This week takes place the Climate Action Week. While global emissions keep growing, the time has come for walking the talk on sustainability in daily operations. It is about stepping up your organisation’s action on delivering measurable sustainable impact across your value chain.

As a Sustainable Leader, you are likely to face barriers on implementing actions that have a real impact on your Triple Bottom Line of economic, social and environmental performance. To help you navigate beyond business-as-usual leadership, we have curated the most successful strategies for avoiding real climate action. By identifying these strategies, we want to help pioneering Sustainable Leaders debunk greenwashing and other avoidance strategies that can be followed by some gatekeepers within organisations.

Here are our Top 5 avoidance strategies

Focus on short-term costs – “Sustainability is too expensive”
It will never be cheaper than now to prepare for the climate emergency, improve organisational resilience and develop a value proposition anchored around real needs of people and planet. Sustainability is an investment to survive on the market.

Delaying action – “We still have time”
If it was not a priority until now, the increased frequency of natural disasters and the skyrocketing prices of natural resources demonstrate the business case. We have to switch sustainable, circular and regenerative solutions now.

Avoiding responsibility – “If China doesn’t act, why should we?”
Beyond the fact that managers in the EU count among the global 1% top earners that are responsible for 15% of global emissions, acting sustainably is the best way to stay competitive in the future, particularly in Europe which is very dependent on the stability of global supply chains.

Fake realism – “Our customers don’t care – they just want cheap products”
Customer expectations and brand awareness is evolving fast. The younger generations put a much higher importance on green and fair products. Furthermore, legislators and market prices will require you to innovate sustainably. Anticipating these changes will be key to stay in the game.

Greenwashing – “I really don’t care about this, but you can do some marketing on sustainability”
As Simon Sinek says, people don’t buy things for what they are, but for why you offer them. Customers, legislators and investors are increasingly aware about greenwashing and fake sustainability.