Sustainability: business, life, environment

With expanding global climate discussions and pending US legislation on the immediate horizon, there is little disagreement that companies need to have comprehensive business sustainability strategies in place to address emissions.  Business implications may be the initial focus for many companies; however, the true question asked of lagging businesses is "What risk will those companies be willing to expose to their business stakeholders and the general public?"

Business sustainability risk affects every aspect of a company and its external relationships. While some of the risks may be obvious, some hidden and intangible threats may prove to have the greatest impacts.  Digging into the detail, these threats to unprepared organizations or traditional business models present themselves in a number of forms:

•    Potential increase in operating cost
•    Potential increase in supply costs
•    Potential disruptions to supply or loss of supplier relationships
•    Potential loss of revenue or market share
•    Potential to business reputation
•    Potential inability to secure investment dollars or capital

Our sustainability consulting experiences have revealed to us that companies are beginning to understand the risks associated with both their direct and indirect exposure and are taking action to address their exposure.  However, few companies are proactively providing transparency of their business risk to the investment community. 

Working directly with organizations seeking to be on the opportunistic end of business sustainability, we have identified risk transparency to be a best practice among leading companies.  Companies that choose a risk avoidance strategy by a lack of recognition or communication of exposure are only compounding the above threats.