If you're wondering what your actual impact on sustainable development is as a sustainability consultant, have a look.
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Hi there! Anyone from Quantis willing to chat?
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Can relate..some people working in the field have no background on the subject or the science behind and probably just ended up there because it's cool now.. In my previous company I had to explain what an ecosystem service is. To my boss. I think that's where we find the difference between a good sustainability consulting firm and a mediocre one.
The ISSP certification is a good, general certification and study guide to help give a broad overview
It's perhaps a similar wake-up call as "Winners take all" was for social impact consultants.
https://ssir.org/books/reviews/entry/are_the_elite_hijacking_social_change#
"Let me clarify from the outset: ESG isn’t per se bad, it’s actually needed information in the design of sustainability indicators, so none of the ESG work is useless; what makes it ‘meaningless to most people’ (to use Dana Meadows wording) is the neglect of the denominator thresholds & allocations against what these numerator data need to be measured to say anything useful about how sustainable any performance is."
"And I’ve heard others use the ‘let’s not let perfect be the enemy of the good’ argument - unfortunately, when it comes to complex adaptive systems (such as companies, economies, ecosystems, etc), one could be doing ‘good’ and yet those systems trigger tipping point collapses. [...] Unfortunately, the widespread conflation of ESG with sustainability is a fatal flaw. As Global Reporting Initiative Co-Founder Allen White has said, ‘ESG does not, by nature, carry a sustainability gene... Sustainability requires contextualization within thresholds. That’s what sustainability is all about.’ White points out that ESG is inherently incrementalist, and therefore it could only achieve sustainability by accident, seeing as it doesn’t actually measure sustainability."
"“The only thing more dangerous than no progress is the illusion of progress.”
- Brendan LeBlanc, EY, r3.0 Steering Board 2015– 2020"
"This series perfectly encapsulated the essence of r3.0’s Positive Maverick stance – that it is an ethical responsibility to assertively voice our concerns about systemic and structural blockages of the fields we work in – even (or especially) when these fields purport to advance positive causes."
This got me thinking about a video I saw the other day:
https://youtu.be/3qGLLA8HNP8
Full disclosure: have not read the paper yet but first impression is this is a bit silly. No ESG consulting practices that I know of are rooted in people just wanting to make a difference, the leaders of the practices are highly specialized and seasoned professionals who pass on their knowledge to younger consultants. For consulting firms that have worked with massive companies on using more sustainable materials, advising against certain energy sources, etc, is definitely not doing more harm than good.
But I digress, should probably read the paper.
Posted some quotes below. If some of them resonate with you and you're open to a new perspective, I recommend to read the paper.
Also haven't read the article (and won't read a 32 page opinion piece) - but I think whatever you see in the corporate landscape is played out in consulting ones too. Some people see as far as incremental change based on anecdote or capitalistic preferences, others are grounded in science-based literature and fight for something more. Consulting no better than companies IMO
Yeah that's fair.
Just highlighting that we need to think for ourselves about whether what we're doing is actually making a difference in view of the time we have left or if we just like to believe so to be able to live a comfortable life.
"I don't do enough because my clients aren't asking for it" appears to me as disingenuous if we're actually concerned about sustainable development (and the moral implications of insufficient action).
Some quotes that stood out to me below (to facilitate discussion without having to read the paper):
"But it’s a hard job getting there individually. Why would any consultant advocate for big transformative changes in an organization when the small incremental steps secure their budgets for many years to come and make it nice and cosy (they call it ‘practically possible’) for clients that already feel overwhelmed by the many things they are asked to do? The fact that many of those things could become obsolete in a ‘New Normal’ doesn’t cross their client’s minds either since they have perfectly cultivated that incremental approach."
"I’ll finish here to note that there’s no way around thresholds and allocations. We need to get used that they are - in macroeconomic thinking - the new ‘supply and demand’ in an age of scarcity. Thresholds describe what is still available within carrying capacities, allocations are describing the ‘allowed demand’ by defining a fair share. The longer we ignore these relevant and necessary parts of the sustainability homework, the longer we wait to harmonize around the denominator thresholds and allocations, the more irrevocable damage will be created. First and foremost, we do this to ourselves, as the planet will be doing wonderfully fine without us! Our choice is a binary one."
This is interesting, thanks for sharing. Do you think sustainability consulting is "worse" in terms of lack of real impact (or other metrics) than in-house/industry sustainability or ESG programs?
I think in-house/external is the same in terms of impact. It all depends on what the client wants, and if that's insufficient then so be it.
Internal folks have more leverage to be aspirational I would assume.