Heading into Climate Week in NYC this year, I was reflecting on the many signals we continue to receive related to the manner in which we are overshooting planetary boundaries (see last month’s post) and the obvious, overdue need for a breakthrough to accelerate greater collaborative action on food waste reduction, climate change, and the SDG agenda.
Specific to the climate challenge, I recalled the comments of UN Secretary General Guterres in late July which provided the perfect framing for the event: “The verdict is clear: the climate crisis is in overdrive” and “the planet is heating faster than our response.”
Yet despite all of the positive energy and interactions around the events in New York, I emerged with one major takeaway: we need a reframe of the business case for sustainability, and Nature deserves greater focus.
Throughout the week I often heard the somewhat robotic refrain that “we must prove the business case for sustainability.” Further, specific to the food waste sector, technical solutions providers were reminded that it was essential to “lead with and emphasize the financial case” in communications with food system organizations and cautioned to avoid devoting too much time to the environmental and social benefits of their products.
To be clear, I get it. I don’t dispute the importance of the financial case. Business organizations require positive returns on investments in order to scale them. Investments in sustainability solutions, such as food waste reduction or emissions reduction, are no exception.
Let me also add that this fixation with “making the business case” is not new.
But what disturbs me is the degree to which the fixation on the financial element has increased in recent years. And I find the rote nature in which these comments are tossed out at public events to be highly disturbing given the clear impact of climate change today coupled with slower-than-needed progress on global food waste reduction and the overall SDG agenda.
There is something very wrong when the environmental and social benefits of critically needed sustainability solutions barely receive mention or are viewed as a minor supplemental nice-to-have.
Worse, in today’s environment of backlash, there’s a seeming hesitancy among many organizations to mention (let alone advocate strongly for) the environmental and social benefits of sustainability solutions, perpetuating a growing mindset where 1) the only thing that seemingly matters is the financial return, and 2) keeping sustainability initiatives “under the radar” is advisable.
This is nonsensical.
In a world where we are receiving continued and very serious signals of planetary and humanitarian imbalance (excessive heat, drought and massive wildfires, warming oceans, glacial collapse, excessive food waste, high food insecurity), how can we not prioritize and extol the environmental and social benefits of such solutions?
Making the business case for sustainability initiatives strictly about financial return and omitting consideration of the environmental and social benefits is ludicrous, and dangerous – it signals a callous disregard for people and planet that humanity cannot afford.
Signals for change, impacts on business
We are all receiving highly visible signals of emissions-driven warming in the form of extreme heat, drought, wildfires, ocean warming, melting sea ice, floods, and collapsing glaciers.
Just look at Europe, which was ravaged by the impacts of climate change this summer – with major disruptions to business operations across multiple sectors as covered in a powerful piece from The Wall Street Journal at the end of August. The title, The Summer That Scorched French Grapes, English Gardens – and Europe’s Economy, says it all.
The authors cited the series of heat waves that set temperature records across the continent, drought conditions that led to battered crops and low river levels, and massive wildfires that devastated acreage across France and Spain.
Extreme heat events drove multiple closures of schools, subways, hospitals, and businesses, resulting in the loss of needed services and reduced production of goods. Low water levels disrupted the flow of commerce as well as tourism via river cruises. Drought conditions resulted in stunted vegetables and reduced milk production. Wine producers lost portions of their grapes due to high temperatures; others incurred significant costs for emergency watering measures. Timber operations in southwestern France were upended by a fire that burned more than 100,000 acres and ten million trees.
Given all of these impacts, the authors correctly noted that “The shifting climate will transform business as usual for governments, companies, farmers and ordinary people.”
They added that this summer’s record heat could add 1-2 percentage points to food inflation while reducing euro-area GDP growth in the third quarter by .2 percentage points. Further, citing the link between higher temperatures and reduced worker productivity, they estimated that continued warming could result in GDP reduction of 5% to 7% (or $240 billion) by 2030 in vulnerable countries like France.
Last, another recent piece from the WSJ (Wealthy Europeans Are Moving North as Temperatures Climb) described how many individuals are reacting to the hotter conditions in southern Europe and moving to northern locations. Such movement has clear implications for business operations – both in terms of workforce availability and customer base.
So the business impacts are quite clear. Business leaders who aren’t aggressively working to embrace climate change and other broad sustainability initiatives (ex. waste reduction) are doing their shareholders (and broader ecosystem stakeholders) a disservice.
In the narrowest view, responsible business governance demands sustainability investments for risk mitigation and resilience, but humanity deserves much more from business leaders – and that’s what we should expect and demand.
Recognizing the disconnect, thinking “What if?”
Coming into Climate Week I was also reflecting on the disconnect between the gravity of the climate and related SDG challenges and the pace of collaborative global action to address them.
Three recent publications should provide a wake-up call to business leaders (along with policymakers) to help reframe their thinking on the business case for sustainability.
First, and critically, the recent 2026 Planetary Health Check report highlighted that seven of nine planetary boundaries (including climate change, change in biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, modification of biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, and introduction of novel entities) are transgressed – and the trends for all seven of these boundaries are moving in the wrong direction.
The report noted that the consequences of humanity’s ability to alter planetary conditions are becoming increasingly visible. Along with the many destructive impacts of global warming mentioned above, the authors warned that “biodiversity continues to decline, freshwater systems are increasingly disrupted, pollution is accumulating across land and ocean, and nutrient overload is degrading ecosystems and water quality.”
Further, weakened land carbon sinks could become sources of carbon in the future, thus accelerating warming.
These impacts are not abstract, they are highly visible.
In addition, the authors stated that “the farther and longer we move beyond the boundaries, the greater the risk of large-scale and potentially irreversible Earth-system change” and that the window for corrective action is closing rapidly.
Second, on the urgency theme, I was also struck by a recent piece in The Economist entitled “The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change.” In it, Tim Palmer of the University of Oxford explored the possible causes of the persistent high-pressure system (anticyclone) that brought extreme heat and drought to Europe this summer. Palmer noted that if this summer’s anticyclone was made more likely due to climate change, and climate change is affecting circulation patterns (including the jet streams), then “it is possible that we may shortly pass a kind of tipping point where the dynamical effects of climate change have become so strong that persistent anticyclones will soon become overwhelmingly likely each and every summer.”
He added that in this scenario, we “do not have the luxury of adapting to the new climate normal in the coming decade or two.” We must instead adapt immediately.
In my view, this raises a critically important “what if” theme for business leaders to consider. What if the negative impacts of climate change and the other planetary breaches are occurring faster and with greater intensity than we understand today? And what if the irreversible nature of the tipping points associated with them is more dire than expected?
Given the enormous complexity of these major Earth systems and the speed and scale of human impacts on them, the possibility of future scenarios that are considerably worse than current forecasts doesn’t seem unrealistic.
As an example, just over two years ago The New York Times reported that a collapse of the Amazon could be coming faster than expected, citing a paper (Critical transitions in the Amazon forest system) published in the journal Nature. In it, the authors investigated the drivers of water stress and the related critical thresholds of those drivers that could result in various levels of collapse. They estimated that “by 2050, 10% to 47% of Amazonian forests will be exposed to compounding disturbances that may trigger unexpected ecosystem transitions and potentially exacerbate regional climate change.” They also noted that the complexity of the Amazon “adds uncertainty about future dynamics, but also reveals opportunities for action.”
These (and many other) reports indicate that business leaders should be focusing on the gravity of climate change and SDG challenges and how they threaten their business, how their operations contribute to them, and how they can lead positive change to address them through their business models. They should also be asking: what if the negative impacts of climate change and other planetary breaches are occurring faster, and with greater intensity, than currently estimated?
Reframing the business case
We have all of the signals that we need to reframe the business case for sustainability.
Yet in my view, we are stuck in an environment where too many business leaders spend too much time focused solely on the financial element of sustainability initiatives while also setting overly high bars and proof points in the name of validating the business case, which in turn hinders the needed aggressive implementation.
To some leaders, the perceived risk of embracing sustainability initiatives outweighs the safer course of business as usual, making it easy for them to continually spout the need to prove the financial case for sustainability initiatives at public events because it is a safe talking point that doesn’t draw challenge.
Again, we can no longer afford this kind of thinking.
And frankly, I’m exhausted by the exhaustive case for making the business case for sustainability.
In the food sector, many organizations have long cited the business (i.e. financial) case argument along with inflated liability fears to avoid even the most basic sustainability-focused effort for optimizing the use of excess food resources – donation to organizations serving those in need.
In a world where we are receiving continual signals with escalating severity of the dangers of breaching multiple planetary boundaries while roughly 700 million global citizens remain hungry, we should be appalled at the narrowness of such thinking.
We must reframe the business case for sustainability to include environmental and social considerations.
Second, while we reframe the business case, Nature deserves greater consideration. The business organizations that so easily set high proof points for sustainability investments in the name of the business case should take a step back and consider the source of their resource inputs – Nature.
All businesses are fundamentally based on inputs from Nature, and in the absence of true cost accounting, they are not paying for the externalities that they inflict on the planet through their operations. We are seeing the impact today in terms of overshoot conditions.
It’s also worth noting that the consequences of these externalities may well preclude their businesses from being able to operate in the future.
Three years ago I attended an event in Italy featuring several hundred food vendors from all regions of the country. I was pleasantly surprised at how biodiversity was continually mentioned in my conversations with many of them – the importance of protecting animal life and soil health was extremely natural.
Yet while in New York for Climate Week, I heard multiple references to the financial case, but little regarding biodiversity and Nature.
I was struck by that contrast, especially given that business leaders have a vested interest in a healthy planet from both a resource and consumer standpoint.
The environmental and social components are part of the business case and must be taken into consideration, not only because of the obvious moral considerations for society, but because business organizations cannot operate without a sustainable resource base, a livable environment, and a healthy population (workforce and consumer).
As I wrapped up my Climate Week events and headed to my train, I walked down a side street where a construction crew was doing underground street repairs, drawing on a huge stack of massive wooden beams. I was struck by how many trees were undoubtedly required to complete a job that none of us really “see” but which occurs constantly in cities around the globe.
And further down the street, I came across massive piles of trash awaiting pick-up for disposal to some distant landfill.
These observations reminded me that all of the resource inputs used by business operations emanate from Nature, and all of the “waste” from those operations returns to Nature.
On that theme, the recent “Prepared for the Predictable?” report from the Global Footprint Network pointed to the importance of Nature for business operations, noting:
“Take almost anything around you right now: the chair you’re sitting on, the phone in your pocket, the food in your fridge. Trace these things back far enough, and they have the same roots: they came from somewhere physical. Metals mined from the ground. Water and cropland. Fossil fuels burned to move and shape things. Timber extracted from forests. No idea, patent, or dataset can skip that step. Knowledge only becomes functional once it is matched with physical resources from the Earth. Nothing works without physical input.”
Yet despite their importance, the authors went on to note that resources are barely mentioned in discussions of the economy; they are a blind spot that is increasingly dangerous to ignore in a world of overshoot.
So while we are reframing the business case for sustainability initiatives, we must include greater focus on preserving Nature and the resources that sustain us.
We are well past time for a reframe of the business case for sustainability.
Responsible leaders, particularly those in the highly impactful food sector, should be embracing environmental and social considerations in addition to the financial element. Humanity matters. Nature matters. The health of people and planet, and business contributions to both, should be central to business decisions – not an afterthought.
