensive yet concise position statement on key issues.
More information is provided in our guide on developing position statements, with more detailed guidance also available on developing a position on climate and nature.
There is growing pressure among companies to link social and environmental limits to corporate strategy and goal-setting. However, the result is often a lengthy document that fails to make strategic connections between specific issues and their implications on business decision-making. We developed this guidebook to help you articulate a concise and transparent board level position on key environmental, social, and governance issues. Drawing upon in-depth analyses of over 4,000 board position statements; over 200 interviews with CEOs, directors, and board chairs; and concepts outlined in our series on the Road to Context, this guidebook provides a checklist for crafting a contextual board position statement and includes examples from a range of industries and global settings.
You can also search for leading position statements in our free database.
Is your company interested in taking a public position on an ESG issue?
To help companies develop strong, clear positions, we will maintain a public database containing leading positions articulated by large companies globally.
Our governance guide outlines how companies should articulate their positions, and we have applied this criteria to the positions featured in this database.
Once you identify your most material issues, you will need to develop more detailed strategies to address them.
This blog post helps explain how process-based targets can help your organisation to deliver on its long-term commitments.
July 11, 2024 · By Stephanie Bertels & Mahroo Shahbaz
While companies may understand the long-term goals and high-level ambitions they need to set, they can be reluctant to commit because they don’t have enough clarity on the work and resources that are needed to get there. In this blog, we share insights from our research into process-based interim targets, and how they can help you to bridge the gap, build momentum, and maintain accountability.
Finally, our series of getting started guides help you to understand key issues and how to take credible action. Anchored in research, each guide tackles a specific sustainability sub-issue to help you (and others in your business) build a foundational understanding and clarify the work ahead. We explain each sub-issue along with relevant trends, system thresholds, key concepts, and key actors, and pair that with resources to help you along the journey. We also outline common corporate goals and internal interim targets that show how companies are working on addressing the impacts of their operational and value chain activities.
Whether you are developing your first strategy for sustainability or refining an existing one, our Getting Started Guides can help provide clarity on the work ahead. Getting Started Guides: An Introduction shares our overall approach and clarifies the value of setting a clear strategy anchored in your company’s most material issues. It also explains key concepts that underpin the work outlined within each guide, including building an understanding of system thresholds and process-based interim targets.
You can also find each of our issue-specific Getting Started Guides below.
Explore our guidance and resources: