Despite the challenges that come with transitioning to environmentally-friendly
business practices, Talbott says that 64 per cent of executives would be willing to make sustainable change, even if it meant lower revenue in the immediate future.
Although executives are highly interested in investing in sustainability efforts to grow their company and address climate change, they are struggling to authentically achieve these goals.
“Green hypocrisy exists — my organization has overstated their sustainability efforts,” agreed 58 per cent of the respondents. Amongst just the North American respondents, this sentiment jumped to a startling 72 per cent.
Other poll results indicate that the majority of companies are not even tracking or monitoring their progress. Roughly one third of the organizations polled reported have measurement tools to quantify their sustainability efforts, and only 17 per cent are using those measurements to optimize their efforts and operations.
“There is a sense of greenwashing or green hypocrisy. It's likely driven by the fact that they're struggling to get really accurate measurements and the impact of some of the decisions that they're making when it comes to sustainability. I also think that organizations and industries are challenged by the fact that the goalposts associated with sustainability are constantly moving,” Talbott explained.
Eco-friendly practices such as packaging with minimal plastic materials and emissions-free transport vehicles were once innovative practices but are now a standard that consumers are expecting, particularly amongst the Millenial and Gen Z demographics. Policies that regulate the environmental impacts of certain industries are continuously updated, which can impact anything from how a house is built to how many electric cars a brand manufactures.
Greenwashing, which occurs when a company makes itself seem more environmentally-friendly than it actually is, also hinders sustainable progress across sectors. High profile cases, such as BP renaming to Beyond Petroleum in 2001 before selling off renewable energy assets and eventually stepping away from the re-brand, indicate how easy it is for businesses to make inflated claims about their environmental commitments.
The poll respondents stated that the top barriers to achieving true sustainability are a lack of investment in the right technology, lack of understanding/education, relentless focus on growth/profit, lack of budget/cost, and lack of regulatory incentives.
Google Cloud says that having accurate data to track is necessary for companies to set sustainable benchmarks and quantitatively monitor how they are moving towards their goals. The company operates the cleanest cloud in the industry, which allows their users to decarbonize their digital services.
“By using better data about the natural environment, powerful analytics tools, and models to better make sense of that data, we can help customers understand their climate risk, and become more climate resilient. And that starts with putting that data in the hands of decision makers to ultimately make a decision that would help their operations become more climate resilient,” Talbott said.
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