Sustainability consulting is a field that has grown significantly in recent years. An increasing number of large firms have begun publishing annual sustainability reports, with the number of S&P 500 companies that produce sustainability reports having grown from 20% in 2011 to over 90% today. The sustainability consulting industry is expanding rapidly, with a compound annual growth rate of 17% in 2022 and revenues of $16 billion. The sustainability and social impact consulting field has evolved significantly from where it was ten years ago, when sustainability consulting was a niche field dominated by firms with fewer than 15 employees. Since then, consolidation in the industry has continued apace, with large professional services firms acquiring smaller boutique firms in order to diversify their offerings in response to the mainstreaming of corporate sustainability. 

There is wide recognition of the need for greater rigour and reliability in sustainability reports, and new initiatives are emerging for mandatory disclosure standards, third-party verification and quality assurance, science-based targets, global harmonization of sustainability standards through the newly created International Sustainability Standards Board, among other trends. New expectations around the fiduciary responsibility of corporate directors to mitigate climate-related risks to their businesses, driven by the widespread adoption of disclosure standards developed by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, have created increased attention around the importance of emissions reductions and low-carbon business models. The explosion of interest in ESG investing, whereby environmental, social, and governance factors are considered material investment decision criteria, has dramatically increased the need for credible and granular sustainability data from corporations for the purpose of driving investment decisions. All of these trends have greatly widened the scope of corporate sustainability as a strategic consideration, thus spurring the growth of the sustainability consulting industry. 

Sustainability consulting is more nascent than the related field of environmental consulting, which tends to be dominated by engineering services firms and environmental experts (i.e. companies like WSP and ERM) rather than conventional strategy consultants or professional services firms such as McKinsey or Deloitte. Although the fields overlap significantly, sustainability consultants tend to be focused on helping firms identify ways to improve their sustainability performance and resource efficiency, while environmental consultants are often hired to help firms comply with environmental regulations and minimize ecosystem impacts. Another related field is social impact consulting, an industry which tends to be dominated by smaller players and independent consultants with mission-driven business models that focus on providing consulting to social enterprises, NGOs, and community organizations.

The sustainability landscape features an ‘alphabet soup’ of acronyms and other jargon that can be difficult to absorb at first glance. The recent rise of ESG investing has added a diversity of new terms to the older language of corporate sustainability and CSR, and there remains some contention around which ESG strategies can be truly seen as ‘sustainable’. See the following definitions for additional clarity. 

Sustainability Standards: There are a variety of global sustainability standards which organizations use as frameworks to disclose their performance on sustainability issues. Many global sustainability standard setting organizations are currently in the process of being consolidated into the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), an initiative of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation. The other major international sustainability standards setter is the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which develops both the oldest and most widely used set of standards unique in its focus on both stakeholder and shareholder value creation. For more information about sustainability standards and ratings, see this article from the GRI. For a full list of sustainability standards and frameworks organized by issue area, see our company transition toolkit. 

Simple vs. Double Materiality: In financial accounting, the concept of ‘materiality’ refers to whether or not a piece of information is deemed relevant for decision-making purposes, on the basis of whether its exclusion would change the result of a particular decision. Traditional notions of materiality (i.e. simple materiality) focus exclusively on financial materiality, or whether or not the information in question will affect shareholder value. The concept of double materiality represents a paradigm shift in thinking about corporate reporting: simply put, it means that both financial and non-financial forms of value are considered material, and it implies that a corporation’s impacts on the world are as decision-relevant as the world’s impacts on the corporation. While the newly created ISSB currently adopts a simple materiality approach, interpreting social and environmental risks through the narrower language of financial value creation, the GRI advocates for a double materiality lens with a focus on stakeholder value creation as the basis of sustainability reporting. The European Union has officially adopted the double materiality lens as its required approach in its updated Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group has signed a statement of cooperation with the GRI. More recently, the ISSB and GRI have announced their intentions to align their respective standards. 

ESG: The acronym ESG refers to business or investing strategies which consider environmental, social, and governance factors to be material considerations for decision-making processes. ESG strategies focus on reducing risks presented by environmental, social, or governance factors, such as property damages driven by extreme weather events or reputational damage resulting from complicity in human rights abuses. Although they are related concepts, ESG should not be conflated with sustainability: ESG tends to focus on the material risks to a company’s operations presented by environmental, social, and governance issues, whereas the concept of sustainability aims to assess a company’s positive or negative impacts on society and the environment. ESG is ‘outside-in’, while sustainability is ‘inside-out’. 

Taxonomy: A sustainable finance taxonomy is a mandatory or voluntary set of standards around what investment products or economic activities can or cannot be considered ‘sustainable’, for the purposes of improving transparency and reducing greenwashing. Many countries are in the process of developing their own mandatory sustainable finance taxonomies, with the most comprehensive taxonomies coming from the EU and China. 

Climate-Related Risk: Climate-related risks are those risks posed to a business by the effects of climate change, which include either physical risks (i.e. property damage) or transition risks (i.e. stranded assets due to carbon pricing regimes and low demand). The Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosure has taken the lead in developing standards for the disclosure and management of climate-related risks. For more information, see the TCFD recommendations report. 

Scope 1, 2, and 3 Emissions: Companies reporting on their annual greenhouse gas emissions are required to differentiate between three scopes of emissions. Scope 1 emissions cover emissions that are under direct operational control, Scope 2 emissions refer to emissions from purchased electricity or energy, and Scope 3 emissions refer to all emissions that an organization is indirectly responsible for throughout its supply chain. For more information, see the GHG Protocol. 

Net-Zero and Science-Based Targets: Many corporations have made pledges to reach net-zero carbon emissions by the year 2050, but not all of these pledges are credible. The Science-Based Targets Initiative is a third-party verifier which aims to assess whether a corporation’s net-zero targets are legitimate and based in science. For more information about net-zero leaders in Canada, see Destination Net-Zero. 

Carbon Offsets and Sequestration: Carbon offsets are a way to use carbon removal or negative emissions technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to create credits which can then be sold to corporations that cannot otherwise reduce their GHG emissions. Carbon offsets have been heavily criticized by many actors, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that they face “multiple feasibility and sustainability concerns.” Science-based targets cannot make use of carbon offsets in lieu of genuine low-carbon transition plans, or can only use independently verified carbon offsets when no technological alternative is readily available. Credible carbon offsets must be additional, in that they account for emissions reductions which would not have otherwise occurred without the offset purchase. For more information about credible carbon offsets, see the Oxford Principles for Net-Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting. 

Nature-Related Risk and Nature-Based Solutions: Many corporations are now considering nature-related risks in addition to climate-related risks, which include risks related to the collapse of vital ecosystem services that are necessary for normal economic functioning. For more information about nature-related risk, see the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has developed the concept of nature-based solutions to refer to projects that restore ecosystems and steward biodiversity. 

Impact Assessment: Impact assessment is an umbrella term used to refer to the assessment of the impacts of an organization’s behaviour on society and the environment. At the project-level, impact assessments are meant to assess potential harms while there is still opportunity to modify or abandon the project plans. Companies looking to improve reporting on their social and environmental impacts should utilize the framework developed by the Future Fit Benchmark. 

Sustainable Development Goals: The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a list of 17 high-level goals related to human flourishing and ecosystem well-being developed by the United Nations. Many corporations reference SDGs in their sustainability reports, but few integrate them into their overall strategies or actually measure their contribution to the SDGs. For more information about corporate action on SDGs, see the SDG Action Manager. 

Circular Economy: The circular economy is a concept referring to an economic system in which no waste or pollution is produced, materials and resources are continuously circulated, and natural systems are regenerated. For more information about the circular economy and circular business models, see the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 

Life-Cycle Assessment: Life-cycle assessment involves the assessment of the cumulative social and environmental impacts of a product or project throughout its entire lifespan. Minimizing life-cycle impacts is a key component of the circular economy. 

Greenwashing: Greenwashing occurs whenever a company makes false or misleading claims about its sustainability practices. Many ESG investing strategies have been accused of greenwashing. To learn more about common greenwashing tactics, see this article from EcoWatch.

Although much progress has been made, many firms’ CSR or ESG strategies lack credibility for the reason that they remain siloed from business strategy and other functions, and are not reflected in core business decisions. Sustainability teams are often not provided with enough resources or organizational power to affect change, and are often housed under marketing departments where they serve as an extension of a firm’s PR efforts. For most organizations, sustainability reporting is not integrated with mainstream financial reporting, meaning that ESG concerns are still not considered material issues (and therefore not worthy of attention from senior officers). As a result of these obstacles, sustainability plans and strategies are often vague and ambiguous, contain few concrete or near-term targets and goals that are quantifiable and realistic, and lack the appropriate capital allocation and organizational resources to be truly transformative. Many sustainability teams spend all their time collecting data for reports, rather than actually pushing for organizational change, resulting in the awkward fact that sustainability reporting can become a substitute for real action. Firms frequently highlight positive success stories in their sustainability reports, while failing to disclose major controversies or ESG failures (i.e. avoiding taxes, or facing fines and sanctions for violations of the law), and in those contexts sustainability reports amount to little more than elaborate forms of greenwashing. 

Over the past 20 years, corporate sustainability reporting has become increasingly mainstreamed. The proportion of N1000 companies producing sustainability reports has gone from just 18% in 2002 to over 80% by 2020. Unfortunately, there is scant evidence to prove that corporate sustainability reporting has led to genuine improvements in companies’ practices and performance. There are a litany of issues with sustainability reporting, including a profusion of meaningless targets, inconsistency between standards setters, opaque supply chains, confusing information, a lack of auditing, and the inherently voluntary nature of reporting mechanisms. Firms often use sustainability reports to highlight positive behaviours while neglecting to report on their adverse impacts, while their sustainability strategies remain separate (and at odds with) their overall business strategies. For a summary of academic research on the limits of sustainability reporting, see this open letter to the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation. 

Most worrisome of all is the problem that most firms tend only to focus on those social or environmental issues that are deemed material to the company’s bottom line. This narrow focus on simple materiality (i.e. enterprise materiality) has the tendency to reinforce the underlying problem of shareholder primacy by exclusively interpreting environmental and social risks through the language of financial accounting. If sustainability reporting is supposed to be about a firm’s effect on society and the environment, then the focus on enterprise materiality reverses this principle by focusing exclusively on how social and environmental problems affect the balance sheet. This causes firms to have less interest in reducing their social and environmental impacts than on finding ways to limit how social and environmental problems will harm their overall financial position. It also has the consequence of causing firms to become blind to long-term social and environmental problems that are of grave concern to society but are not yet considered relevant business risks. 

ESG investing strategies have faced criticism for similar reasons. As recent Bloomberg analysis has demonstrated, ESG ratings have less to do with reducing negative impacts than with ensuring a company’s continued profitability. Their analysis of MSCI’s ESG metrics showed that a company’s “water stress” score had nothing to do with measuring a company’s impact on local water supplies, but rather whether local supplies contained enough water to sustain their factories. Research by the OECD has shown that many ESG indices are not actually less emissions-intensive than their parent indices, and even that in some instances “high E scores positively correlate with high carbon emissions.” 

Even within the paradigm of enterprise materiality, corporate sustainability reporting is still falling short. Few firms are fully complying with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), one of the most prominent international standards-setters on the risks of climate destabilization to business.  Only 3 in 10 companies fully disclose their environmental and climate-related aspects of their business model. Very few companies complete scenario analyses against a 2˚C or lower scenario, and only 6% of companies identify the short, medium, and long-term time horizons over which identified risks would impact the organization. According to GreenBiz, few companies overall implement climate resilience strategies, use different climate-related scenarios, or disclose processes for identifying, assessing and managing climate risk or integrating it into overall risk management.

To learn more about what firms should be doing to improve their sustainability reporting and governance practices, see Section 4.3 of our Company Transition Toolkit on transparency and reporting, as well as Section 4.2 on leadership and governance.

To learn more about corporate emissions reduction plans and net-zero targets, see the Section 1.1 of our Company Transition Toolkit on emissions. Many large firms are adopting more ambitious emissions reduction plans; at least 20% of the world’s 2000 largest publicly traded companies have made net-zero commitments. However, according to the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, very few major firms have made net-zero pledges that are actually credible. For a compilation of all the most up-to-date net-zero tools and resources, see Destination Net-Zero (focusing on Canada) as well as the Net-Zero Knowledge Hub.  To learn more about the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), see this convenient flowchart. 

To learn more about biodiversity, ecosystem services, and nature-based solutions, see Section 1.2 of our Company Transition Toolkit. The Science-Based Targets Network (SBTN) has developed a comprehensive set of guidelines for businesses looking to report on their biodiversity impacts and dependencies and develop a plan for mitigation actions. Firms should make sure to look out for guidelines and frameworks from the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). To see a searchable list of over 1,240 businesses taking actions to improve nature, see this list of case studies from the SHIFT community. 

To learn more about the circular economy, see Section 1.3 of our Company Transition Toolkit. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the University of Exeter, has developed a Circular Economy Business Design Guide that aims to help firms develop a holistic vision of their risks and opportunities when it comes to implementing circular business strategies. The National Zero Waste Council has developed a list of five areas for businesses to consider as they move to embed circularity.  For more specific information about circular economy best practices broken down by sector, check out these guides from the Smart Prosperity Institute.

To learn more about water and pollution management, see Section 1.4 of our Company Transition Toolkit. The Water Footprint Network has developed this assessment tool, and the Global Environmental Management Initiative has developed its own local water tool for analysis of water usage at the local level. The CEO Water Mandate has a specific target-setting guidebook. 

Sustainable procurement and supplier engagement is another key component of sustainability consulting roles. For more information, see Section 4.4 of our Company Transition Toolkit. For a comprehensive introduction to supply chain sustainability policies, see this practical guide for continuous improvement developed by the UN Global Compact. Firms can also review this guide from the Judge Business School at Cambridge that focuses on supplier engagement for sustainability. For an introduction to the themes and core concepts of supply chain traceability, see this guide from the UN Global Compact. The World Economic Forum has created an insight report that provides a road map for all businesses to decarbonize their supply chain (i.e. Scope 3) emissions, as well as a brief guide on supply chain decarbonization incentives. 

For more information about sustainability and social impact news and thought leadership, see the following media sources: 

• GreenBiz
• Corporate Knights
• Future of Good 
• Bloomberg Green
• Inside Climate News 
• Sustainable Brands
• Triple Pundit
• ImpactAlpha
• Financial Times Moral Money 
• Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Impakter