What is Corporate Sustainability?

Generic definition: Corporate sustainability is a managemnt paradigm under which companies engage in activities that are consistent with sustainable development

Corporate sustainability differs across three dimension

• The comprehensiveness of sustainable development

• The level of ambition

• The level of integration

  
  

The notion of sustainable development contains four elements:

• The economic

• The environmental

• The social side

  • -> triple bottom line

• The notion of intergenerational equity

The more elements of sustainable development includedd in the company’s statement, the more comprehensive it is

A company that only considers single elements, fails to recognize the interconnected and holistic challenges that the environment and our society is facing

The level of ambition captures the extent to which firms must exert effort

If you asses a company’s sustainability efforts, consider carefully how ambitious the sustainability targets are and what the company plans to do to schieve the targets

The level captures the extent to which a company integrates sustainability into their core activities

When you combine the three dimensions, you get a comprehensive perspective on corporate sustainability in the form of a cube

This three-dimensional vector space allows you to capture the various understandings of corporate sustainability

Two important points the cube stresses:

• There isn’t only one correct understanding of corporate sustainability

• You can systematically compare and contrast different understandings of corporate sustainability