tant natural cycles for freshwater, pollination or seed dispersal. All in all, business profits ultimately rely on what our planet gives us.
It makes sense for businesses to ensure that $125 trillion is sustained into the future, and not squandered over a short time period.
By preserving natural resources, extinction in a business sense is prevented.
Business and environmentalism as concepts are, therefore, very compatible. By ensuring our natural world and its resources are sustained into the future, businesses are maintained by virtue.
Pillar two: The society and its impacts on business
Pillar two, social sustainability, is about understanding human needs.
From a business perspective, social sustainability is realizing the impacts corporations have on workers and society as a whole. This includes accounting for human rights, health and safety, community engagement, work-life-balance, philanthropy, diversity, and equality.
Professor of Accountability and CSR at the Middlesex University Business School, Adrian Henriques, states:
“Social impact includes anything that affects company-stakeholder relationships: from how much and how reliably suppliers are paid, to how a product affects lives. From how small shareholders may be treated to the impacts of alcohol on health and communities.” – Adrian Henriques, Understanding a company’s social impact is crucial to sustainability
One key element that’s certainly contributing to Google’s success is high employee satisfaction.
86% of Google employees state they are satisfied with their jobs. Providing flexible working hours, fun offices and encouraging collaboration and trust, Google integrates social responsibility into its business strategy and delivers a profitable company culture.
Walt Disney certainly practices what it preached in the childhood classic movie Winnie the Pooh. Take Disney’s voluntEARS program for instance. The program encourages employees to donate time to community service efforts. It’s a successful program, as 2.9 million hours of service have been put in since its inception.
Pillar three: The economy and its impacts on business
It is at pillar three, the economic pillar, where we find common ground with most businesses. To be sustainable, businesses must make a profit.
Activities that fit under the economic pillar include compliance, proper governance and risk management.
Let’s consider the oil company Shell as an example to explain pillar three.
Often deemed as ‘evil’, oil companies receive a lot of pressure to reduce the use of fossil fuels and switch to renewable sources. Investment in Shell occurs due to the returns Shell brings. But abruptly dropping fossil fuels will mean losing returns and thus investment. The adoption of renewable energy resources, therefore, has to be slow and incremental.
To achieve a successful balance, Shell has set targets to cut its net carbon footprint by 50% by the year 2050. If Shell meets these targets, Shell will have successfully balanced economic factors to meet the environmental climatic demands of being more sustainable.
Gorging on a finite resource to maximize profit has grave environmental and social costs. Yes, profit is vital for corporate success but it cannot be at the expense of the other two pillars. To truly understand why, read the next section of this article.
A model for sustainability: Three-nested dependencies model
There has been some debate over how the three pillars of sustainability interact with one another. The most accurate model proposed is the 3-nested-dependencies model.
This model represents a co-dependent reality between the environment, society, and the economy.
Human society and our economy are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the environment. Neither can prosper in the long-run without prosperous, healthy surroundings. Beyond the environment, economic success is then driven by the exchange of goods and services. This exchange is determined by social constructs and choices that make up a society. Economic success does not come with fragile, poverty-stricken, despondent communities.
In summary, a