By Annegrethe Scholtz
Post I in a series where I interview my colleagues at WE Sustainability and other professionals to gain a deeper understanding of the industry.
I'm new here. That's the premise of this series: there are no silly questions! I'm going to ask my colleagues all the uncertainties beginners have and share what I learn along the way.
I decided to start at the very beginning: what is sustainability? I sat down with Jonathan Weimers, the founder of WE Sustainability, to begin my quest for knowledge. What does "corporate sustainability" mean?
"Sustainability is the very foundation of making things keep working."
I've generally heard people use CSI, ESG, and sustainability interchangeably and I'd like to set the record straight. From what I gathered the core difference lies in the time horizon and mechanism.
CSI, or Corporate Social Investment, generally involves giving back. Painting a school, building a vegetable garden, packing food parcels. These initiatives have marked a deliberate turn to contribute to social development and have achieved wonderful and necessary outcomes.
The only caution, however, is that these initiatives are comparatively short-term by design. They often don't leave behind a system that keeps running once the programme ends.
ESG opens the approach to corporate responsibility into three areas: Environmental (the ecosystems everything else depends on), Social (how an organisation gives back to its communities and employees), and Governance (how things are managed so that, for example, fraud and corruption don't take root).
ESG looks at problems through an investor's lens. It's the world of rating agencies, sustainable finance, responsible investment, essentially using capital to shift behaviour.
The goal usually includes a return. However, ESG does have a blind spot. Since it's anchored to returns, it can be reluctant to make riskier moves or challenge a profitable status quo. Imagine an initiative that cleans up a river.
If it runs on donor funding, it is permanently one crisis away from collapse. A pandemic, a downturn, a change in government, a funder whose profits dry up.
But if it was designed from the start to generate its own revenue, it's self-sustaining. Sustainability in the purest sense is systems-first. It asks how you could change the underlying patterns, behaviours and mental models that made the system unsustainable in the first place.
It doesn't necessarily start from return on investment. Yet, the complexity of this approach can make it challenging to implement. Ultimately, corporate sustainability is about making sure an initiative, company, or project can be sustained into the future and adapt to the complexities of the world. We need all three of these approaches to be working together to build a better collective future.
Why should a business be sustainable?
"It's actually a no-brainer. It's insane to not allocate budget for sustainability."
I'll avoid the temptation of deep diving into the moral argument of what we owe one another, nature, the past and future generations. Instead, assuming that the business case may be more convincing, sustainability often comes down to operational maths.
Take a delivery fleet: electric trucks versus combustion. The sustainable option costs more upfront; it almost always does. But then you start using it. Maintenance is significantly cheaper. Charging is cheaper than diesel, even off a public charger.
So, the gap narrows over the life of the asset, and eventually it inverts. The point at which that happens has moved much closer in recent years as the technology has improved. At this point the CFO isn't defending a cost, they're reporting a saving, one that happens to have cut noise pollution, air pollution and environmental degradation on the way.
Not every business has an electric vehicle shaped win available though, and the sums look very different for a small business. What struck me is that Jonathan's answer to that isn't to spend more, it's to reach out.
Approaching suppliers and vendors to ask what's possible is often where the better and more sustainable deals are. The same applies to expertise. The thing standing between a business and a viable idea is sometimes just a conversation that hasn't happened yet.
The answer to "Why should I?" isn't only about obligation. A business needs customers who can afford to buy and communities that aren't in crisis; it needs energy it can pay for and materials it can still source in twenty years.
Sustainability isn't a cost you accept on principle. It's what keeps the thing you're running able to keep running.
