How To Sell Sustainability To The Board: Make It About Resilience And Competitiveness
Despite the backlash, companies still value sustainability skills, says the head of education at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership
As corporate budgets tighten and sustainability loses political favour, businesses would be forgiven for thinking that green skills are in lower demand.
But this assumption would be a mistake, Meredith Odgers, director of the educational programme at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, tells Sustainable Views.
The transition is happening and businesses can either choose to play a leadership role in shaping the future or risk getting left behind, she argues.
However, the context has become more challenging. Sustainability teams are required to make a business case to the board for why their work is valuable in the face of economic constraints and sustainability backlash, led by the US, she adds.
“The green economy will be worth $7tn annually by 2030 . . . but if we don’t have people in leadership positions to shape that future and to shape the global talent pipeline, it is going to slow down,” says Odgers.
She says future-thinking companies understand that sustainability must be part of the “core business strategy” to ensure resilience and “long-term value creation”.
“A lot of sustainability teams have been set up traditionally from a business operations perspective,” focused on taking existing ways of doing things and making them more green or reducing their carbon intensity, says Odgers.
Companies can adapt to the current political climate by embedding sustainability principles such as the circular economy or nature preservation into all parts of the business, from research and development to customer servicing, she argues.
Showing that sustainability offers a more resilient or efficient business model, rather than being an added extra, makes it easier to sell to the board and get the necessary funding, she adds.
Odgers sees the insurance sector as an example of how sustainability is being framed as a risk issue. With climate change-induced weather events making it harder for households and businesses to get insurance, the industry is being forced to bring sustainability considerations into everyday business decisions.
CISL research published this month found a growing number of global insurers are conducting and disclosing double materiality assessments to manage climate risks.
‘Brave’ companies
Greenhushing, the corporate practice of deliberately staying quiet about sustainability programmes or achievements, is “real”, says Odgers. “It is hard to have a brave voice in a market where the voice of the opposition can sometimes seem stronger.”
But those businesses that speak about their sustainability success stories play an important role in offering examples of best practices for other companies to emulate, she says.
One way that companies can overcome some of the perceived risk associated with being open about green initiatives is by acting together and having a “collective voice” through industry associations or joint statements, she adds.
Another issue business faces is that “the pace of market growth in the green economy [is] outstripping the pace of training and upskilling”, says Odgers.
CISL, along with partners at the British Standards Institution, has launched a leadership training programme focused on helping companies to create “real-economy value”, competitiveness and “resilience against future uncertainty”.
The UK government has adopted measures to boost green skills in the clean energy and construction sectors, but not to enable more jobs in the wider corporate sustainability sphere, despite ambitions to make the UK the world’s leading centre for green finance.
Asia and Middle East push ahead
Global businesses should also be aware that the political mood of delay is not international, warns Odgers.
While the US is “stuck” and Europe embarks on a series of regulatory rollbacks, other regions are pushing ahead. Asia-Pacific and the Middle East are “shaping their own regulation and markets”, she says, challenging Europe’s historical position at the forefront of sustainability.
In 2025, the Sustainability Standards Board of Japan unveiled ISSB-linked disclosure standards for listed companies. Meanwhile, China issued its first climate standard in December as it seeks to establish a national disclosure system by the end of the decade.
Clean energy expansion is also continuing apace across the Middle East and north Africa.
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