Properly understood, sustainability is not the same as corporate social responsibility (CSR)—nor can it be reduced to achieving an acceptable balance across economic, social and environmental bottom lines. Instead, it is about the fundamental, intergenerational task of winding down the dysfunctional economic and business models of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the evolution of new ones fit for a human population headed towards nine billion people, living on a small planet which is already in ‘ecological overshoot’.
Our vision of the evolution of the transparent economy over the next decade is as follows:
Within the next decade, market and business transparency is universally accepted across the G20 countries and beyond as critical to economic resilience and sustainable value creation. Sustainability news and performance updates rank alongside financial news and performance. Terms like triple bottom line (TBL) and environment, social and governance (ESG) have played their roles as booster rockets and fall away as new forms of integrated accounting and reporting take over.
Growing political and government involvement, driving new rules, regulations and incentives with sustainability objectives, have spurred intensive innovation not only in corporate reporting and engagement but also in areas like cleantech—and in crowd-sourcing approaches to many areas of innovation. Web 2.0 approaches are endemic—and Web 3.0 (Semantic Web) strategies are widely used across the leading edge of business. Companies increasingly expose critical internal data-sets to selected stakeholders.
Data aggregation and analysis have reached levels unimaginable in 2010, with the performance of individual technologies, products, value webs and even entire economies readily and powerfully visualized against the background on global limits, footprints and targets. Common platforms—evolved from the likes of Google Earth and IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative—are widely used to track progress in system level change, to connect and support innovators, and to inform, engage and motivate citizens.
There is continuous access to real-time information on products, companies, supply chains and economies. And people use it, when buying, investing and deciding which organisation to work with.
