The sustainability profession has been given a mulligan. Let’s take it

The opinions expressed here by Trellis expert contributors are their own, not those of Trellis.

Corporate sustainability spent decades building the case that doing good and doing well aren’t in conflict. It largely won the argument and then fumbled the implementation. Now, sustainability is under fire. But with AI, economic volatility and geopolitics rewriting the rules of business all at once, we have a rare mulligan.

While sustainability is being sidelined and attacked, the underlying business imperatives have never been stronger. There’s a window of opportunity to re-imagine what corporate sustainability is, how it ought to be deployed across a company, what investors should be looking for, and how we integrate it into business school curriculums.

In practice, the discipline of corporate sustainability became focused on providing transparency and measurement of societal, human and ecological impacts of business activities. Because these metrics sat outside typical business KPIs and were framed in environmental (and sometimes, but not often enough) social impact measures rather than financial terms, sustainability remained niche. It hasn’t fulfilled the promise it holds to tap the transformative speed and scale of markets.

That is, in part, because many companies stopped short of the obvious next step: measuring the financial implications of their sustainability work as they would any other corporate initiative. The field developed a “special snowflake” problem — grounding the work not in commonly-accepted business metrics of margin, market share and efficiency, but in subjective morals, ecological limits and political litmus tests.

The results of these decisions look obvious in hindsight, and the community is left playing defense, and sometimes, turning on itself. At a recent conference, for instance, I heard the observation that we need to hive off sustainable energy transition from the “low to no value” sustainable business practices.

Here’s what is missing, though: natural systems, social systems and governance systems are all outside traditional business boundaries but increasingly determine business success. At its best, sustainability is the discipline that brings external risks and opportunities inside the business model early enough to act on them strategically.

Sustainability as a competitive advantage 

Companies using sustainability as a strategic business discipline see supply disruptions before competitors, unlock efficiency gains traditional operations miss, capture emerging demand for new products and services, and navigate cascading impacts of policy and regulatory shifts instead of reacting to each new shock. This is competitive advantage, not compliance.

Yet most companies can’t access this advantage because sustainability professionals lack the financial frameworks to prove ROI in terms that executives recognize: growing share, improving margin, reducing cost and risk.

The gap is costly, and the stakes are rising. We’re in the midst of a profound reshaping of how the world works. AI is transforming work at speeds that defy comprehension, climate is destabilizing operations, geopolitical conflicts are fragmenting markets and supply chains, and social contracts are being rewritten in real time.

Sustainability doesn’t have the solutions to this upheaval. But it’s the discipline designed to ask the questions that help businesses absorb and navigate systemic transformation: What external systems are we dependent on and how are we impacting them? How are they changing? What does that signal for us? 

To tap sustainability’s potential in business, we need to move away from “special snowflake” status, and incorporate the fundamentals of good change management. This looks like: 

• Identifying the business problems, concerns, or opportunities that sustainability can address. Recently, the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business (CSB) held our 9th annual Practice Forum “Creating Value through Volatility,” where we brought together investors and sustainability pros to share the latest research and advances. Every single case study presented this year started with a problem that was material to the business, and likely keeping an executive up at night. 

• Translating the impact of sustainability work into the language of numbers that businesses natively speak. We have tools that can help. Going forward, we’ll be focused on making these tools easier to use, and are currently prototyping options for embedding them into enterprise AI systems, so that sustainability professionals and finance can speak the same language.    

• Building universal fluency in sustainable value creation by helping every part of the business see where they can benefit and contribute. 

In the months to come, CSB will be zeroing in on work that’s designed to reinforce and accelerate embedding sustainability into business. We will do this by improving access and developing AI enabled tools that help leaders understand and quantify the value created; advancing research on the barriers and systems that sustainability needs to penetrate within firms; and providing enhanced training and building sustainable value creation fluency. 

Corporate sustainability has a rare mulligan and a narrow window — let’s take our shot.