Need To Build Sustainability Into Business Practices

Dr. Hynd Bouhia, President, CEO, Author, Mentor, and Forbes 100 most powerful women in the world, participate in Risk Roundup to talk about “Need To Build Sustainability Into Business Practices.”

Background

Today, nations and their economies rely entirely on the human environment and ecosystem. The reason is that the human ecosystem plays a central role in all human services—and without the essential environmental resources, humans cannot survive.

But it is no secret that the environment is not just ours—for those of us living today. The environment belongs to all life today, tomorrow, and forever. So, it is time to evaluate the interconnectedness between human existence, environment, and economy to help us strategize how to build sustainability in everything we do. And for that, assessing the implications of our actions today that will shape our coming tomorrow is essential.

Planet Earth

The reason is that the planet Earth is our only home today for the entire human civilization. The environment provides life support functions to the Earth’s inhabitants. While human society may end up becoming multi-planetary species in the future, at this point, we have no other place to go if Earth becomes inhabitable.

So, the question is:

• What could go wrong on our planet?
• What has the ecology of our planet got to do with the economy?

To understand that we should first consider planet Earth as a system. We also must realize that all living organisms, including the human species, receive inputs from the environment in the form of air, food, and water. Not only that, each one of us gives off outputs in the form of excrement that goes back to the environment. So, any resource deprivation from the environment in the form of input is fatal.

Similarly, depriving the ability to dispose of any output is also fatal. Therefore, we need to stop believing that we live on virtually infinite environmental resources that will provide limitless input to human systems and understand the potential implications of the known limits of human habitation, production, and consumption.

Need For Economic Analysis

Environmental Economics, the study of the allocation of scarce resources, markets function, and incentives affecting individual and institutions’ behavior, gives us a foundation to further our understanding of sustainability needs and solutions.

The need to change individual and institutions’ behavior needs to deal with several issues beyond inefficient natural resource allocation, market failure, externalities, and management of resources and incorporate accountability in human action and decision.

Understanding how well-defined metrics affect individuals’ and institutions’ behavior is necessary. We need to develop improved methods for measuring the economic consequences of individuals’ and institutions’ environmental outcomes. We also need to formulate models to explain the various economic activities and their external effects. The main objective is to:

• bring accountability in individuals’ and institutions’ actions and decisions
• maintain a balance between economic development and environmental protection
• move beyond static problems of market behavior
• build dynamic decision-making sustainability score that unlocks benefits for individuals and institutions

Sustainable development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is a need of time. Risk Group, therefore, proposes developing Sustainability Score.

Sustainability Score

A Sustainability Score will indicate that the individuals and institutions can be trusted with their actions and decisions to protect the environment. Therefore, the proposed system shoul