Climate & Sustainability
Why Climate & Sustainability Research
That the world is currently changing at an increasingly rapid pace, is a well known fact, also that it is driven by “mega trends” from deepening globalization, large scale population trends, accelerating technological progress, the “consumer,” the corporate social responsibility imperative and growing political uncertainty. These trends are creating a sense of urgency around focusing on both climate and sustainability, forcing companies to innovate and refine everything from their strategy, business models as well as their operating model.
Since 2007, the Global University Alliance members have researched, compared, analyzed and developed Best Practices, Industry Practices and LEADing Practices around climate and sustainability concepts. Our last analysis of 2018 revealed that an astonishing 93 percent of global CEO’s surveyed believe that climate and sustainability is critical to the future success of their companies. Close to 90 percent of these organizations believe that climate and sustainability practices would be a key ingredient in helping them in the future to differentiate themselves in the market. But most of these executives added that concerns over an integrated climate and sustainability approach led them to difficulties of a longer term development and deployment. So while climate and sustainability is not a new subject anymore, but rather a mature subject, many organizations still struggle to implement the concepts across the organization.
Our analysis revealed that this is due to the complexity of the subject, and that they don’t know how they can incorporate climate and sustainability into their business model, link climate and sustainability to their strategy, develop the right performance measures and incorporate it into their operations. Many countries and organizations are struggling to identify with the “what”, “how” and “where” they can make a change.
