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The Life Sciences industry is to-date the most impactful and advanced industry sector on the planet.

The overarching atmosphere at the ESG in Life Science Summit East—where sustainability leaders from Life Sciences corporations and organizations recently gathered together in Boston to share insights and best practices as they seek to progress ESG leadership—proved this to me. Specifically, a fact and an observation made this clear.

1. First, the My Green Labs CEO, James Connelly, shared that the Life Sciences sector has the best forecasted temperature rise of any other globally. Said differently, they have reduced emissions more than any other sector relative to the amount for which they are responsible. 
2. The second source of evidence was a simple observation over the conference’s three days: these folks are not breaking stride, despite all the headwinds that ESG faces here in the U.S., where many corporations are reframing their programs to better fit an acceptable public narrative. After all, this is an industry that is professionally dedicated to saving lives. I am sure the C-suite at these companies are clearly attuned to the ESG pushback and are requesting re-confirmation of their ESG commitments, but the professionals at the conference don’t appear to be slowing down. The name of the conference alone highlights that backbone.

So, getting to a few highlights, I offer the following event takeaways:    

Themes

• Companies are maintaining their environmental strategies and have actually found that re-confirmation processes with senior management have proved beneficial to their overall programs. Leading practitioners also suggest that consistent strategy monitoring, with annual decisions around reporting (which often flexes with changing regulations), is the best way to manage up to the C-Suite and board of directors.
• Supplier Engagement remains a difficult component of Life Science corporations’ overall global decarbonization strategies. Companies are seeking to execute fair due diligence, but progress to-date is slower than needed, especially to hit ambitious targets.

Recommendations from leaders, spanning the breadth of corporate sustainability:

• Start with the California climate disclosure bills first, regarding managing upcoming mandatory reporting requirements, as an easier-to-achieve hurdle that also contributes capability to addressing more formal and stringent standards like CSRD.
• Create an ESG Program Management Office (PMO). This office maintains the master list of all reporting regulations and requirements, scanning for updates and changes. It also provides companies with the ability to move towards modular reporting efficiency. While no company today can issue a global interoperable report that accommodates different reporting geographies, a modular approach captures much of that benefit today.
• Embed business value metrics within your sustainability pillars. For one leader, these include market share growth and customer experience. Additionally, avoid talking about compliance and rather use terms like competitive advantage and differentiation instead.  Not only does this align a company’s business and sustainability strategy but also rises to the level of how the Dow Jones has defined Corporate Sustainability since 1999—it is literally about sustaining the corporation and not limited to the environmental definition many have adopted today.
• Recognize early on that finance is your gateway to the corporation. Keep them close and adapt to present your sustainability initiatives using the finance team’s methods for presenting business cases to senior management.
• Be specific and add more dynamic dimensions to your stakeholder engagement presentation materials. Use examples to make your point, embed talk tracks within presentations, and create AI-enabled FAQ search features that feed off of internal documents and product dashboards.

As you know, SR Inc has the privilege of working with many of the leading Health and Life Sciences corporations in the world and we welcome a chance to connect if you have any questions relating to the above points or challenges you are facing in your ESG programs.

David Osborn

CFO / Senior Advisor