Let’s push things forward

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Leaders will gather in Amsterdam to explore the future of sustainability

This week, Sustainability Leaders will be in Amsterdam for the 2024 edition of our World Sustainability Congress. With more than 200 global sustainability leaders in attendance, this year’s event is shaping up to be bigger and better than ever.

The agenda will directly address some of the most pressing sustainability challenges and opportunities that businesses face today: from protecting biodiversity, to enhancing circularity, to making faster progress on improving environmental and social impacts in supply chains.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lucky enough to chat to several of our guest speakers about what they’ll be sharing during the event. Just yesterday, I was speaking to a group of CSOs about the evolution of their teams. The increasingly heavy regulatory workload is soaking up many teams’ time and resources but, in the longer term, leaders are eager to distribute reporting requirements across the business and claw back time for their teams to focus on value creation and improvement work. This will be a key point for the function’s development during 2025.

Within supply chains, obtaining product carbon footprint (PCF) data is a particular focus area. A manufacturing company I spoke to earlier this week told me that the need to obtain this information is such that certain suppliers are charging extra to do so, owing to the time that is required to calculate this footprint. If this trend expands, it could fundamentally change how businesses collect carbon data from their suppliers; effectively creating a competitive advantage for vendors that are able to calculate this type of data.

To enable circularity, businesses are often reliant on the infrastructure of the regions in which they operate. If they are making their products recyclable, for example, each country in which the product is present must have the infrastructure to recycle it. I’ll be hosting a panel this week that will dig into this challenge, and how businesses are investing in infrastructure themselves to ensure their products contribute to the circular economy.

These are just a few of the topics that we’ll be diving into at the Congress. It promises to be an impactful event, full of insight into how businesses can accelerate their ESG strategies.

I hope to see you there.

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