Milestones in sustainability journey

When viewed over a time horizon, organisations can equally assess the progress or maturity achieved against the time taken.

A good measure of not just progress but the resources taken and benefits realised.

This journey would typically involve five major milestones for an organisation, with variations required for tailoring and revisions to suit an organisation’s unique context.

The first milestone for organisations is ‘Purpose Alignment’. It is the most critical phase and a necessary first step on the journey of sustainability transformation. This step is where organisations determine their why for sustainability and integrate sustainability into their purpose holistically in a manner that ensures it delivers long-term sustainable value creation for stakeholders.

Organisations that don’t have this alignment fail to realise tangible benefits from sustainability adoption and end up simply approaching it as a compliance burden.

The next milestone is ‘Baselining’. This phase requires organisations to perform an as-is assessment of the business to understand their current positioning, considering the sustainability purpose set for the organisation. It involves materiality assessment, gap analysis, capacity building and a definition of sustainability goals and targets.

Organisations also conduct baselining exercises across priority areas like emissions and resource utilisation.

The subsequent milestone is ‘strategy and roadmap’ development. It involves planning the integration of sustainability as an enabler of the organisation’s business growth strategy and establishing governance structures to support it.

The outcome of this phase also includes an implementation roadmap for the organisation with timelines.

The fourth milestone is ‘implementation’. The implementation milestone is the phase where sustainability gets cascaded across the functional teams of the organisation. It also involves technology implementation considerations, including processes and controls.

The final phase is ‘reporting and assurance’. This phase represents the outcome of the earlier milestones achieved by the organisation.

It involves sustainability reporting that complies with standards and frameworks, assurance readiness considerations, communication, continuous improvement and refinement to the reporting process and maturity over time.

The writer is a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is an author who writes and speaks widely on corporate reporting topics.