By Business & Finance 
Catherine Duggan, Head of Sustainability for Grant Thornton, looks at the type of ESG strategies that will help companies succeed.
For the full interview, see video below.
Catherine Duggan, Head of Sustainability for Grant Thornton, is on the judging panel for the upcoming ESG Awards, in partnership with Grant Thornton, taking place on 10th April. In this interview, she explores some of the strategies that can help a company reach its ESG goals. For more information on the ESG Awards, please contact Alma.Bustos@businessandfinance.com
She spoke about the importance of technology and transparency.
“What gets measured gets done. And I think a lot of these new technologies are helping companies to be able to quantify problems and quantify things like emissions that are complex. Once you can understand what you’re trying to change, once you can measure it and monitor it, then it makes it much easier to implement strategies to improve them to see where they’re not working and to make sure that you make the progress that you want to make. So it’s really in terms of that visualization and understanding the size of the problem, that’s where technology can really support.”
Duggan also explored the issue of incentives which have proven most effective in shifting corporate and consumer behaviour towards more sustainable practices.
“This comes back to fundamentals and it’s probably two lenses to look at. One is the business lens and the other is the consumer lens. So from a business lens, what’s going to help you drive progress, opportunity, mitigate risks in your business and fundamentally how does it impact the bottom line? If you can look at sustainability in terms of those lenses, particularly for people who aren’t embedded fully in sustainability, but are purely looking at the commercials, being able to speak their language can really help move the agenda along.
“When it comes to consumers there is always this talk of the values gap where people have a desire and a will to perhaps act sustainably and make sustainable choices but they are confronted by the economic realities in terms of cost and how some of those choices may impact other parts of their lives. So in terms of moving consumer behaviour there are probably two different aspects.
“One is around making it again attractive commercially and a lot of that is linked, in the current climate, to economic advantages and benefits. With behavioural psychology, there’s an opportunity there in terms of how you communicate with your customers the nudge theory that has been leveraged in other areas particularly in terms of communication with customers and getting them to engage. There’s a lot of work that could be done leveraging some of that experience in terms of in getting consumers to engage and change their behaviour because fundamentally that’s what you’re asking them to do. Look broader than just, here’s a product are you interested in that. It’s how you communicate and leverage some of those insights.”
For more information on the ESG Awards, please contact Alma.Bustos@businessandfinance.com
