In five years as a Foundation for Digital Sustainability, I have seen many, many Sustainability Officers. There are the enthusiastic ones, who take a huge issue on their shoulders and make it a banner for the company. There are those who make it a real mission. There are those who have vision. There are those who move (and move) the world. Many of these over the years have become friends, and real pillars in the Foundation’s initiatives. But there are also those, and if I really must be honest they are not the minority, who – in the final analysis – do more harm than good.
Yes, they hurt. Not out of malice or calculation, but out of structural ignorance and congenital uselessness. They hurt because they do not understand. Or, worse still, they do not want to understand. And they are of two kinds.
– On the one hand, there are the ex-financiers, those who have spent a lifetime chasing the penny in the balance sheet and today masquerade as sustainability experts. For them, sustainability is a code to be deciphered, a compliance to be met, an indicator to be normalised. They talk about CSRD as if it were the Bible, quote the ESRS as if it were a mantra, compile KPIs with the zeal of a bailiff. They do ‘post mortem’ sustainability: they chase projects to check their impact ex post, when everything has already been decided, implemented, metabolised. Like corporate pathologists, they dissect what remains to try and prove that it was sustainable after all. A bit like putting a green plate on a hearse.
– On the other side are the CSR professionals. Those who, convinced they are making a difference, organise charity marathons and volunteer campaigns. Those for whom ‘doing sustainability’ means allocating a residual part of the budget to some social project, just to salve their conscience (and reputation). Maybe they don’t even do it for green washing: they are convinced that this is how it works. They make bombs, but in the meantime they reforest Marsica. They produce tons of disposable plastic, but sponsor the cleaning of the beach next door. They sell pesticides, but fund urban gardens for primary schools. Zero balance sustainability: you get dirty on one side, you wash on the other.
And yet, the most grotesque paradox is that both, the green accountants and the budget philanthropists, feel themselves to be protagonists of change.
They present themselves at conferences with colourful slides and plastic smiles, spouting buzzwords such as ‘impact’, ‘carbon neutrality’, ‘stakeholder engagement’. But the truth is that they have understood nothing. Nothing.
Because sustainability is not (just) a balance sheet. Nor is it (only) a social impact project. It is a paradigm shift. It is when sustainability enters the business model and contaminates it, restructures it, recasts it. It is when it stops being a business function and becomes the lens through which all – all – decisions are made. It is when it moves from the logic of ‘doing something good’ to the logic of ‘being something different’. Because if sustainability does not enter the business model, it is not sustainability. It can be corporate social responsibility, it can be compliance, but it is not sustainability.
Even worse, it is a sustainability that is not sustainable in the deepest sense of the term: it weighs on the organisation without generating value, turning into a cost that produces no return, neither economic nor reputational. It becomes a regulatory cage or a design ornament, more or less green, but which remains marginal, decorative, often perceived as a ballast by those called upon to implement it. Sustainability that imposes constraints, but does not offer meaning; that demands resources, but does not create results. It is not useful to the company, it is not useful to stakeholders. And therefore, paradoxically, it is unsustainable.
True sustainability is transformative. It is one that forces the organisation to question its own meaning, not just its impacts.
It is the one that imposes a radical rethinking of processes, of success metrics, of relationships with territories, with suppliers, with people. It is the one that forces one to choose. And choosing really costs money. It costs power, initially it costs margin, it costs time. But it restores meaning.
And therein lies the point. As long as we continue to look at the finger, made up of sustainability budgets and more or less worthy initiatives, we will continue to ignore the moon: a new idea of enterprise, capable of generating economic value by structurally transforming it into collective value. Not out of philanthropy, but out of vision. Not out of moral duty, but out of strategic intelligence.
If sustainability is dead, the climate did not kill it. The crisis did not kill it. We killed it. With our superficiality. With our inability to choose. With our illusion that it was enough to tell instead of change.
But there is still time. As long as we stop telling ourselves fairy tales, and start writing, with effort, but also with lucidity, a new story. One that is measured not in tonnes of CO₂ offset, but in generated sense.
And this work is now more important than ever. Because we are at the dawn of 2030, the year in which the United Nations will have to explain – at the weakest political, institutional and symbolic moment in its history – that it has missed the Sustainable Development Goals. Not some. Not some of them. Almost all of them. And if we are unable to read this failure for what it really is: definitive proof that a paradigm shift is needed, then sustainability will become what its detractors hope for. A rhetorical illusion good for filling conferences and reports, but incapable of directing change. To prevent this from happening, we must return to understanding its deeper meaning. We must stop talking about sustainability, and start doing it. Beyond words, beyond metrics, against hypocrisies.
And before any of the latter-day Pharisees feel compelled to defend the sanctity of the sustainability report or the nobility of CSR, let us make things clear right away: I am not denying the importance of CSRD, let alone corporate social responsibility activities. On the contrary: they are fundamental, necessary, often valuable tools. But to do only those things, deluding oneself that one has understood the deep meaning of sustainability, is to have understood nothing. I repeat: nothing. It means confusing the map with the territory, the checklist with the strategy, appearance with substance. And it is this, I repeat, that has killed sustainability.
