Is corporate sustainability as we know it finally over? Are traditional green business strategies failing to the point that they are doing more harm than good?
Perhaps not entirely. But the growing number of sustainable business leaders calling for a rethink of these measures suggests a tipping point is at hand.
For those of us who have never thought it likely that businesses and the markets that shape them would be enough to fix the gathering menace of climate change, this realisation is overdue.
But it’s not trivial. There may not be enough time to upend capitalism but there is plenty of time for companies to push for markets to be reformed in ways that drive faster climate action.
So it has been a relief to see a rising recognition that the status quo is not working.
Or as Lindsay Hooper and Paul Gilding from the venerable Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership put it in a paper this month, “it is time we questioned the founding ideas and dominant approaches in the corporate sustainability movement”.
The Cambridge university-based institute is a prominent voice in corporate greenery, thanks in part to the backing it has had for most of its 36-year history from its royal conservationist patron, King Charles III.
But as Hooper and Gilding point out, despite years of green corporate pledges, and mushrooming clean tech investments, “the sustainability crisis is deepening”.
Worse, businesses and their sustainability advisers may be adding to the