Why does sustainability matter?
Understand why sustainability is becoming increasingly important for businesses looking to reduce emissions, strengthen ESG performance and improve long-term commercial resilience.
Why climate change matters
Why does climate change matter to our business?
We hear regularly from clients that sustainability is hurting profits and not adding value to their businesses. So why should you care about sustainability?
The simple answer is that climate change matters to everyone, including all industry, and to ignore it is to put your business at risk. This page puts that risk into context.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Thanks to years of observation, theories and model building, scientists know with high confidence that climate change is happening today and is the result of greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.
You can find out more about Climate Change at the Climate Change Committee website here
Consequences of climate change
- Extreme Weather Events: Rising temperatures increase the frequency and severity of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods, putting ecosystems and human life at risk.
- Melting Ice and Sea Level Rise: Polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, causing sea levels to rise and threatening to displace millions in coastal areas.
- Ecological Disruption: Ecosystems are changing rapidly, leading to loss of biodiversity, with many species facing extinction.
- Human Health and Safety: Higher temperatures increase mortality through heatwaves and air pollution-related illnesses, such as respiratory issues and heart disease.
- Threats to Food and Water Security: Changing rainfall patterns and droughts make it harder to grow food, causing crop failures and increasing hunger.
Damage to economic infrastructure
Climate change also impacts directly on economic activity, with potential consequences for industry including:
- Supply Chain Disruptions: Extreme weather such as hurricanes, floods and heatwaves, disrupt transportation and damages factories, breaking down supply chain operations.
- Reduced Labor Productivity: Increasing heat stress causes worker productivity declines, particularly in agriculture, construction, and mining.
- Declining Agricultural Output: Heatwaves, droughts, and changing rainfall patterns degrade land and decrease crop yields, driving up food prices.
- Infrastructure Destruction & Costs: Rising sea levels and natural disasters increase costs for repairs, coastal flooding alone could cost over EUR 1 trillion annually by 2100.
- Resource Scarcity & Energy Risks: Water shortages affect agricultural irrigation and power generation (hydropower), while warming oceans threaten fish stocks.
- Financial Market Volatility: Stranded assets (e.g., coal reserves) and climate-related damage to properties can affect the stability of insurance and financial sectors.
Left unchecked, these consequences would ultimately prevent economic activity, which presents a significant financial and existential risk for all industry. Because economic activity itself contributes significantly to climate change, this in turn increases the risk to its own existence.
Sustainability, therefore, is not just a moral issue, its about risk management and protecting your future. Failure for industry to act on climate change would be self-destructive.
What action is being taken?
In response to this challenge, governments and industry across the globe have taken action to mitigate the damage caused to the environment by economic activity.
Regulations and standards are part of this, and compliance can be a necessity for your business. Not implementing sustainability measures poses real and tangible financial risks.
- Securing investment: Investors see non-compliance as a risk, and therefore sustainability is increasingly required for securing investment.
- Reputational damage: Non-compliant business risk reputational damage, which has real consequences for the bottom line.
- Supply chains: Supply chain partners require compliance to reduce the liability to their own business and reputation.
All of these represent real financial risks to your business, and sustainable compliance is therefore increasingly essential.
Read more about regulations, standards and compliance
What regulations do we need to comply with?
There are a number of different regulations and standards that apply to different industries, sectors, and geographical locations. These include:
- ESG: Environmental, Social, and Governance is a framework used by investors and stakeholders to measure a company’s long-term sustainability, ethical impact, and risk management
- UK SRS: UK’s mandatory framework for corporate reporting on sustainability and climate-related risks and opportunities
- ISO 14064-1: International standard that provides organizations with a structured framework to quantify, monitor, and report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals
- SECR: Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) is a mandatory UK government regulation requiring large companies to disclose energy use and carbon emissions in annual reports.
- ESOS: The Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme requires large enterprises to conduct energy audits every four years to identify reduction opportunities.
- EcoVadis: The world’s largest provider of business sustainability ratings, evaluating companies on environmental, social, and ethical performance to foster supply chain transparency.
How do we comply?
We are here to help you.
We can help you take the following steps to reduce your carbon footprint
- Measure your carbon footprint to establish the level of emissions your business activity produces
- Plan and implement measures to reduce your carbon footprint
- Invest in carbon offsetting or reforestation schemes to offset your carbon footprint
- Set out your sustainability plan and report on the success of your carbon reduction efforts
Enter your details to request a free consultation, and see how we can help you on the road to net zero, and protect your business from risk.
