Taking regeneration on board

Boards and companies have made wide-ranging sustainability goals; regeneration is what they should be talking about.

Gulp and double gulp: imagine the grief of a hungry fish swallowing bait, only to find it contains a barbed hook. Senior business leaders will soon know what that feels like as they wake up to the market implications of the public commitments their boards and companies have made to a wide range of sustainability goals.  

And that’s a lot of companies, a lot of boards. Back in 2011, some 20% of S&P 500 business had produced sustainability (aka citizenship, CSR or ESG) reports. By 2020, that proportion had swelled to 90%, representing fully 80% of the equity of the largest U.S. corporations. 

So what were they thinking as they made those pledges? Often it felt like the right thing to do, at a time when key customers were rattling their supply chains. There was a certain comfort, too, in the fact that the U.N. had established a framework for such…