Sustainable Business magazine - essential reading for sustainability professionals
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/137958
Interview Sally Uren, Forum for the Future 2/3 start to take flight, notably with greater board-level buy-in. "Today there is a much greater understanding that businesses need to get to grips with these big environment, social and economic issues together as a way of creating value. These sets of issues have moved from the periphery, from being poorly understood, to now driving the business model," she observes. Climate change and resource scarcity trends have been the obvious burning platform here – rising input costs are forcing companies to embrace de-materialisation and look beyond simple resource-efficiency measures. But other mega-trends are starting to emerge and these are becoming increasingly influential – such as the rise of digital, social value, and disruptive innovation. According to Uren, digital platforms are fast knitting social fabrics together, enabling groundswell opinion or movement to accelerate on particular issues. "Consumers aren't yet demanding sustainability, but their awareness of these issues is much greater than it was five or ten years ago because we live in this connected world. I think there could be a way that digital platforms help shift societal norms … what these platforms enable you to do is to create tribes, peerto-peer networking, to create movements where we can normalise this stuff," she explains. Digital is also great at helping to tell – and sell – that sustainability story. Take the horsemeat scandal for example, or the recent tragedy out in Bangladesh where the collapse of a garment factory killed over 1,000 workers. "[Digital] can be the super highway, connecting people to the source, for example showing them where their stuff comes from," says Uren. "Until there's that emotional connection, behaviour won't change and we won't get that societal shift that will enable sustainability to be mainstreamed." Social value is another mega-trend bursting through as organisations look to embed CSR into the heart of their operations. The vogue for strategies such as net positive, cradle-to-cradle and sharing