Part 3 — What Should Be Done?
Today sustainability has become a priority for nearly every organization. However, for real progress to accelerate, the focus needs to shift from reporting to implementation.
Sustainability is strongly reflected in strategy documents, reports, and communication efforts across many organizations. However, it is not always given the same weight in investment decisions, budgets, and operational practices.
If sustainability is to truly drive transformation, some fundamental approaches need to change.
Real transformation becomes possible when sustainability moves beyond being a visible discourse and becomes embedded in decision-making mechanisms.
Sustainability must be truly integrated into budgets.
In many projects, environmental and social requirements are still treated as part of general overhead costs.
Especially in public tenders, sustainability-related activities are often not defined as separate line items. As a result, these issues are either implemented at a minimal level in practice or pushed to the background under budget constraints.
Unless sustainability requirements are clearly defined as unit cost items and budget line items, it becomes difficult for them to be effectively implemented in practice.
A similar situation is also observed in the private sector. In supplier and subcontractor selection, sustainability criteria often remain a secondary consideration.
If these criteria do not become an integral part of procurement and investment decisions, the transformation is hindered from the very beginning.
Impact measurement must be genuinely conducted.
A significant portion of sustainability efforts is still reported in terms of activities However, to understand real progress, it is necessary to measure outcomes rather than the number of activities.
The extent to which an investment actually reduces emissions, and whether a social program creates lasting improvements in living conditions, should be systematically evaluated.
Some methods that help measure this impact are now widely used:
- Life Cycle Analysis (LCA): Assesses the environmental impact of products across their entire lifecycle, from raw materials to disposal.
- Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L): Calculates the environmental costs of company activities in monetary terms.
- Social Return on Investment (SROI): Expresses the value created by social programs in economic terms.
In sustainability efforts, evaluating not only activities but also the real impact through such tools is one of the most critical steps in moving from reporting to implementation.
Sustainability is not a departmental task, but a management responsibility.
Today, many organizations establish a sustainability specialist or a small team to manage their sustainability efforts. This team is then expected to manage the organization’s sustainability agenda.
However, sustainability is not an issue that can be addressed by a single department.
Areas such as energy investments, production processes, supply chain decisions, product design, and financial planning are directly shaped by top management decisions. Therefore, the true owners of the sustainability strategy should be top management and company owners.
Sustainability teams play an important role. However, their role is not to drive the transformation on their own, but to support it within the organization in terms of knowledge and coordination.
Real change becomes possible only when sustainability is placed at the center of the management agenda.
Sustainability has become more visible than ever over the past decade. However, visibility and real progress do not always advance at the same pace.
Perhaps it is now necessary to ask the following question more explicitly:
Are we merely talking about sustainability, or are we truly putting it into practice?
The time remaining until 2030 should test real implementation, not rhetoric.