Sustainability embodies some of the great challenges facing us, including the impacts of population growth, increased energy demand, resource depletion, water scarcity, and waste-stream management. Businesses are feeling pressure to address sustainability issues from many quarters, including shareholders, supply chain partners, customers, nongovernmental organizations, regulators, and lawmakers.
Sustainability’s emergence as a core business issue adds a new dimension to finance, including setting finance strategy and vision and designing and implementing changes across the finance organization. Transformation can help improve finance executives’ – and finance functions’ – contributions to overall company value through four critical, interdependent activities: serving as a catalyst, a strategist, a steward, and an operator.
In each of these roles, finance executives would have sustainability-related responsibilities.
This report examines:
- The intersect between finance and sustainability
- The sustainability-driven triggers for finance transformation
- A closer look at reporting, and tax and regulatory drivers