Shifting the focus from compliance to opportunity

Lara Martini
Oct 21
2 min read

The urgency of the world's interconnected crises requires a fundamental shift in how businesses approach sustainability, moving from mere compliance to a strategy that drives long-term value and growth. This was the central theme of this morning's G17Eco Roundtable on Sustainability and Growth, hosted at our offices TOLI House in London.

The discussion, which included a mix of customers and industry leaders from manufacturing, agrifood, and finance, convened to discuss how to overcome key challenges and accelerate the delivery of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Internalising the True Value of Sustainability

A major point of consensus was the persistent regulatory uncertainty and the need to strengthen the visible rewards, the "carrot", for investing in sustainable practices. While a business focus on long-term value creation requires taking into account environmental, social, governance, and economic factors, the discussion highlighted that fully internalizing the true, often immense, value of nature and externalities remains a challenge, both due to the difficulty of accurately measuring ecosystem services and the intrinsic value of the natural world, and the fact that if accounted for correctly it would often be too high to be accepted.

Discussions reinforced that sustainability is no longer just about GHG management. To drive resilient and sustainable supply chains, businesses must consider a broader range of factors, including the risks posed by:

Participants were critical of traditional off-setting and carbon credits but agreed on the value of in-setting. In-setting focuses on interventions within a company's own value chain to make positive natural impacts, ensuring that investments directly improve the resilience and sustainability of the business and its immediate operations. This approach leverages a company's expertise and influence in its own system to create tangible, verifiable change, rather than relying on external, unrelated projects.

Scaling and Collaboration: The Path to Impact

A significant tension was noted between the success of pilot projects and the ability to act at scale, as well as between the impulse for industry collaboration versus competition.

To manage these challenges, we must improve our ability to:

The path forward requires not just robust data and technology, but a unified purpose to shift the time horizon of business decisions and make real-world impact. We at World Wide Generation, with our Sustainability-as-a-Service platform G17Eco, are committed to providing the integrated tools and data-driven solutions to support changemakers in accelerating this transformation.