Join SPRG – the business sustainability group for professionals

TBC | Thurs 8th May 2025

TBC | Thurs 12th June 2025

ESG Backlash – what are we seeing, and what matters? | 13th March 2025

Recent months have seen some push back against ESG / sustainability policies, with shifts in company commitments and government attitudes.

Some key aspects include:

• The US government exiting the Paris Agreement and rolling back many environmental regulations
• Some major investors leaving the Climate Action 100+ initiative
• Political push back in the EU leading to suggestions that sustainability regulations and reporting burdens may be relaxed
• Concerns that stringent ESG regulations are putting European businesses at competitive and valuation disadvantages compared to US peers.

However, the overall picture is mixed. Despite the political noise it also appears that the capacity of sustainability issues to present strategic risks and opportunities is still largely recognised by companies and investors. The push back appears greatest in the US (and perhaps emerging markets), less pronounced but still evident in Europe, and perhaps least evident on the UK.

In this session we looked at:

• some of the key trends and drivers
• Shared what’s happening for different roles and organisations
• Considered what’s important for companies and sustainability professionals.

Setting Long-Term Targets for Sustainability | 13th February 2025

Setting – and importantly, declaring – long-term targets has always been a critical component of sustainability/ESG strategy and management.

These targets, typically set 5-10 years in advance, or even longer for climate commitments, allow companies to align with global frameworks such as Net Zero goals or SDGs and provide the scaffold for planning and implementation plans.

Long-term sustainability targets are important for several reasons, they:

• help demonstrate commitment
• provide a strategic framework for targeting effort and planning
• help tackle issues that extend beyond conventional planning cycles
• focus strategic priorities and drive innovation
• reduce risks and help build long-term value

However, developing and setting long-term targets can be complex, both technically and in terms of the organisational change required for them to be delivered.

In this session we looked at:

• The place of long-term targets in strategy and sustainable transition
• Some useful strategies that help break down the task of target setting into logical steps
• Where organisations often go wrong and the key things you need to get right.

The role of sustainability professionals in preventing greenwashing | 23rd January 2025

Much greenwashing is often the result of overenthusiastic or poorly informed marketeers. However, a significant amount arises from far more fundamental strategic challenges.

While sustainability initiatives such as SBTi seek to place sustainability intentions and action in the contextual of global performance trajectories, much activity is still focused upon incremental improvements to business as usual. For example, we have recently seen companies seek to claim that products using a proportion of recycled materials is ‘sustainable resource use’ when the primary material used is oil based.

So, this month we looked at:

• Integration of sustainability strategy with business strategy – aligning sustainability goals with overall business objectives and pursuing real impact reductions.
• Developing capacity and capability to measure and report sustainability performance on material issues – ensuring that a realistic picture of performance is used to inform management decisions and underpin disclosure.
• Build knowledge and capabilities – in wider teams, especially customer facing functions such as brand, marketing and sales.

Solving Sustainable Business Challenges | 14th November 2024

Navigating the ever-evolving landscape of sustainability can be challenging. With economic uncertainties, global political shifts, and some resistance to ESG initiatives, staying ahead is more crucial than ever. Regulatory demands like CSRD are also increasing, consuming significant time and resources.

In this special interactive session we:

• Identified and discussed the pressing challenges faced by professionals and organisations.
• Explored practical solutions and strategies to overcome these obstacles.

Sustainability and Business Value | 10th October 2024

In recent years, the adoption of sustainability and ESG approaches has become more widespread. However, much of this activity remains superficial, with many targets and KPIs focused on activity indicators rather than actual performance. Over the past 25+ years of advising companies, we have consistently encountered the challenge of integrating sustainability into strategic relevance.

While regulation and reporting are crucial, the increasing complexity of disclosure requirements and broad ESG mandates can divert attention from the broader impacts and strategic direction of the business. Reducing impacts is essential for a sustainable future, but it’s not just about reduction. Viewing sustainability through the lenses of compliance, restriction, and reduction can hinder long-term value creation.

In our work, we have identified several areas where companies’ focus or efforts can be ineffective:

• Strategy: sustainability strategy is not integrated into the overall business strategy.
• Peripheral Activities: time, money, and effort are invested in less effective areas.
• Reactive Approaches: policies and actions follow legal and customer requirements rather than the company’s purpose.
• Integration: sustainability-related issues are not fully integrated into enterprise risk functions, remaining peripheral activities focused on shallow, incremental responses.

These approaches fail to address the main aspects of long-term risk and opportunity, ignoring the possibilities and benefits of sustainable value creation.

On October 10th, we discussed:

• How sustainability relates to the major dimensions of business value.
• How other companies understand and communicate this relationship.
• Where the organisations you have worked for have found value – or struggled to do so.

Sustainability strategy is one of our core areas of expertise, and we shared some of the most valuable insights we have learned over the last 20 years in helping businesses and non-profits pursue their objectives.

Navigating New Sustainability Disclosure Requirements | 12th September 2024

Sustainability disclosure (including formal reports, regulatory information provision, investor and sustainability rating requests) has been with us for quite a while, but it is growing in both importance and complexity.

The recent developments of the European Regulation CSRD, the release of the IFRS’s ISSB (International Sustainability Standards Board) Disclosure Standards and the United States SEC climate disclosure requirements have meant that sustainability disclosure is not just the province of sustainability professionals, but a topic that requires the involvement of organisational leadership, together with functions from across businesses.

But the picture remains complicated, which standards must or should you report to, how do you navigate the complexity and how can you ensure the right information, in the right way to the right audiences?

In our session on the 12^th September we were honoured to welcome Lois Guthrie, an expert in the disclosure space to help us identify effective disclosure practices.

Lois took a look at the new requirements, their commonalities and differences and identified the fundamental elements that are required to ensure good practice, including:

• Understanding the sustainability disclosure landscape.
• Implications for company processes and practices.
• Meaning and sense-making: ensuring meaningful narrative.

Sustainable Transition | 13th June 2024

Extending the theme of sustainability strategy from our May meeting, in June we focused on the topic of sustainable transition – how organisations articulate, plan and undertake the journey from where they are now to where they need to be in the future.

A key element to transition strategies, whether they focus on achieving net zero goals, or wider sustainable business transformation, is that they may require significant changes to business as usual.

In some areas, this might mean changing activities the organisation undertakes, because there aren’t ways of doing the same things with radically different impacts.

In this session, we looked at what good practice should look like and highlighted what companies are saying and doing in reality, including:

• What sustainable transition means.
• How best practice currently defines and guides transitions.
• Highlighting some of the fundamental challenges and hard questions that need to be tackled.

Building Sustainability Strategy | 9th May 2024

If your organisation doesn’t have an up-to-date, relevant and integrated sustainability strategy then it’s open to multiple risks and decreases your chances of making the most out of possible opportunities.

Many organisations have acted on different aspects of sustainability/ESG, perhaps on climate, waste, raw materials, or employee engagement. However, some haven’t managed to move beyond largely ad hoc or reactive responses towards integrated, objective-driven approaches.

That’s where good strategy comes in. At its heart it is very simple, you are looking to understand your context and situation, your aims and objectives and develop plans for how you will increase your chances of being successful in executing them.

Because getting the direction, focus and priorities right is so important to overall effectiveness, in this session we looked at:

> What does strategy really mean – cutting through the fog of jargon

> The key components of sustainable business strategy – and what’s often overlooked or missing

> The things you really need to get right – and where people often go wrong.

Sustainability communication - Tensions and challenges in communicating sustainability/ESG | 11th April 2024

Leading practice in sustainability requires a mixture of consistent internal and external communication to different audiences to meet different objectives and expectations.

The demand continues to grow, there has never been a greater need to both explain your approach and describe your performance.

In this session we explored some of the main challenges in developing and producing sustainability communications and asked:

• Do you have a strong narrative about sustainability/ESG for your organisation?
• What are the challenges in producing timely, accurate and meaningful messages and content?
• .. and we will explore what tensions and obstacles need to be overcome and how they can be effectively tackled.

Double Materiality - Doubly Difficult? The key steps and what you need to get right | 14th March 2024

Materiality assessment is central to a complete approach to ESG/sustainability, it demonstrates that you have thoroughly analysed and prioritised the social and environmental issues that represent impacts, risks and opportunities for you and your stakeholders.

Recent developments in ESG/sustainability disclosure have now placed what is called ‘Double Materiality’ at the heart of their approaches – is this different or just a new way of describing a familiar process?

Double Materiality is a requirement of voluntary guidance for sustainability management and reporting (GRI) and also the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive’s European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).

Like many things in sustainability, materiality can be a source of confusion and raises questions like ‘just how different is Double Materiality to what many of us may have been doing for years?’.

What do the regulations require and what are the implications for your business and customers?

In this session we explored these questions and discussed:

• Why a (double) material approach is vital in good practice
• How to avoid the common pitfalls when assessing materiality
• What you really need to get right.

What’s the relevance of ethics to your business, and how do they manifest? | 8th February 2024

Business ethics are a key part of organisational sustainability. They refer to the integration of ethical values and their translation into the behaviour and performance of an organisation and its employees.

Frequently, organisations are criticised because they either fail to live their values or do not share the values of those who criticise them. But there’s a huge challenge in navigating these issues – whose ethics are ‘right’?

In this session, we discussed:

• The gaps between ethics in theory and in practice – most companies have statements of their values, but can they demonstrate how these drive decisions and outcomes in practice?
• Whose ethics are your ethics? – navigating internal and external pressures.
• What are the ethical challenges that your organisation has faced, and how were they dealt with?
• How do you set boundaries for ethical behaviour – and ensure they are followed?