The Sustainability Imperative

Enrique Castro-Leon, Katrina Pugh, and Jose Zero take another approach to supporting business resilience. They believe we need a carbon-accounting system that is clear, credible, transparent — and can stretch along supply chains and be compared across businesses. Starting with US generally accepted accounting practices, the authors advocate for an approach based on the accrual method to provide a more accurate picture across time and promote the idea that carbon investments in impermanent solutions like forest planting should be accounted for just like a commodity with a value that changes depending on circumstances.

A net benefit for nature is central to the activities happening at Duke Farms in Hillsborough, New Jersey, USA, a campus-like setting in a peri-urban landscape. Margaret Waldock, Jonathan Wagar, and David Jeffrey Ringer describe how Duke Farms addressed greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and carbon sequestration using a science-based approach that supported the location’s strategic objectives with smart decision-making and an authentic discussion of trade-offs.

This Advisor introduces the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP), a key industry initiative supporting the European Green Deal. With a structured governance model and ongoing collaboration with the European Commission, the CNDCP drives the data center industry toward climate neutrality by 2030.

In this Advisor, we explore how AI is transforming adaptive reuse decision-making. The Reincarnate project integrates AI tools with traditional scenario methods and participatory workshops to develop 15 circular building reuse scenarios. Leveraging ChatGPT-4 for narrative insights and DALL-E for visualizations, these scenarios enhance early design stages, align stakeholder priorities, and support more informed policy and project decisions.

This Advisor highlights the critical need to align the green and digital transitions, emphasizing that while both will reshape society and the economy, they follow distinct trajectories. To ensure a just and effective twin transition, industry and policymakers must address key challenges, including data fragmentation, overreliance on technology, power imbalances, and policy alignment.

Shannon Ames and Whitney D. Stovall demonstrate how a whole-system approach can transform hydropower by expanding project evaluations beyond reliability and longevity to embrace multiple priorities that deliver additional value. The authors illustrate how, when designed effectively, hydropower can fulfill its renewable energy mandate while also supporting 24/7 demand matching, biodiversity protection and restoration, and positive community impact.

Matt Mayberry, Scott Tew, and Laura Asiala contend that a lack of strategic alignment between leadership and management is the root cause of failure in sustainability transformations — when sustainability is treated as an add-on, it remains separate from core business operations. Using Trane Technologies as an example (and pulling from the experience of coauthor Scott Tew, Trane’s chief sustainability officer), the article highlights a common pitfall: once executives roll out a strategy, leaders expect strategy execution to propagate naturally across the enterprise, but without structured alignment, implementation falters. This gap often leaves ambitious sustainability goals unheard or unheeded across the enterprise because of the distance — both actual and metaphorical — between the corporate boardroom and operations.

Paul C. Godfrey and Vishal Gajjar explore how a newly appointed chief sustainability officer (CSO) can navigate complex sustainability challenges to deliver co-benefits, satisfy multiple stakeholders, and optimize resources. This can be achieved through the Sustainability Canvas, a strategic framework that acts as a compass. The authors take us inside the world of a new CSO facing seemingly disparate issues — low maturity in sustainability reporting, water scarcity in operations, toxic chemicals in products, and a shallow community program that prioritizes philanthropy over genuine engagement. As the CSO plots sustainability approaches to address these issues, the Sustainability Canvas tool offers a structured approach for balancing compliance, costs, reputation, and customer expectations, viewing each challenge through both risk and opportunity lenses while addressing ROI concerns.