Trends shmends

Some of the trendiest terms in business right now: Sustainability; Circular economy; Regeneration; Carbon neutral; and ESG.

ESG stands for environmental, social and governance – it’s a measure of an organisation’s performance in various areas including things like ethics, sustainability, and so on.

The great thing about it is that it’s a super popular term which puts it on the radar of people who need to know about it. It’s also a mandatory reporting requirement for companies over a certain size.

The sad thing is that it can be equal parts useful and harmful. This article explains how companies who record high ESG scores often aren’t doing anything better than companies who ignore ESG completely.

In other words, a high ESG score often still equates to being a terrible polluter.

The researchers in the article even tried applying just the environmental score (without the social and governance) to give the orgs the best chance of “scoring” a good performance overall, but here’s the knockout quote:

On average, social and governance scores more than completely reversed the carbon reduction objective.

Here’s my point

You can jump through all the hoops, tick all the boxes, follow the trends, complete the required reports, and still make zero progress on your climate impact. Even make it worse (!?).

Climate action isn’t a chess board where you simply move pieces around to win.

The whole point of having ESG and the rest of it, is to minimise the impact our business activities have on the climate.

To bang a drum from a few weeks ago: if your bbq is on fire, diversions and distractions don’t reverse the impact – putting out the fire is the only thing that stops it.

Here are a bunch of fires you can put out pretty much right away.