It’s time for new vocabulary: unsustainable core business

Let’s normalise some new vocabulary today: unsustainable core business.

I have recently been approached by a company delivering infrastructure projects for clients in the Oil & Gas and Energy Transmission and Urban Development sectors, to provide guidance on sustainability.

Here are some notes I made while researching the firm:

Vis-a-vis planetary boundaries

• Infrastructure projects => Land Use Change [a breached planetary boundary, ABPB for short], habitat destruction => Biodiversity Loss [ABPB];
• Construction footprint + relatively high direct emissions and footprint of heavy machinery => Climate Change [ABPB], and Ocean Acidification [foreseen to dissolve carbon-based marine life by 2045, followed by a marine ecosystem collapse and further dominoes].
• Oil Gas clients => Climate Change [ABPB], Novel Entities [ABPB], Ocean Acidification
• Urban development => Land Use Change [ABPB]

Vis-a-vis social foundations

• Construction => associated with human exploitation and bonded labor, both a human rights abuse and shortfall against Income & Work [a social foundation]. Also => Health [a social foundation],
• Oil & Gas => also impact on Health
• + the aggregate effects of transgressed planetary boundaries indirectly threaten most of the social foundations: Water, Food, Peace & Justice, Housing, etc.

Preliminary conclusions

• The business was deep in the segment of “What Causes Harm”, and it was questionable whether it overlapped with “What the World Needs” (see my Planetary Ikigai diagram or read the whole article).
• Compliance with EHS norms and ISO standards did nothing to offset these negative impacts adequately — they do not take real-world sustainability as a goal and are not grounded in science.
• All of the above “represents substantial risks to your business model and financial returns under any plausible future scenario,” I wrote to them.
• To attain sustainability, they needed serious reinvention.

Takeaway

If your business model is incapable of creating adequate financial (shareholder) value without being subsidised by
a) destruction of environmental capital that others (possibly removed from you in time or space) depend on for their needs and/or
b) systematic impoverishment of workers (mostly in your value chain, and predominantly in the Global South), then you are running a so-called *unsustainable core business*.

If and when you are forced or mandated to fit your business within our ecological ceilings and above the 12 social foundations, you will struggle to find a way to do so.

Ponder the consequences for your business continuity, for that of your industry peers — and the opportunity in being a first mover in turning that around (through pivot or transformation).

We need to normalise using this expression. Not as a stigma, but as guidance, a reminder of fiduciary duty, a pointer to what needs to be done. To at last get over incrementalism, and invite business leaders and shareholders to seek for future-readiness (bonus: it’s in the same place as integrity!)

The opposite of “sustainable” is not “less sustainable”.

Let’s collectively ramp up the awareness and pressure and usher in a new paradigm!

PS: If you happen to run an unsustainable core business, you may choose to engage in what is now mainstream corporate sustainability — either “in service of“ your unsustainable core business (low maturity incrementalism focused on energy, resource and process efficiency) or “in opposition to” your unsustainable core business (attempting to mitigate negative impacts of your unsustainable core business by redirecting value from shareholders towards that). Neither of those approaches has the potential to make your core business *sustainable* — which I write about elsewhere.

About Alice Kalro

Alice is an emerging global thought leader in science-based corporate sustainability, providing practical guidance on science-aligned business transformations and urging corporations to take on a systems leadership role in order to help secure a just and liveable future for all.

She has been leading business transformation programs and developing stakeholder-centric business strategies since 2014.

Between 2022 and 2023 she headed the Corporate Sustainability consulting and technology solutions vertical at Goodera, serving both Fortune 500 and SME clients.

Alice has been a prominent Advocation Partner at r3.0, a global non-profit catalyzing a systems change towards a regenerative and inclusive global economy.

She has been working to trigger a reinvention of the sustainability consulting space towards science-aligned practices and systemic integrity, and is currently stepping up to form and lead a global movement of activist consultants.

Alice holds a masters degree in International Relations and several sustainability qualifications from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford universities, as well as a GRI certification. In January 2023 was among the first global cohort to be trained in the UN SDPI standard (the world’s first-ever end-to-end context-based reporting instrument), and has participated in the recently launched (re)biz degrowth program for business leaders.

Alice has led teams and worked with clients across five continents, and lived in Europe, China, and is presently based out of Bangalore, India.