Sustainability and the new normal

Over the past few weeks, as we’ve wrestled with making near-term adjustments to our lives, my team and I have been trying to understand what changes may result in longer-term alterations of societal and organizational behavior in the wake of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak. I’ve drafted the following to outline a few changes that will resonate well beyond this current stage of acute stress, and influence how companies and government bodies operate. The outcome will significantly impact whether or not we succeed in accomplishing the many urgent targets outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

And why are the SDGs relevant in this context? If we look at problems like public health in a vacuum, they may seem disconnected from the topic of sustainability. That thinking stems, in part, from inconsistent definitions of sustainability that are also often quite narrow, solely being limited to topics such as corporate reporting or climate change. Another contributor to this disconnect is the common tendency to treat individual problems as discrete and independent from other elements of complex adaptive systems in which they exist. In reality, the types of challenges outlined in each SDG are interdependent of many other SDGs. Challenges related to environmental degradation, climate change, and resource depletion are inextricably tied to human development, education, and inequality. All of these challenges are woven, in one form or another, into public health and how we tackle large-scale problems like the current pandemic.

Each of the items below are potential paths or pivot points, which dictate whether the many systems we rely on will evolve in ways that regenerate or deplete our environmental resources and communities. Here are a few headlines that will likely to be prominent as the impacts of the pandemic continue to unfold:

Supply Chain (In)visibility

This has been a time that we are acutely aware of the things on which we rely, and often take for granted. Many people haven’t thought much about the anodyne topic of supply chains for rubber gloves and protective masks, but we certainly do now. Many businesses that may have felt a relative sense of security and control over their supply chains, now feel that the scale and complexity of these chains are greater than they originally understood. This sudden shock of realization will lead companies in a number of directions. Some companies will adopt fairly radical changes, including increasing local production and investing in increased capacity or redundancy (as opposed to just-in-time production), automation, or distribution production techniques such as 3-D printing of key products or components. Other companies will maintain similar supply chain models, but will strengthen their due diligence practices to better understand their exposure to supplier capacity and quality issues, security threats, social and environmental impacts, and overall business continuity practices. This will require strong management systems, risk intelligence, scalable technology, and skills to better engage suppliers to understand and manage risk further upstream.

Resilience Pivots from Concept to Practice

Several years ago, BSI authored the world’s first standard on organizational resilience (BS65000). Although the standard was designed as a framework to understand and manage resilience, many people continued to struggle to understand such a large-scale, crossdisciplinary,and seemingly ambiguous topic. The pandemic has cast stark illumination on both effective and dangerously ineffective organizational practices. Exemplars include a Texas grocer that is running pandemic simulations and US government organizations that are rapidly deploying the build-out of temporary hospitals at scale. In the aftermath of the response, stronger organizations will take a sober look at their practices, and begin to develop their organizational practices, physical infrastructure, and human capital to better predict and respond to future risks. BSI is currently partnering with our clients to develop programs, risk models, skills development, and assessment of effectiveness in each of these areas so that when the next pandemic, cyberattack, or climate related risk happens, they are better prepared to respond.

Infrastructure Turnover (Physical & Behavioral)

The response to COVID-19 may lead us in a number of directions. One option is to pour significant capital into markets simply to keep the status quo afloat. As we know, that status quo does not lead to reduced inequality, material circularity, or meeting our 1.5 degree Celsius climate target. The other path deploys that enormous and rare funding opportunity to invest in the necessary infrastructure to reduce waste, strengthen resiliency, and transition from a carbon economy. Not only does that investment need to be into physical infrastructure, but also into education, human development, and the individual and organizational skills to support the behavioral changes that will enable advancement of the SDGs.

What Are We Measuring?

The global economy’s success has been long measured across a range of topics with blunt instruments, such as GDP and quarterly returns, despite a dramatic evolution in potential measurement tools (e.g. computing power, satellite imagery, etc.). These traditional measurements have failed us in managing both this current COVID-19 pandemic and in protecting our environmental resources. Investors and insurers have only recently stepped up their demands of the business community in relation to sustainability impacts and continuity practices. BSI works with our clients on issues ranging from relatively simple environmental accounting to more challenging accounting of Scope 3 emissions in order to understand all of an organizations’ costs - before regulators eventually catch up to force companies to account for them.

Cities React Fast

Even before the pandemic response, cities had become a crucible for experimentation in relation to resilience and sustainability. During the pandemic response, cities have demonstrated a similar ability to rapidly react to immediate constituent needs and make confident decisions about social distancing, especially when compared to lumbering federal bureaucracies beholden to a much wider range of stakeholders. Cities have a disproportionate impact from a sustainability perspective, for good or for ill, and when they effectively leverage economies of scale and public transportation networks in distributing essential environmental and community services, hold the potential to reduce GHG emissions and drive innovation and economic development. BSI’s work in this area leverages our experience in shaping the ISO 37101 standard on Sustainable Cities & Communities, which accounts for aspects such as resilience, responsible resource use, and social cohesion, among others. Look to cities to continue to pilot and adopt more innovative approaches to resiliency and sustainable development.

So how do we accelerate the modest progress we’ve made thus far in advancing the SDGs, and how do we define a new normal that supports regenerative systems and sustainable ways of working and living? Large-scale systems in which business and government operate will of course need to play a role. The business, finance, and insurance communities will need to continue to evolve their understanding of value. Sustainable practices strengthen long-term shareholder value and organizational resilience – full stop. The government has a role to play in aligning incentives with that evolved understanding of value, and through funding jobs focused on rebuilding our infrastructure to support the transition toward lower-impact forms of energy and transportation.

In order for those actors to adopt these changes, each one of us must channel both the collective wisdom and frustration of this experience to push entrenched centers of power to use this opportunity to act with both empathy and fearlessness. We have been forced to slow down, to appreciate the chirping of the birds and the importance of real human relationships. We’re learning that we can survive without overconsumption of limited resources in the name of infinite growth. We’re realizing that systems that don’t effectively support stakeholder needs can be bad for some when things are going well, but are simply broken when things don’t go so well. Things that seemed weird not so long ago, like distance learning and reducing frequency of travel for work, are no longer a crazy experiment. This experience is teaching us that we can quickly and collectively change our behaviors. It is that ability to advance rapid, large-scale adaptation that we must embrace if we are to create a new normal that enables a regenerative and resilient world for this and future generations.

Ryan Lynch

Ryan Lynch, Practice Director of Sustainability, works with organizations across multiple regions and industries to design creative solutions to drive organizational improvement, improve upon social/environmental impacts, and mitigate and remedy risks.

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