Sustainabilty – Not longer for sale

Orginal article E24 05.09.2021 (Norwegian)

The biggest obstacle to working with sustainability in a sustainable way is that we do not include the whole picture, but rather a small part of it.

Bjørn Kjærand Haugland CEO of Skift - the business climate leaders and founder of Terravera

Kristine Falkgård Head of Sustainability Fremtind and co-founder of Terravera

Paal Larsen Director EMEA at Meltwater and founder of Terravera

Eirik Fossum Færevaag Founder of Disruptive Technologies and founder of Terravera

How can we navigate the sustainability jungle and make the right—and crucial—decisions when our knowledge base is insufficient?

This year’s election has become a climate election, whether we like it or not. It’s now or never, even though it should have happened much sooner. The new UN report declared a “code red” for our planet, which has truly set off alarm bells for our politicians. Increasingly, climate is emerging as the most important issue in the election campaign.

Coordinates but No Map
During Arendalsuka, the discussion revolved around a definitive end date for the oil industry and what would become “the new oil,” yet no one has a clear answer. Politicians keep outdoing each other with climate and sustainability measures to the point of overflowing. They agree on where we are and where we need to go, but not on how to get there.
It’s a confusing picture, with widespread greenwashing and “climate delay”—actions disguised as solutions that tend to concern what we’ll do far into the future, often by 2050 or so.

The question we have to ask ourselves now is: can we truly trust that the proposed measures will actually work? How do we navigate through the sustainability jungle and make the right—and essential—decisions when the decision-making basis is incomplete?

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are well-known, defining the social, economic, and environmental building blocks for managing our planet sustainably. The EU has introduced taxonomy, a classification system for sustainable activities intended to guide green investments and put an end to greenwashing efforts. We have the coordinates, but despite countless committees and expert groups, we still lack the map.

Sustainability Is for Sale
Since the Sustainable Development Goals emerged in 2015, countless companies have embraced these goals and integrated them into their business strategies, where they serve as guidelines for best practices in sustainability. The country’s brightest minds have long understood that it’s financially profitable to work on sustainability—and that helping others do so also pays off.

Sustainability is for sale at every major consultancy firm in the country. They have developed their own standards and solutions to steer clients in the right direction. As a result, a sea of standards, certifications, reporting methods, and benchmarking systems have emerged, with even more sets of KPIs to evaluate goal achievement.

Not Measuring Reality
Of course, it’s positive that the market is responding to the need for systems and tools to make the world a better place. Yet, at the same time, all these different systems have made it harder to find our way. Which systems and KPIs should we choose? What should we report on? Is one solution better or more sustainable than another? The answer is that, in reality, it doesn’t matter, because no one today is measuring reality as it truly is.

The biggest obstacle to working with sustainability in a truly sustainable way is that we’re not including the entire picture but only a small piece of it. We work on sustainability separately, each following our own methodology and using our own closed system for measuring various sustainability parameters. The result is that data are collected in different places, owned by different parties, and managed in different ways.
The elephant in the room is concealed by polished reports from various players who all sell sustainability.

Collaboration to Achieve the Goals
What these systems share is a missing piece, the one that ties everything together and will enable us to compare sustainability regardless of standards and certifications. We lack the infrastructure—the system that can gather all these data and make them available to everyone—a model that will allow us to measure sustainability across different goals, standards, and certifications.

Sustainability Goal 17, “Partnerships for the Goals,” might be the most important because it’s absolutely crucial that we collaborate and form strong partnerships if we’re to achieve the other 16.

We Can’t Improve What We Can’t Measure
That’s why the dedicated people behind Terravera have launched a huge mobilization of academia and business to make this information open and accessible to everyone, so that we can work together toward achieving the goals. They are now working intensively to build the infrastructure that will make sustainability straightforward and comparable, based on verified indicators and models.

If we want a real chance of meeting the 1.5-degree target, we all need to become truth-seekers and model the world as it really is. At Terravera, this is done by using data, models, and algorithms that mirror reality—not just parts of it.

Society, businesses, academia, and students are invited to join this collective effort. Let’s work together to seek the truth, stand up against greenwashing and climate delay, and model reality as it actually is.

Because the truth lies in the whole.