Our thinking

The ripple effects of regulation

18 October, 2024

Our Sustainability Leaders Panel, run in partnership with Echo Research, is a group of senior sustainability executives who provide regular insight into their experience of the evolving, and often challenging, sustainability landscape. Most recently, we engaged the panel in a survey focused on the way businesses are reacting to new sustainability regulations.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given two-thirds of our respondents will come under CSRD requirements (imminently or in the future), the challenges of adapting to this regulatory shift are front of mind.

The inevitable pain of complying certainly comes through in results, but encouraging our panellists are also already seeing some benefits being unlocked by regulation. These include engaging boards more effectively in sustainability, encouraging the business to think more carefully about risks (with double materiality playing a big role here), and perhaps most importantly doing the long-talked about task of taking sustainability out of a silo and into the heart of the business. There are also some weak signals that other transformative benefits might be coming down the line – including that regulation and reporting might act to drive businesses to change their business model in progressive ways. Though that is not to deny that panellists are clear we are a way off a shift in mindset from “just” complying with this undeniably complex and onerous legislation. There are also interesting findings around how the job of CSOs is changing, and in future surveys, we plan to look in more detail at how sustainability leaders can best create organisation-wide change.

You can find more information on the survey results here. And if you would be interested in joining the panel, please contact Kerry (kerry@good.business).

By Rosie Serlin