Despite sustainability being hailed as a key area of business focus, most companies are just using the term as another layer of management-speak.
Research commissioned by Google Cloud, which featured responses from about 1,500 C-level executives from 16 countries across Europe, sustainability is being inserted into every press release and dull business meeting.
However, money to bring about sustainability goals is surprisingly lacking with cash being earmarked for more pressing projects.
The vast majority of respondents (90 percent) name-checked environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives as being a top organisational priority for their enterprises, with the UK participants in the poll giving themselves an above-average rating for their efforts.
But the research also revealed that businesses across EMEA are allocating only nine percent of their budget towards ESG initiatives, with this figure dropping to eight per cent for UK firms.
Managers appear clueless about how effective the sustainability initiatives they have rolled out are because relatively few have measurement tools in place to track the impact of their actions.
To this point, 36 percent of respondents to the Google Cloud poll said they have methods in place to quantify their sustainability efforts, and 17 percent of this group said they are using the insights gleaned to optimise their sustainability efforts.
Justin Keeble, managing director for global sustainability at Google Cloud, in a blog post discussing the results. “Without accurate measurement, it’s hard to report genuine progress.”
The research showed a troubling gap between how well organisations think they are doing, and how accurately they were measuring it.
Also, 58 percent of participants said they agree that “green hypocrisy” exists within their organisations and acknowledge that their firms have overstated their sustainability efforts.
Some 71 percent of the UK respondents admitted that their organisations are guilty of “greenwashing”. This means their companies spend more time and money on marketing themselves as sustainable than on measures that would genuinely minimise the environmental impact of their activities.
On the positive side, the data suggested that businesses wanted to do a better job on sustainability, with 65 percent saying they want to make more progress on ESG but don’t know how to go about doing so.
