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Sustainability

Business and science: Partners for sustainability?

Published 15 January 2025 in Sustainability • 7 min read

Science-based approaches to sustainability are on the rise as firms seek to build strategies that align with the planetary boundaries. But how can scientists and businesses see eye to eye?

As businesses grapple with the complexities of building science-based sustainability strategies, the growth of tools and approaches offers practical help that can keep them on track to meet increasingly stringent targets.

By partnering with organizations grounded in science-informed approaches, companies can craft sustainability programs that are tailored to their operations and the challenges of their sector, with scientific facts translated into language that they can understand and act upon.

The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) was established in 2015 to address several gaps in the sustainability resources available to businesses. The initiative defines and promotes practices in emissions reductions and net-zero targets that are aligned with the Paris Agreement. SBTi assesses and validates companies’ and financial institutions’ targets. Since 2023, more than 4,000 companies and financial institutions have set emissions reduction targets to be validated by the SBTi.

A separate but related initiative, launched in 2019 by a group of global NGOs, aims to ensure that impacts on nature are considered alongside the climate impacts of companies. The Science-based Targets Network (SBTN) works with both cities and companies to develop targets enabling them to address their environmental impacts with respect to biodiversity, land, freshwater, and the ocean. The resources they make available to companies can help enable them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while preventing – and reversing – nature loss.

Both initiatives aim to help companies align with the planetary boundaries framework, which was originally proposed in 2009 to identify nine planetary boundaries to quantify the environmental limits within which humanity can continue to thrive. In September 2023, scientific quantification of all nine processes took place, concluding that six of these boundaries had already been transgressed. Businesses seeking to understand how their activities impact these boundaries can collaborate with science.

Science partnerships
When businesses enter partnerships based on science, there can be a mismatch between the corporate desire for actionable numbers and the scientific desire to maintain their independence from business and avoid advising firms on action pathways

The challenge of collaboration

Collaborating with partners on sustainability is challenging and many tensions can arise in the process. These tensions can be especially pronounced when scientific and business partners attempt to work together. The most common of these revolve around conflicts over professional values, and conflicting aims and goals. When businesses enter partnerships based on science, there can be a mismatch between the corporate desire for actionable numbers and the scientific desire to maintain their independence from business and avoid advising firms on action pathways.

Scientific approaches based on biophysical thresholds can also often suggest more stringent sustainability goals than businesses that prefer incremental change may be comfortable committing to. Even widely accepted frameworks such as the Paris Agreement and the planetary boundaries framework present significant challenges to cross-sector collaboration.

This is particularly evident in the fossil fuel sector. SBTi’s Fossil Fuels policy stipulates that companies are not allowed to set science-based targets unless they derive less than 50% of revenues from fossil fuels. As a result, some companies in the sector are currently outside of the remit of science-based targets altogether until the sector-specific pathway is released for oil and gas companies. Other companies may set targets but find it difficult to set actionable plans.

So, what can businesses do to get the best out of the growing body of knowledge grounded in scientific principles? The scientific frameworks offered by the SBTi and SBTN, complemented by the more holistic picture proposed by the planetary boundaries framework, means that companies today can access powerful science-based guidance in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. But this is simply the start of a more transformative business trajectory.

“The strategy the partners eventually settled on entailed a change of course for the aim of the partnership, pivoting to focus on ‘societal must-haves' beyond the accountability of business.”

Science-business partnership in practice

Established by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC), Action2020 was a partnership that spanned the academic and business sectors to set science-based targets based on the planetary boundaries framework. WBCSD’s previous strategy, Vision 2050 was too far out into the future and had been developed for business by business. The new CEO of WBCSD wanted to set near-term targets for businesses based on science to enhance the legitimacy of their strategy. Challenges faced by member companies during Action2020 included reconciling significant differences in interests between science and certain industries.

Initial methods of working proved challenging for the partnership. At first, the plan was that both partners would co-design a strategy and corporate sustainability targets. Co-creation (joint development of knowledge) and translation were attempted as ways of structuring the collaboration. However, it soon became clear that this would not succeed because the scientists became uncomfortable with the role of helping to develop the strategy for businesses to adhere to scientific principles, as it was too close to a ‘consultancy’ role.

The partners then tried an approach based on translation, where the scientists would translate the science for business in the form of executive briefs. This in turn did not work, because the businesses were uncomfortable with committing themselves to the science that would have broad-reaching implications for their industries.

The parties then brought in intermediaries to prevent the collaboration from breaking down altogether. However, including the intermediaries had the effect of diluting some of the commitments of business to science, making the outcomes of the project less stringent.

The strategy the partners eventually settled on entailed a change of course for the aim of the partnership, pivoting to focus on ‘societal must-haves’ beyond the accountability of business.

These changes enabled Action2020 to launch its shared corporate sustainability targets, despite the challenging collaborative process.

Finding the right path to sustainability takes a willingness to experiment, often requiring several iterations and adjusting of goals to move forward.

Why experimentation is important

For businesses that are considering signing up to the SBTi or SBTN frameworks, the risk of encountering problems with differing professional values should be lower than that faced by the partners in the Action 2020 case. This is because when working with these frameworks, companies are not required to collaborate directly with scientists but benefit from the infrastructure behind organizations that already have established methods of tracking and measuring progress. However, issues with conflicting goals and aims can still arise when different stakeholders disagree on important aspects of science-based sustainability pathways.

Finding the right path to sustainability takes a willingness to experiment, often requiring several iterations and adjusting of goals to move forward.

Sustainability by its nature requires collaboration and businesses need to be ready to work together with other actors in situations marked by various tensions. This is especially the case with new collaborations in which the parties have conflicting aims or do not have much experience in finding common ground. The ability to experiment and to adjust and adapt along the way can yield powerful results.

The advantages of partnering with science-based organizations go well beyond the marketing benefits associated with such collaborations. By seriously considering what science means for their businesses and sectors, the companies that succeed in meeting scientific targets can position themselves as leaders in a sustainable future. Most importantly, these businesses can help return to a safe operating space for humanity as defined by the planetary boundaries.

This article is based on the co-authors’ research article, “A Process Study of Evolving Paradoxes and Cross-Sector Goals: A Partnership to Accelerate Global Sustainability”, which was published in the Journal of Management, September 2024 (e-publishing before print).

Authors

Amanda Williams

Amanda Williams

Research fellow at IMD Business School

Amanda Williams is a research fellow at IMD Business School. She was formally a senior researcher at ETH Zurich, a research fellow at Copenhagen Business School, and a Research Associate at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development where she worked on the SDG Compass, a guide for corporate action on the SDGs. Her research focuses on how organizations understand global sustainability issues and develop corporate sustainability strategies that align with global sustainability targets.

John N Parker

John N. Parker

Associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo

John N Parker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on understanding the social organization of science, creativity, and emotions. His work has been published in journals such as American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, Sociological Methods & Research, and Social Studies of Science.

 

Steve Kennedy

Steve Kennedy

Associate Professor researching business sustainability at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

Steve Kennedy is an Associate Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His current research explores how systems and resilience thinking can help organizations innovate to tackle grand societal challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. He is the Scientific Director of the Centre for Eco-Transformation. He teaches across multiple levels of education from Executive Education to Bachelors.

Gail Whiteman

Gail Whiteman

Founder of Arctic Basecamp and Professor of Sustainability at the University of Exeter’s Business School (UK)

Gail Whiteman is the Founder of Arctic Basecamp and Professor of Sustainability at the University of Exeter’s Business School in the UK. A visiting professor at IMD, she is an expert on global risk arising from the systemic changes occurring in the natural environment. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Frontier Risk, and Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. She is actively involved in building science-based targets for a future low-carbon economy.

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