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The Importance of an ESG Strategy

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The Importance of an ESG Strategy resource image

Join FigBytes Head of Sustainability, Kate Cacciatore, as she shares her thoughts and insights on the importance of an ESG Strategy.

Don’t miss this brief chat on ESG strategy from the perspective of an experienced sustainability professional. This is a short excerpt from the full length webcast, Carbon & Beyond: A Discussion with Kate Cacciatore.

Rajiv JalimAnd I wanted to ask a very simple high level question, why is strategy important? Why is an ESG or sustainability strategy important for any organization?
Kate CacciatoreI kind of learned quite quickly in the work I was doing that if you want to bring about something that you consider to be positive either to reduce the negative impact of the company’s activities on the world and on people, or to bring about more positive impact, then you’ve got to somehow integrate that intention into the overall intention of the company.
Kate CacciatoreAnd in most companies, that happens through the strategic objectives that are set at the top of the company. And so throughout my career, in every job that I had, I was always focusing on, OK, so you’ve got this kind of overall strategy which may or may not already have some reference to sustainability. You know, until fairly recently, a lot of company strategy would not explicitly include objectives that might be related to sustainability.
Kate CacciatoreSo my goal was always to fully embed sustainability in the company strategy and not just have some separate things that we do on the side. And the way that played out in my career was that we were I was focusing primarily on, yes, doing all the things we have to do to be a responsible company, to do things the right way, et cetera, but also to in terms of the product and services of the company’s core business and look very deeply there.
Kate CacciatoreHow does sustainability fit into the picture? What are the ways in which our products and services could have a negative impact or a very strong positive impact on stakeholders, society, the environment, people etc. And so that was that was almost always my goal. And I think for me it comes back to intention, right? We have these processes in companies today for how to go from an intention to executing on that intention and strategy is fundamental to that.
Kate CacciatoreYeah, in particular setting strategy in terms of very specific targets and things that you want to achieve so that you can then, you know, measure and figure out with the data that you’ve got whether you’ve achieved that objective or not. But I would add that one of the things I learned over my career was the importance of governance, which is like the foundation underpinning the strategy that the company sets.
Kate CacciatoreAnd what I found was that very often some maybe weaknesses or things missing in the governance of the organization could end up meaning that you can’t even begin to integrate things into the strategy in a meaningful way. So I had a lot of learnings over my career, one that’s and it’s still something that’s very top of mind for me and for other companies today.
Kate CacciatoreI think in terms of, you know, are we are we setting ourselves up with the right governance structures to enable and create the conditions for what we’re seeking to achieve.