What challenges and strategies are top of mind for you in sustainable business?
The field I helped build is now drowning in its own success. At the onset of my career, the challenge was to prove that sustainability data, finance, and strategy existed and that it should be taken seriously. Over 25 years later, the opposite is true; too much data, too little of it comparable or verifiable, and the political backlash has evolved ‘greenwashing’ to ‘greenhushing’. A challenging evolution as greenwashing can get challenged but silence cannot.
Another challenge to highlight is the structural problem that disclosure has outrun capital allocation. Companies report more than ever, but the capital is not moving at the scale needed to fund transition. The pipeline between institutional capital and investable climate assets is still thin and expensive to build deal by deal.
The last challenge is nature. Climate got 15 years of standard setting before the tricky issue of biodiversity and nature-related risk was addressed. It is underfunded and short on the kind of data infrastructure that made carbon accounting usable.
The strategy that is top-of-mind for me has not really changed much in the three decades I have worked in sustainability: stop treating sustainability thinking as a communication function and start treating it as market infrastructure, with demonstrable risks. It can be investable, auditable, and structured in such a way that risk committees will trust it.
What should we be doing differently today?
Fewer frameworks, better plumbing.
The variety of frameworks, such as GRI, SASB, TCFD, CDP and the jurisdictional ones of CSRD and ISSB, were necessary in providing early guidance. But now the plethora of alphabet soup of reporting has become a barrier; a mid-cap company, who has the best intentions, spends more time on mapping disclosures across frameworks than providing solutions for transition work. We need fewer people investing in a new framework or platform, and more people doing the integration and strategy structuring.
Also we need to stop pretending that disclosure is the finish line. A perfect report never changes a capital allocation decision, which could be seen as a failure. What is needed is connection appropriate, concise data for decision-useful activities at the board level. In principle, connecting this data directly to underwriting, lending covenants, insurance, and fund mandates. Avoiding the check-the-box overlays, making the data part of the process of investing. This is the difference between the last decade of sustainable finance and the next.
Lastly, hold the scientific line under political pressure. The current environment invites the temptation for institutions to quietly water down ambition. There are still companies who are doing the rigorous transition planning without announcing it, that is a defensible strategy. Whereas abandoning substance is not.
IF YOU COULD RESET SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS, WHAT WOULD YOU EMPHASIZE?
I am leaning toward emphasising a single global reporting and data baseline, not because standardisation is elegant, but because comparability is what lets capital move. Every additional local framework variant is a tax on cross-border investment. The hardest hit are the emerging-market issuers and smaller funds who can least afford three compliance teams.
Put nature and social outcomes on equal footing with climate, not as a ‘phase two’ once carbon is solved. Nature and social impacts are harder and messier, and that is exactly why they have been deferred.
Sustainability functions report through the CFO’s office or the investment committee, not through corporate communications. Responsibility should lie with those who own the balance sheet and have a mandate to own the decisions.
WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?
I would describe myself as an infrastructure builder, and systems creator, not necessarily an advocate. My contributions have consistently been in transition; taking a values-based idea (such as companies should be responsible and accountable for their environmental and social impacts) and turning it into something that is valued by capital markets. Where a capital market professional could turn the information into a viable financial product: an index, a fund, investment strategy. That is a less visible role than the campaigners and the policy voices to get the headlines. I have made peace with that, as someone has to build the plumbing, erect the building, and set down the guard rails.
What I am most proud of is not any single credential. It is the fact that the infrastructure that I have been part of starting has outlived my direct involvement and kept being useful.
From the Dow Jones Sustainability Index to the GRI. The durability, building something that keeps working after you leave the room, is the only metric I actually trust for this kind of work. Reports get read once, infrastructure gets used for decades.
Staying useful across an entire market cycle; early conviction, mainstream adoption, political backlash, and now re-legitimisation, is the actual achievement. Deep knowledge coupled with nimbleness and unique insight to take on the harder edges of sustainability.