SBER Q3 Executive Symposium – Part One – Aligning ESG Vision & Strategy with Corporate Purpose to Get Net Zero Done

Our Third Quarter Sustainable Business & Enterprise Roundtable (SBER) Symposium was held both in person in New York City and virtually on Thursday, September 22nd as an Official Climate Week event.  A special thanks to our Member-Client presenters: Amy Wendel, Director and Head of Corporate Responsibility at GoTo and Jacqueline Drumheller, Global Sustainability Program Manager at Bio-Rad Laboratories.

Climate Week’s theme this year was “Getting it Done,” and the theme of the first half of our Symposium was Aligning ESG Vision & Strategy with Corporate Purpose to “Get Net Zero Done.”  Aside from discussing implications from recently passed and proposed climate regulations in the US and the associated backlash, we discussed how sustainability executives can align their corporate purpose and leverage their corporate “superpower” to create a CEO-backed ESG vision that, in-turn, aligns with the most sought-after talent, customers, investors, and host communities.

Key takeaways from this first session include:

1. The Inflation Reduction Act combines with the Bipartisan Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts to reflect a changed politics, creating a US industrial policy to mobilize trillions in private capital and re-shore manufacturing with the US leading globally on clean energy.
2. The ESG backlash attests to the market-shaping power of ESG – an acronym representing three categories of management competence that will not save the world but could save your company in a world that has “a brief and closing window to secure a livable future.”
3. While the US SEC may be delayed by litigation in promulgating a final rule on mandatory ESG reporting in the US, the ISSB and EU will proceed with ESG reporting requirements in 2023-2024.
4. Leaders should use TCFD-aligned scenario analysis to understand the expected P&L impacts of physical and transition risk.
5. Corporate sustainability leaders can help their enterprises align with the most sought-after talent, customers, investors, and host communities who recognize human-caused climate breakdown as a current emergency that is reshaping markets, nation-states, and global politics.
6. Corporate Sustainability leaders can embrace a science-based framing that transcends partisan politics and aligns the firm’s response to the climate crisis with the requirements of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
7. Leaders will develop and update a “Vision” for a sustainability strategy that is aligned with corporate purpose and “superpower” to help enlist CEO support for shared and enduring multi-stakeholder value creation in a rapidly changing world over the long term.
8. Leaders will enlist motivated leaders across HR, Investor Relations, Marketing, Global Workplace, Procurement, and Research & Development for an annual benchmark against past years’ performance and peers to develop a gap analysis for efficient improvement aligned with a multi-year roadmap to ESG high-performance.
9. News from GoTo: GoTo recently published its first annual ESG report, highlighting its efforts to: align ESG into its corporate purpose, create value for its customers and stakeholders, and reduce its impact and its customers’ impact on the environment.
10. Key Advice from Amy Wendel: Your business’ product lines should align with your sustainability values, and then you need to equip the different teams within your company with the information to communicate that impact to your customers.

We look forward to deepening our Member-Client based guidance on global ESG leadership throughout 2022.  Our year-end Executive Symposium will be held in Washington, D.C. – which is once again leading globally on decarbonization – on December 8^th.

Member-Clients can find a copy of the presentation deck from our Q3 Symposium in our Digital Library.