Evermore

Sustainability Reporting: Necessary, but not Sufficient

Judy — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:58:40 +0000

Dunstan Allison-Hope
Founding Partner

The backlash era is affecting multiple aspects of the just and sustainable business agenda, including our ability to pursue climate strategies, conduct human rights due diligence, and address bias and discrimination. Sustainability reporting is feeling the heat too, but with additional criticism from within the field that disclosure diverts attention and resources away from more important goals.

I have written in the past about how the current form of sustainability reporting — especially overly complex reporting standards, a lack of clarity about who the reports are for, and the pressure for each year’s report to feel different — supports this perspective. The critique of reporting as it exists today is compelling, but it doesn’t answer the question of what form of sustainability reporting we want to see or set an agenda for where we go from here. I assume opaque corporate secrecy doesn’t feature in anyone’s preferred theory of change.

Over the past two years, I have become immersed in the reporting state of play, from financial to sustainability, mandatory and voluntary, mainstream and specialized. I have had the opportunity to explore the quality and quantity of company disclosure for both AI-related and child rights-related impacts, risks, and opportunities. In both cases, I have focused on how companies have integrated these two focus areas (i.e., AI and child rights) into existing mainstream financial and sustainability reports, rather than creating a whole new category of disclosure. Both focus on hot topics of the moment, with significant society-wide interest in company policies, strategy, and performance.

As a result, I have now read hundreds of SEC filings and sustainability reports, engaged with both the authors and readers of these reports, and reflected on how disclosure supports broader societal goals. I thought it would be useful to reflect on the insights I have gained and what this might indicate about the future of reporting.

Regulated reports that follow a standardized form and structure are more useful than “free-form” voluntary sustainability reports. When reading SEC filings and reports using the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), I knew exactly where to find the information I was looking for, immediately understood its significance, and could compare it directly with other companies. I knew the company had scrutinized every word, giving the information robust meaning and significance; it wasn’t disclosure at the whim of the public relations team. By comparison, the voluntary sustainability reports were often an unstructured mix of stories, anecdotes, and updates of unclear significance and ambiguous meaning. Regulated reports deal with a serious, high-stakes question (“what information is material”), not a frivolous, temporary one (“what story provides the best narrative this year”).
Social impacts are of material interest to investors and should be treated accordingly. The topics I have focused on are clearly relevant to investors, whether as liability (e.g., AI and discrimination claims or safety risks), market size (e.g., limiting children’s access to technology), or cost (e.g., achieving regulatory compliance). This is prompting discussions within companies about the relationship between business models, corporate strategy, and social impacts. However, it is also essential for capital allocation that investors have access to high-quality information about how companies in their portfolios—individually and collectively—identify and address these risks. Investor decision-making cannot create change if investors lack the information needed to play this role.
Improved policymaking by government requires better information from companies. Both responsible AI and child rights online suffer from unsatisfactory government policymaking and ad hoc regulatory enforcement. There are many reasons for this, and the lack of robust sustainability reporting is far from the top of the list. However, I’d argue that a proactive communications strategy, based on a thoughtful, systematic, and transparent explanation of the relationship between technology, social impact, and business success, can only increase the likelihood of improved decision-making by governments and regulators. Companies cannot complain that government action is badly informed if they are the very entities restricting the flow of high-quality analysis.
Different report audiences have different information needs, and this patchwork requires greater coherence. In the field of responsible AI, investors, enterprise customers, insurers, regulators, and safety researchers all have different priorities and information needs; a similar dynamic is found in child rights online, with children, policymakers, regulators, investors, child rights advocates, educators, and parents all having an important stake. The challenge of having multiple target audiences has long complicated sustainability reporting, and in the technology industry this has been compounded by a culture of creating new forms of transparency and information taxonomies, rather than using what already exists. A table published in AI Transparency Starts With the Audience outlines several different reports and the audiences who find them useful for decision-making. Though simple, this table has been surprisingly clarifying for a field of contrasting professions with distinct areas of expertise and differential understanding of reporting.
Risks of under-disclosure are in battle with risks of over-disclosure. Historically, companies understandably feared disclosing too much—that being candid about shortcomings and transparent about risks would damage reputation and increase liability exposure. New regulations in the EU and elsewhere are beginning to turn this calculus on its head, as companies become increasingly aware of the risks of incorrect or incomplete disclosure. The implementation of the EU Digital Services Act is early evidence of this shift, though it remains to be seen how this evolves over time.

The availability of decision-useful information is only one of the many system-level challenges and priorities for the field of just and sustainable business. I have always viewed reporting as a “necessary, but not sufficient” feature of the world we want to see; a virtue in its own right and a formal discipline that should serve other priorities, not constrain them. However, just as it would be a mistake to prioritize disclosure over programmatic priorities, so it would also be a mistake not to shape reporting for maximum effectiveness.

We all have a preferred position on the playing field when trying to win, and formal sustainability reporting just happens to be one of mine. I played fullback on my high school soccer team, breaking up attacks and helping my team move forward, but rarely scoring goals. Perhaps reporting is the fullback of the just and sustainable business team.

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Is there a war on data centres?

Judy — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:08:29 +0000

Judy Kuszewski, Founding Partner

Almost as quickly as the generative AI industry has boomed, public (and increasingly official) opposition to data centre development has mushroomed into what may be the mass-resistance cause celebre of our time. There are several main reasons for this opposition, whether to a specific data centre or to the systemic compound impacts of the sector. But it is worth considering broadly what makes this opposition specifically appealing to so many people, and whether this is the most visible front in a wider war.

Communities around the world are pushing back against the march of DCs in their neighbourhoods:

In Buckinghamshire, England, about 25 miles from where I live, a coalition of pro-environment, pro-social and tech sector activists have recently halted the development of a ‘hyper-scale’ DC, arguing that the government’s decision to force it through disregarded the energy and water requirements and climate impacts of such a project.
In January this year, the town of Quilicura, near Santiago de Chile, gained notoriety for its campaign to discourage the unconsidered use of AI while their town – host to multiple DCs – was facing a severe water shortage. Their campaign offered would-be AI users the services of real-life skilled people from their community for a single day. Over 25,000 prompts were received. Flesh-and-blood researchers answered such deep questions as ‘why are hot dog buns sold in packs of eight and sausages in packs of 12? And living artists and designers drew portraits of pet dogs or created images of sloths playing in the snow.
The city of Marseilles in the south of France has been the site of numerous locally-organised campaigns against the uncontrolled development of DCs, whose power and water use requirements have created significant environmental justice challenges for local people. The city is one of the poorest in France, and the DC industry has directly prevented the cleanup of serious air pollution by delaying the electrification of the city’s port.

What many of these and other examples of public opposition have in common is an emphasis on the direct conflict DCs pose between community needs and DC demands – especially in relation to energy and water. Because of the specific demands of markets for AI services, DCs are by definition concentrated in populated areas. This puts computational power near to industries such as financial services (which value low latency times), but in the process exacerbates demands on already-strained infrastructure, and in the case of metropolitan areas such as London, monopolises large amounts of physical space where housing stock is in short supply and precious shrinking ecosystems are under constant pressure.

Developers – and supportive governments – counter with promises to power DCs with renewable energy, to operate to the highest standards of efficiency, and to create jobs and tax revenue locally. In reality, all these claims are controversial at best, with renewable energy purchasing contracts simply monopolising existing renewable supplies and creating no new generating capacity; and public subsidies and tax breaks vastly outstripping any benefits in jobs and local revenues. An academic paper cited by the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy found that U.S. data centre investments in receipt of at least $811 million in tax relief generated a measly 837 permanent jobs in total. That’s a million dollars of public money for each job created – for a collection of DC deals valued at a total of some $10 billion.

Moreover, we must confront the systemic impacts, risks and opportunities that DC (and more broadly AI) development brings. It is safe to say that a single data centre on its own is unlikely to raise many alarm bells outside the locality where it is proposed to be built (unless it’s Meta’s would-be hyper-scale Zeewolde campus in the Netherlands). But in some ways, this is exactly the problem: if data centres are only considered one-by-one – can a single instance be justified in its location, with its specific configuration, and its individual impacts and potential benefits? – it is inevitable that the wider, system-level trends will be missed until the impacts are much wider than the individual planning application.

Campaigners claim that data centres in the pipeline in the UK would altogether double the country’s energy requirements in a few short years. The grid was not created for this, we don’t have the sustainable energy supplies to provide for it, and anyway, we need lots more electricity for other things (to bring down the cost of living, to reduce pollution, and to transform major economic sectors for the future).

The UK government declared AI data centres to be critical national infrastructure in 2024. This means, among other things, that vital services including energy and water will be prioritised for the needs of DCs even in times of crisis (such as the severe drought affecting much of the country in summer 2026) – over and above the needs of hospitals, agriculture, transport, households, and any other activities that people in the community are likely to value more highly.

The energy use trade-off – that is, that any energy used to power DCs cannot also be used to power other services or endeavours – raises afresh the question that Amory Lovins first posed fifty years ago in an article in Foreign Affairs, and recently revisited by Joel Makower: we should be asking not how much energy do we need, but what do we need energy to do? The apparent doubling-down on polluting fossil sources to feed the ever-growing numbers of DCs and jettisoning of efficiency as an aim altogether represents a massive backward slide into unconsidered demand-side thinking about this issue.

There is a ‘data sovereignty’ argument – which is real and important – that deserves to be acknowledged. Regardless of anything else, governments often share the view that sovereign countries cannot afford to have major economic activities (like AI) dominated by foreign interests. Yet it is important to recognise that simply locating DCs in a certain jurisdiction does not in itself confer digital sovereignty – this depends on the whole ecosystem of infrastructure that underlies it, including ownership questions and binding energy and water standards. Indeed, digital sovereignty in itself deserves discussion and whether it is an important objective in its own right may be a subject for another day.

And like any technology, whether AI is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on what it is used for. Whether any given data centre is used for ‘sovereignty’ (or for any of the other benefits backers claim, such as curing cancer or solving climate change) rather than for deepfake porn may be impossible to say, meaning there is a much more fundamental discussion to be had about public benefit, public acceptance and what it is founded on. And this is to say nothing of Anthropic’s IPO prospectus warning of ‘existential risks to humanity’ inherent in its AI systems while still expecting a valuation of over $2trn – is there any other industry that could get away with this? – again, a subject for another day.

There are policy fixes for these problems, addressing systemic impacts and prioritising strategic solutions – if communities and governments have the resources and capacity to consider them. For businesses – most immediately those businesses that own, use, promote, or finance DCs or the digital services they enable – the opposition is only growing, meaning the challenges will become more visible, not less.

The real danger is that the rush to develop DCs without due care and consultation may have hardened public opinion to the extent that community, NGO, and increasingly government opposition is now more categorical than contingent. The need for powerful trust-building and radical honesty around the future of this industry is now immense.

Does your business need a principled, positive and pro-social strategy? Let us help you work through the challenge.

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Leadership: Luck or tenacity?

Judy — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:20:56 +0000

Dr. Tauni Lanier
Founding Partner

Read Dr. Tauni Lanier’s full article on Substack. Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched the sustainability field reorganise itself. Some see this as retrenchment. But if you’re advising boards, managing CSO transitions, or building leadership pipelines, you’ll recognise what’s actually happening: the skills that built the sustainability agenda from 2015 to 2021 are no longer the skills it needs now. This isn’t about ESG being “dead”, 87% of major companies have quietly increased sustainability spending even as they’ve dropped the language. It’s about where that work lives, who leads it, and what expertise actually matters in the moment we’re in. This essay explores that shift through two historical tests for leadership: the Hamlet test (does success depend on you?) and the Havel test (are you the right person for this moment?). Most organisations are still hiring for the first. The field is asking for the second. If you’re navigating CSO transitions, building advisory collectives, or trying to identify who can actually deliver impact now rather than who built the momentum then, this piece offers a framework for thinking it through.

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A Community of Experts

Judy — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:13:34 +0000

Dr. Tauni Lanier
Founding Partner

Read Dr. Tauni Lanier’s full article on Substack.

As AI eats into the graduate intake at the world’s biggest advisory firms – KPMG’s own numbers are down by a third, McKinsey and BCG have frozen starting pay for three years running – the industry is reading it as efficiency. Dr. Tauni Lanier reads it differently: as a business model running out of road.

In this piece, Tauni traces the shift from Stanford researcher Melissa Valentine’s concept of “flash teams” expert groups assembled fast, dissolved once the work is done aligning to the model Evermore is built on: not a marketplace assembled from scratch each time, but a standing community of senior practitioners who already know each other’s work, AI-scaled rather than AI-replaced. It’s a case for judgement over utilisation, and for why the firms with the most to lose here aren’t the boutiques they’re the ones with a permanent bench to keep busy.

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We are Evermore.

Lambert — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Judy Kuszewski and Dunstan Allison-Hope
Founding Partners

It has been a tumultuous time in the world of sustainable business in recent years, a fact that hardly needs saying, but which affects the whole business environment. We’ve whiplashed away from what looked like widespread mainstream consensus a few years ago – that successful business means serving a social purpose; that companies play a vital role in delivering justice, securing human rights and equality; that bold climate action is necessary, inevitable, and just around the corner ahead. Today, by contrast, you’d be likely to believe the very opposite: climate action has fallen so far down the list that we are now paying utilities to scrap wind energy in favour of coal; the apparent backlash against DEI initiatives has dismantled decades of progress virtually overnight; and legions of businesses that once proudly announced their sustainability achievements have taken instead to silence and opacity.

Great time to start a sustainability collaborative, then, right? At a time when the weakening or elimination of regulatory mandates has caused the bottom to fall out of the sustainability services market; when corporate budgets have been cut to the bone; and when a year of devastating climate-induced weather catastrophes have seemingly no impact on endlessly-rallying financial markets – surely, not now?

Look, we get it. The financial conditions are hard going, if nothing else, and we’ve all grown weary of the excesses of what you might call the sustainability-industrial complex.

And yet, this is exactly why we’ve started Evermore – to offer a different kind of relationship with our clients, one that respects what matters most to them, and is designed to deliver impact and value in the real world.

We are launching Evermore to provide a new thought leadership platform in just and sustainable business, embodying several core beliefs that underlie the work we do:

Knowing what needs to be done and being able to do it are two fundamentally different things. In so many instances, there is really no doubt about what needs to be achieved, but the political, economic, and organisational levers aren’t positioned to help us do this. We’re not in the business of persuading companies to care about responsible business. The leaders and teams we work with already care. What they really need is help removing the barriers that prevent action today.
Sustainable business is hard work, and no one should pretend otherwise. The many decades of advocating for win-win solutions have frankly produced very few of them, and we have to ask why. We also have to ask whether the solutions that our industry offers are really capable of addressing the climate crisis and ecological decline; whether they have any answers for the tough questions about the future of equity, wealth, work, and power that are being surfaced by the rise of transformative technologies. We reject the overstated claims, overblown marketing hype, and failure to evolve that our industry has indulged in, which has alienated people who may otherwise have become allies in business transformation.
Every business is part of a whole array of systems. From supply chains to national, international and local communities and from customers’ lives to the capital markets, these systems are where social and environmental challenges are most salient and sustained. We want to help our clients understand and use their influence to change the system for the better – to expand their impact beyond their own perimeters, for lasting, positive change.
The power of experience is often cited, but rarely delivered to clients in practice. Working with Evermore means working with us, a unique collective of senior-level experts in our fields, practiced and skilled advisors and champions, and the architects of sustainable business in our own right. We don’t operate a pyramid of junior consultants, and we won’t waste time on unnecessary make-work.
The future of just and sustainable business still needs to be written. Whether it is emerging regulation in the EU, urgent questions about the impact of technology on society, or the need for a just climate transition, an expansive agenda remains to be shaped. No outcomes are inevitable, and we need to continue advancing a vision grounded in international standards of responsible business conduct, effective multilateral governance, and a sustainable future for everyone.

The story of Evermore is a belief that we all have power to change the future, but this won’t happen by itself. Real change requires honesty, discipline, accountability, and the willingness to engage with the hardest questions rather than manage around them.

Evermore is what you say when you intend to keep going – because the destination is worth it, even when the journey is difficult.

The post We are Evermore. first appeared on Evermore.

What would the raven say today?

Lambert — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:00:59 +0000

Judy Kuszewski
Founding Partner

When we set out to create Evermore, we wanted our name and identity to say something meaningful about the ideas that inspire us and that inform our relationships with our clients. We wanted to tell a story about yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our storyteller is the raven.

We didn’t choose the raven to represent us because of its beauty, though it is undeniably beautiful; rather, we chose it for what it represents across cultures and time – and for how that meaning contrasts with the conventional corporate template.

Ravens, along with other corvids, such as crows, jackdaws, magpies, and choughs, are among the most intelligent creatures on earth. They plan; they remember. They solve problems that other animals cannot. They have been observed in studious analysis, joyful play, and cunning deception – that is, they are capable of complex behaviour that speaks of serious engagement with the world. They are not symbols of innocence, like doves, nor of apex-predatory might, like eagles. They are symbols of intelligence operating in a complex world.

The raven is also culturally resonant, although not always flatteringly – their habit of hanging around battlefields and the aftermath of predation means their reputation as a portent of death is perhaps inevitable. Edgar Allan Poe made the association immortal: a black raven arriving uninvited, settling permanently, and responding to every desperate question with the same single word: Nevermore.

In many traditions, the raven is a messenger – it travels between worlds, carrying knowledge from one place to another, serving as guide and interpreter. In others, it is a guardian: the creature that watches from high above, sees what’s coming, and sounds the warning call. In Norse tradition, Odin’s ravens Huginn and Muninn – mind and memory – fly out each day to observe the world and return to report what they find. Their gift is that of truth.

That is the kind of counsel Evermore aspires to offer. The stories we tell are not the naive reassurance that everything is fine, nor the polished narrative that makes difficulty look like progress. Rather, we offer an honest, clear-eyed, intelligent account of our clients’ reality, what it means, and how they can act – delivered with respect and responsibility.

One more thing about ravens worth saying: they are long-lived. They form lasting bonds. They do not abandon the places and the communities they are part of. In a field where so much advisory work is transactional – where the project ends and everyone moves on – Evermore is built around a different kind of presence. We offer a relationship that endures; that cultivates knowledge, memory, and trust over time – a relationship that delivers more, not less, the longer it has endured.

Get in touch – let us help you write your own story.

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A Revolution from the Inside?

Lambert — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:00:22 +0000

Dunstan Allison-Hope
Founding Partner

When I first entered the field of just and sustainable business in the mid-1990s, I was quickly drawn to the idea that more progress could be made by engaging with companies that have severe adverse impacts, rather than avoiding them altogether. I was motivated by the notion that advocates—whether in investment, civil society, or simply individuals like me making career choices—should not be afraid to work for the very companies whose practices we want to change.

I was in my early 20s, full of the optimism that comes with limited experience. I was also clearly shaped by the optimistic political context of the time: Tony Blair was telling us that “things can only get better”; Bill Clinton believed in “a place called Hope”; and the first episode of The West Wing was about to air. However, given what we now know, does this belief in what we might call the “insider strategy” hold up to scrutiny today—or as Sarah Palin might have put it a few years later: how’s that hopey-changey stuff working out?

The easy part of the answer is that my view is much more nuanced now. I recognize that insider and outsider strategies are more powerful when combined, that decisions about whether to work for or against a company can vary by the situation, and that different people will have varying levels of comfort with each approach. However, I think this belief has stood the test of time, and that debates today focus on how to engage with companies most effectively, rather than whether to do so at all.

Two factors seem especially important when reflecting on this question: the direct impact that can be achieved by working for or with a company, and the insights those following the “insider strategy” can gain into how systemic change can be achieved.

In terms of the first factor, for example, the recent TrustCon conference brought together more than 1,000 people working in trust and safety, policy, and human rights roles at technology companies to share strategies and tactics for improving company decisions, operations, and impacts. They do not win every time (far from it), but these are the people who propose alternative design choices, write improved content policies, and develop risk mitigation approaches. It is easy to notice the things technology companies get wrong when operating in conflict-affected areas or providing services to children—and believe me, I know they get a lot wrong—but also, it is easy to overlook the hard work that gets many other things right.

However, I find the second factor even more compelling: By being close to product development, content policy processes, and in-market decision-making, people in these roles can identify risks, develop practical solutions, and craft well-informed approaches to responsible business. If we want to understand what truly drives change, it is important to pay attention to those close to the action, who can warn of upcoming issues and help us understand the incentives and forces that may be pushing in the opposite direction. Some of the most important insights into how to create systems-level change will come from those working inside the system.

This second factor also ties to a key shortcoming of my original optimism—that while turning “bad companies” into “good companies” is a necessary part of just and sustainable business, it is far from sufficient. Too often, there are simply too many other companies willing to step in and fill the void.

Examples abound, such as an energy company that buys dirty assets from another energy company, or a spyware company that sells products other companies are unwilling to sell. If I advise an investor to remove a fossil-fuel-intensive asset from its portfolio, the climate benefits are null if another investor holds the same asset instead. If I work with a B2B technology company on sales due diligence and the proposed deal is declined, the impact of that work comes to nothing for the people and communities affected if another company simply steps in and makes the sale. Rather than naively hoping for a “race to the top,” more system-wide approaches are needed, such as government policies, regulations, and incentives that support structural change.

And here is the rub. Clearly, government policies should be shaped by desired outcomes and by engagement with the people and communities most affected and with the most at stake; however, they should also be informed by insights gained from spending time close to business decision-making. While I understand the skepticism that can accompany a move from company to policymaker or regulator, I have come to believe that more rotation across sectors is needed, not less.

I am often asked for my opinion on the biggest technology companies, not just by those in the field but also by my doctor, dentist, and optician. I have developed a standard answer that I believe is true. While acknowledging that the company operates within a broader system of incentives, I emphasize that some of the most impressive work I have seen on sustainability or human rights is carried out by the same companies that have also made some of the worst decisions I have seen. This is hardly a coincidence, because those close to the action have the insights and lessons learned to do better next time; indeed, they are sometimes hired for exactly this reason. I have no doubt that the influence of those pursuing the “insider strategy” is highly constrained by both systemic incentives and the work of those higher up the chain—but we need more insiders with influence, not fewer, and they need the resources and support to meet the challenge.

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Ayesha Barenblat

Lambert — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:00:48 +0000

What challenges and strategies are top of mind for you in sustainable business?

The challenge I keep returning to is the gap between commitment and practice, and how easily that gap becomes a chasm when political winds shift. Companies that built genuine sustainability strategies are navigating a moment where voluntary commitments on DEI and climate have become politically contested, and the institutional consensus that underpinned them has frayed.

The ESG backlash is real, but worth being precise about. Some of what’s retreating deserved scrutiny: commitments made without the operational infrastructure to back them up, goals set for signaling rather than impact. What concerns me is when substantive progress gets abandoned alongside the performative variety. Because the costs of backsliding are not abstract. They fall disproportionately on women who power global supply chains, who are both on the frontlines of human rights abuses and the first to lose their livelihoods when floods, heat waves, and climate disasters strike. They are not a footnote to this story. They are the reason it matters.

My view is that this moment actually clarifies the opportunity for private sector leadership. As governments backslide on climate and labor commitments, companies that stay the course build resilience, secure supply chains, and attract the talent and capital that will define the next decade. Human rights due diligence, done properly, is an opportunity to understand whose lives are shaped by business decisions and build strategy around that knowledge. The companies that do this well don’t just manage risk better. They make better decisions.

What should we be doing differently today?

We need to stop treating regulatory compliance as our final destination. Forced labor has moved from being a human rights concern at the margins of trade policy to a question of economic competition at its center. Section 301 investigations, import bans, and the EU Forced Labour Regulation coming into effect in 2027 mean that plausible deniability in corporate supply chains is no longer viable. The companies that will lead are the ones asking not just how to comply, but how to get ahead of what’s coming.

I’d also push for a more honest accounting of what intersectionality actually means. Climate and human rights are not separate agendas. The workers most exposed to heat stress, flooding, and climate disruption are the same workers grappling with economic precarity. Companies that treat their environmental and human rights commitments as different workstreams are missing both the point and the opportunity.

And we need a different model of stakeholder engagement: time-bound, goal-focused, and built around genuine accountability between companies, labor, and civil society. We have wasted too much time convening indefinitely without moving the needle.

If you could reset sustainable business, what would you emphasize?

Intersectionality, not as a buzzword but as an operating principle. Social and environmental justice are inseparable, and the companies and initiatives that treat them as such will build something durable. The ones that don’t will keep cycling through commitments that don’t hold.

I’d also emphasize the power of radical collaboration among people who don’t usually share a room. At Remake, we united influencers, creatives, and brand executives with union leaders, legislators, and workers from the ground up, building campaigns grounded in frontline experience rather than constructed on behalf of it. That distinction matters enormously. Solutions that center the people closest to a problem ensure lasting change.

I’d also bring much more urgency to binding accountability rather than voluntary commitments.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?

When brands cancelled $40 billion in orders at the start of the pandemic, leaving millions of workers without wages overnight, we built #PayUp: a viral campaign that united supermodels, everyday citizens, influencers, and labor advocates around a single demand, and recovered more than $22 billion in cancelled contracts. The California Garment Worker Protection Act came from the same playbook. Passing legislation that established sectoral wage liability and ended the piece-rate pay system enabling endemic wage theft required years of coalition building across constituencies that did not naturally align. It passed. And changed lives.

Earlier in my career, at Business for Social Responsibility and through the ILO and World Bank’s Better Work programme, I built the muscle for this kind of work: convening luxury brands and global retailers including Amazon, Chanel, Gap, Gucci, Levi Strauss, Target, and Walmart around shared problems, and facilitating complex multi-party dialogues. I have facilitated dialogue between governments, unions, suppliers, and global brands on issues as charged as forced labor in Jordanian factories and gender-based violence in Cambodian ones.

When the stakes are high and driving consensus changes workers’ lives, that is the work I am most proud of.

The post Ayesha Barenblat first appeared on Evermore.

Cornis van der Lugt

Lambert — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:18:10 +0000

What challenges and strategies are top of mind for you in sustainable business?

We find ourselves in a geopolitical epoch where “the leader of the free world” is saying the whole sustainability agenda is overrated. Leave serious matters to serious players, ones dominant in a struggle for power. The only social responsibility of business may well be to simply pay its taxes, and to embrace nationalism.

The risk is that even critics fall into the trap of adopting this mindset. If the example set by leadership is saying that all cats are black, maybe all cats are indeed black.

We think of business leadership as entrepreneurial, innovative, forward-looking and setting the standards of managerial efficiency. Leaders of large businesses have traditionally displayed scant interest in being inhibited by national borders. Trade liberalisation was to take market efficiency to a transnational scale.

But the sustainability agenda is still there and increasingly material. Our challenge is therefore one of enlightened leadership, leadership that stands up for a more holistic and values-based way of pursuing business, leadership that grasps the relevance of longer-term developments and that inspires collective action along global value chains.

What should we be doing differently today?

As a student protester in the 1980s, I’ve seen firsthand what happens if large sections of society find their human rights ignored, their welfare conditions rock-bottom, and need to find ways of making collective action work for a democratic transition. The context of economic transformation in an emerging market is nothing new to me. A key lesson from the South African experience is the role that inspirational leadership and open dialogue played in making a peaceful transition.

Working on sustainability issues since the 1990s, I’ve seen the agenda evolve. There are always new issues, including new technologies, that mature and eventually lead to the development of new standards and regulations. But some fundamental dynamics of how we use and manage different capitals (including natural and human) remain the same. And what we know about climate change today we essentially knew thirty years ago.

What is different in the 2020s is the changing geopolitical environment combined with a disruptive phase of the digital revolution. It is one in which Western economies can no longer assume leadership positions. Consumers and business leaders in Asia may lead the way. New leadership can come from many corners of the world. This is dynamic and exciting. Plus, business leadership can demonstrate how sustainability challenges pose not only risks but also opportunities, including opportunities of collaboration across national borders.

IF YOU COULD RESET SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS, WHAT WOULD YOU EMPHASIZE?

Looking at the urgency of the agenda, it is tempting to conclude that only mandatory standards and regulation will deliver the required action at scale. But weakness in regulatory enforcement will remain. This is where voluntarism and leadership by business remain key. As the nature of sustainability issues is clearer today, it may be that the reset is about mainstreaming. This implies that “ESG experts” cannot hold on to old terminology. Climate management may become risk management. Circularity may become synonymous with innovation. People management may become more human in the face of AI. Sustainable finance may become naturally associated with investment grade. All of this challenges how we educate the managers of tomorrow.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?

I’ve seen the inside of government, international negotiations, the United Nations, international standard-setting, a Fortune 500 company, investor engagements and management education. I have been blessed to work with people from diverse backgrounds and leadership roles.

My proudest achievement remains a work in progress: the ongoing ability to learn and facilitate improved understanding of an evolving agenda, from sustainability innovation to best practice, from sustainability reporting to accounting systems, from ESG ratings to investing in future leadership.

The post Cornis van der Lugt first appeared on Evermore.

Andy Wales

Lambert — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:13:17 +0000

What challenges and strategies are top of mind for you in sustainable business?

Noble intention alone never was enough – and now we all know that. The phrase ‘ESG backlash’ does capture the sense that the veneer has been ripped off many overly simplistic commitments made when sustainability was in vogue everywhere. But it is of course much more nuanced. Some key sectors, especially within finance, are rolling back their commitments. However other major areas of the global economy now have systemic underlying drivers towards sustainability – from Chinese dominance of low priced but high quality solar and battery technologies, to the hyperscalers’ desperate need for innovative decentralised power solutions for AI given constrained grids. Even in finance, pension funds, as key asset owners, are becoming more activist in switching mandates away from asset managers under-performing on sustainability to better meet their duties to protect long term value in a climate changing world – and better match the values of their pension holders.

What should we be doing differently today?

The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership paper in Sept 2024 on Competitive Sustainability was both insightful and prescient given what’s followed. My favourite line was “It is time to move on from trying to put ‘sustainability thinking’ into business and instead start putting ‘business thinking’ into sustainability”. We need to change our mindset. The time we’re in is an age of disruption – business leaders everywhere are grappling with an even more VUCA world. Despite sky high valuations, no one is sitting comfortably. Taking a business approach to sustainability means thinking smartly and focusing on the weak and strong points in your business that disruption identifies. That’s the way in for sustainability. That means finding ways to be a better partner for growth customers if you’re B2B. Or better ways to identify what a consumer needs next if you’re B2C. In both cases it means looking hard to see how AI might enable new entrants to disrupt your business model. It means understanding where supply chain or operational shocks from the nexus of climate adaptation / water scarcity / energy competition will hit first. It means targeting development programmes and employer brands at the tight band of key skills you’re fighting for in the talent marketplace.

IF YOU COULD RESET SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS, WHAT WOULD YOU EMPHASIZE?

I’d start with boards. Boards need to really understand where their weak and strong points are and – if we’re honest – be fearful enough of the risk, or excited enough about the competitive opportunity – to commit to the investment decisions at scale that will move the needle on sustainability. We need bolder asks from business for firmer government policy to enable the climate transition – but that will only come when boards see how urgent it is that they do that. As Europe’s carbon border adjustment mechanisms kick off, the deforestation and simplified ESG reporting requirements return, and the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and California step up too, can we be more surgical in the next phase of our policy ambitions?

WHAT ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF?

I’ve led major growth strategies in the context of disruption in different sectors across the world. At SABMiller we built what was essentially a $1bn bottom line sustainability value plan responding to trade policy shocks (localising agriculture with new innovative products), water scarcity (protecting watersheds where major volume growth was at risk), changing consumer trends (expanding the portfolio to zero alcohol products, and responding to craft beer with purposeful brands) and addressing energy costs (major energy efficiency savings).

Bringing growth and sustainability together – often through partnerships.

At BT we founded the UK Electric Fleet Alliance with the Climate Group, which saw major companies invest to transition much of their fleets to EVs and ask (with Greenpeace!) for earlier ICE bans to enable the transition. At BT and at Accenture we put in place the right guardrails and cultural awareness that enables the faster innovation needed to take AI and big data opportunities to market. Also at Accenture we looked at how technology can simplify and accelerate sustainability progress through digital twins, geo-spatial sensing and AI. Now I guide the leaders of private equity owned companies to understand how sustainability can help them respond to disruption and better enable growth.

Disruption creates opportunities and ‘putting business thinking into sustainability’ means being ready to exploit those opportunities, very effectively.

The post Andy Wales first appeared on Evermore.