I Spent Ten Years in Corporate Sustainability. Here Is What I Learned.

I joined my first corporate sustainability team in 2012, three years after the company had published its first sustainability report and one year after it had hired a Chief Sustainability Officer. By the time I left the sector a decade later, I had worked across three multinational organisations in two continents. What I learned does not fit neatly into the frameworks that consultancies sell or the case studies that business schools teach.

The Budget Problem Nobody Talks About

Sustainability teams are almost universally under-resourced relative to the ambitions they are asked to deliver. The strategy document says the company will halve its Scope 3 emissions by 2030. The sustainability team has six people and a budget that would not cover the data systems needed to measure Scope 3 accurately, let alone reduce it. The gap between the aspiration in the report and the resource in the team is where most corporate sustainability initiatives quietly die.

This is not always cynical. Senior leaders often genuinely believe that once the target is set, the business will find a way. What they underestimate is how much active resourcing, process change, and organisational friction reduction is required to make that happen. Setting a target is easy. Changing procurement criteria, capital allocation processes, and supplier relationships is not.

What Actually Moves the Needle

In my experience, three things drive real progress inside organisations. First, when sustainability is tied to something the business already cares deeply about, usually cost, risk, or regulatory compliance, it gets funded and implemented. Second, when there is a senior champion who is willing to spend political capital, things that would otherwise die in committee actually move. Third, when external pressure, from investors, customers, or regulators, creates genuine urgency rather than just reporting requirements.

What does not work, or works much more slowly than people expect, is persuasion alone. Presenting the moral case, the brand case, or even the financial case for sustainability, without the organisational levers to follow through, produces good presentations and slow change.

The Reporting Trap

Sustainability reporting has grown enormously in sophistication and volume over the past decade. The frameworks have multiplied. The disclosure requirements have expanded. And in many organisations, the sustainability team has become primarily a reporting function, producing the data and narratives that feed external disclosures rather than driving the operational changes that would make those disclosures look better in future years.

This is a trap. Reporting is necessary but it is not sufficient, and it can crowd out the harder work of embedding sustainability into business decisions, product development, and capital allocation. The organisations that make real progress are those that treat reporting as a byproduct of doing things differently, not as the goal in itself.

What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out

Understand the business deeply before you try to change it. The sustainability practitioner who speaks the language of the finance team, the procurement team, and the product team is far more effective than one who speaks only the language of sustainability. Know where the money flows. Know what the organisation is trying to achieve commercially. Then figure out where sustainability creates value within that frame, rather than asking the organisation to subordinate its commercial logic to an environmental one.

It is slower than it should be. It is more political than it should be. And it matters more than almost anything else a business professional can choose to work on right now. Those three things are all simultaneously true.