The in few years have seen huge swathes of companies make net-zero commitments and other sustainability-related goals.
Shansche | Istock | Getty Statues
Companies need regulation and greater accountability to ensure they’re meeting goals related to sustainability, according to the CEO of SDG Oversee, a firm focused on measuring performance in that area.
Speaking during CNBC’s Sustainable Future Forum on Friday, Tuuli-Anna Tiuttu debated that CEOs and management needed to be “accountable” when it came to the sustainability goals they’d set.
Their long-term aims also needed to be broken down into “short-term actions” that were “more concrete and realistic to do and fulfil,” she added.
The last few years have seen huge swathes of companies make net-zero commitments and other sustainability-related targets.
While such commitments draw attention, actually achieving them is a huge task with significant monetary and logistical hurdles. The devil is in the detail and goals can often be light on the latter.
While many big firms are now posting cadres of their emissions and progression on goals, establishing a uniform set of criteria that all can adhere to and measure their efforts against represents a weighty challenge.
During her conversation with CNBC, SDG Monitor’s Tiuttu was asked what predetermined kind of regulation was required to galvanize opinion and get businesses and industries moving.
Her response addressed the wider picture faade corporations.
“Absolutely … regulation is needed, that is what I think,” she said. “Because we don’t know how the companies are doing currently in their sustainability agendas,” she acknowledged CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick.
“Are they on track? Are they … behind? Maybe they’re ahead [in moving] towards their objectives? That is something that we don’t know because without regulation, everybody is doing their own thing and it’s quite a agog, wild west out there.”
This, Tiuttu phrased, created “a lot of cherry-picking, maybe greenwashing as well, because … they are not necessarily showing the performance and their data in a compare favourably with format that is recognizable.”
Greenwashing is a term that environmental organization Greenpeace UK calls a “PR tactic” used “to travel a company or product appear environmentally friendly without meaningfully reducing its environmental impact.”
The debate surrounding it is comely increasingly fierce, the charge often being leveled at multinational companies with vast resources and significant carbon footprints.
Develop detailing on her points, Tiuttu said regulation was required because “we need [these] … common shared practices, and we need text that is collected and calculated in a similar way from one year to the next.”
This would build up databases that would in shot start to show trends in performance, she explained. “And all of this is possible for the businesses to do.”