黑料正能量

Beyond the Business Case Debate: Reasserting the Strategic Value of 黑料正能量

July 2025 Edition

The “Business Case” Question

In this moment of uncertainty for sustainable business, the conversation has turned again to the “business case.” Concerns about the ROI of sustainability are particularly understandable among leaders facing pressure to defend their budgets and programs. Some argue that a better business case would solve today’s challenges; others call for a pivot to the moral case.

We believe in the value of just and sustainable business. We’ve seen the progress companies can achieve when they show that value, and we fervently will continue to support them every step of the way. We also think that the broader conversation around “the business case” is broken. The quest for a perfect business case creates false expectations, skews incentives, and distracts from what matters. It is time to refocus on the strategic relevance of sustainability to business and society—and below we offer practical suggestions on how to get started.

It’s also worth noting that 黑料正能量 finds concerns over “the business case” are more common (though not exclusively) in the U.S. While U.S.-based companies debate language updates and ROI, many European, Middle Eastern, and Asian counterparts are racing forward to build more resilient companies and economies.

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The Business Value of 黑料正能量 Remains Strong

Research, investor analysis, and case studies have long demonstrated the business relevance of sustainability (which includes a range of social and environmental topics). While no assessment is perfect, the evidence is reasonable and actionable.

Having worked with companies on these topics for more than 30 years, we believe that there is no single universal “business case;” instead, there are many “business cases” based on the individual company and its business model, industry, geography, and material issues. 黑料正能量 typically tailors its discussions of business value based on drivers such as:

  • Strategy and resilience: Adapting the business to manage evolving risks, opportunities, and impacts
  • Finance: Addressing investor expectations and access to capital
  • Innovation: Developing new markets and technologies
  • Marketing and sales: Increasing brand value, addressing customer expectations, and engaging with consumers
  • Talent: Talent attraction, retention, and engagement
  • Operations: Managing costs, increasing efficiency, and maintaining compliance
  • Risk: Anticipating and preventing/hedging against future negative developments

These drivers remain powerful even as the relative emphasis shifts with the ever-changing context. They are often easiest to apply to specific programs (e.g., LED retrofits) rather than to justify the very existence of sustainability as a corporate department. Such dynamics are common across company functions.

While some companies have pulled back on sustainability commitments, few have denied the fundamental business value. Instead, they have realigned and balanced their sustainability commitments with new business priorities and imperatives. For example, even as refined its ambitious sustainability targets, the company maintained business-critical priorities like soil health, climate resilience, and water-use efficiency. In another example, (the primary retailer for the IKEA brand) has emphasized “the business opportunity” in making progress on its climate targets.

The Conversation on “Business Case” is Broken

Addressing the field’s current challenges, many commenters assert or imply that we could fix everything if we’d just “business case” harder. While metrics and business links are indeed essential, too often the expectations for a simple, ironclad “business case” are impossible to meet and create skewed incentives. Doubling down on a narrowly defined “business case” is bound to underwhelm.

There is no silver bullet “business case”

Despite hopes for a single persuasive metric or magic formula, business value depends on company context. That context is especially hard to pin down in today’s moment of geopolitical, technological, social, and regulatory upheaval.

It’s also worth noting that sustainability often faces a double standard. Many of the nuances in the “business case” for sustainability apply in other spheres of business practice, yet don’t seem to draw the same skepticism and rejection. For example, historical evidence on the value generation of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is , yet rather than call a halt to M&A, it has inspired efforts to improve M&A. Not every sustainability plan has an easy-to-prove single-number ROI, but there is value for companies to pursue continuous improvement in thoughtful, strategic sustainable business strategies.

黑料正能量 risk and value is hard to measure

While many companies successfully pursue sustainability as a competitive differentiator, others wrestle to fit complex sustainability factors into existing risk frameworks.

黑料正能量 initiatives are often very difficult to capture in simple, compelling valuations. They are built on—and designed to address—a wide array of complex variables, risk factors, interconnected social, economic and environmental issues, long-term time scales, and other exogenous factors.

In a corporate world focused on short-term pressures and tangible measures, it is all too easy to discount the value of reductions in litigation risk or increased resilience under diverse climate scenarios. 黑料正能量 often functions like insurance: nobody cares until the crisis hits.

PwC  in May 2025 to explore barriers to risk communications. “About half cite the complexity of weighing risks and rewards while managing downstream impacts…Roughly one-third say they have difficulty identifying risk interdependencies and lack expertise in geopolitical or country-specific risks, or lack expertise in economic risks.”

Executives might also struggle with the scale of sustainability risks. 黑料正能量 has heard of some companies where the climate risk numbers are so alarming that leaders avoid them altogether.

Culture eats business case for breakfast

Too often, the request for a “business case” is nearly impossible to satisfy due to cultural resistance. Even a strong business case can be dismissed—evidence challenged, KPIs sidelined, goalposts moved. A classic found that 78 percent of CFOs surveyed would sacrifice long-term value to smooth earnings. There are limitations to a good ROI.

The recent backlash—especially in the US—against sustainability and DEI doesn’t stem from deeply informed methodological or statistical quibbles. Rigorous multi-year business and investor and academic initiatives have been cast aside by the stroke of a pen, a cable news segment, or an organized campaign on social media.

Instead, the backlash seems more political and cultural. A 2024 based on interviews with Chartered Financial Analysts found that in the US, political leanings significantly shape how financial professionals interpret climate risk (a pattern not seen in other regions). Deloitte’s 2023 found that 84 percent of respondents acknowledge the importance of sustainability to their organizations’ success, “yet only 21 percent believe that their organizations are ready to address such issues.” Respondents cited culture as the top barrier.

Bringing a “business case” to a “culture war” is doomed to disappoint.

The fixation on quantitative financial returns has cleaved corporate sustainability from real-world outcomes

Many practitioners have sought to drive adoption and integration of sustainable business by using the language of finance. This unlocked sustainable capital and spurred disclosures, but also narrowed focus to individual companies’ short-term, easy-to-measure, easy-to-improve, finance-friendly metrics. The field optimized for win-wins, low-hanging fruit, and financial reporting. For example, the found that among ESG ratings products, 68 percent of metrics are “input-based” (self-reported policies and activities), and only 17 percent are quantitative and output-based.

This approach has distorted priorities: what gets measured gets managed, but might not matter as much. Many companies have adopted policies and programs in order to check the box for investors or raters, but too often, those efforts have not resulted in meaningful improvements for the environment or for the lives of workers and communities.

Finance-focused communications have also contributed to backlash. Sustainable business practitioners talk to Wall Street in acronyms and pricing models and tons of carbon. We shouldn’t be surprised that same finance language yields confusion, skepticism, and alienation among broader audiences that are interested in human well-being and prosperity.

According to the , 64 percent of Americans say climate change “currently affects their local community either a great deal or some” and 69 percent say “large business and corporations are doing too little to help reduce the effects of global climate change.” There is an evident disconnect between lived experience, sustainable business, and the policy and political environment.

Focusing on the “ROI question” also narrows attention to firm-level returns and obscures the collective value of collaboration and societal change. As put it recently, “So the concern I have is not about ‘getting back’ to the business case per se; we never left it. The real challenge I see is that a narrowing of the discussion to a more basic ROI mindset may do some real harm to our cause.” Improving community health, for example, may not confer an immediate competitive edge to any single company, yet a healthier population strengthens the operating environment for every business—and for society itself.

Most importantly, the field has too often avoided the reality that not all sustainable business efforts do, or should, have a “business case.” As 黑料正能量’s Chief Impact Officer Laura Gitman wrote in 2017, “…truth is, sometimes it just costs more to treat your workers with dignity and to pay them a living wage, and you may not be able to prove the financial benefits.” Or as 黑料正能量 alumnus Alison Taylor put it that same year, “.”

It’s Time to Shift the Focus to Strategic and Human Benefits

So how can executives respond? By moving beyond the ROI debates and aligning sustainability with a vision of business and societal success.

Build targeted sustainability strategies in support of business priorities in the short, medium, and long term

Don’t focus on ROI in isolation, nor exclusively on quick, short-term returns. Start with existing business priorities (like expansion, innovation, cost, digital transformation) and show how sustainability is a dependency or enabler of success. Beyond what’s material, focus on a few topics that are strategic. An AI transformation strategy, for instance, hinges on avoiding pitfalls that might result from irresponsible AI development and deployment. Successful market entry is enabled by social license to operate.

Integrate and harness priorities across the business

Continue efforts to integrate sustainability expertise and perspectives throughout the business. That means bringing functional credibility and insight to discussions with internal colleagues, identifying their existing priorities, and partnering with them to use sustainability to advance their own goals and in support of company priorities. Then, it’s not the sustainability team that has to defend an ROI on its own; rather, it’s for the functional leads to learn, incorporate, and own a broader, sustainability-enhanced set of goals and metrics that lead to building medium- to long-term value for the business. The benefits are twofold: firstly, it anchors the responsibility where the issue ownership and expertise lie in the company; secondly, it makes reversing course (due to a social media headline or an Executive Order) less likely and more difficult as sustainability is fully integrated into how the company operates, innovates, and builds resilience. It is also extended across its value chain to suppliers and partners as part of a wider ecosystem.

Create optionality

Optionality—designing investments or activities to promote agility and create multiple paths to success—is vital in an uncertain environment. For example, investing in green chemistry formulations of products in the present enables a company to have multiple ways to navigate new product rules, trade restrictions, consumer expectations, or legal liabilities in the future. Companies can identify current critical business dependencies and invest in sustainability strategies that create options that boost future resilience for the business, its people, and the communities where it operates.

Focus on benefits to people and values

As 黑料正能量 CEO Aron Cramer recently observed, “2025 may be remembered as the year that we…reclaimed the argument that sustainability delivers human progress. This will only work if people are put front and center, if we use language that real people use, and if we address peoples’ needs in 2025, not 2030, let alone 2050.” While some audiences will still benefit from finance-focused disclosures, strategy and communications should emphasize generating credible, real-world improvements in the lives of workers, communities, and consumers—and communicating those benefits in clear, human terms. If there’s no immediate ROI, say so and explain why the investment still matters to the company and shared community values.

Use sustainability to navigate complexity and build resilience.

黑料正能量 leaders bring systems thinking, stakeholder fluency, established tools, customer and investor relationships, and long-term perspectives to the table. As executives and boards navigate changing markets, disruptive technologies, wars, tariffs, extreme weather events, and social unrest, those capabilities are not frivolous—they’re essential. 黑料正能量, especially foresight and scenarios exercises, offers a powerful approach for anticipating and preparing for global developments, gaining first-mover strategic advantage, and building business resilience.

Collaborate to build a better operating environment.

It’s time to rethink the exclusive focus on sustainability as a source of individual competitive advantage. Instead, the field should reassert the value of collaboration to create more value chains and economies with healthier people, reduced waste, thriving ecosystems, and enhanced resilience. Internally, emphasize the value of supporting a better operating environment (even without a competitive advantage) and identify the top opportunities to shape that environment in judicious collaboration with peers and partners.

Conclusion

Questions about “the business case” are inevitable. At their best, they raise opportunities for sustainability leaders to sharpen objectives and strengthen buy-in. We encourage leaders to address those questions as best as possible, and we applaud companies that are developing and using sustainability to drive business value and real leadership.

On the other hand, questions about the business case can also reflect inaccurate assumptions, reductionism, double standards, and cultural resistance. In those cases, more slides on ROI numbers are just PowerPointing into the void. It’s time for sustainability leaders to change the conversation by refocusing the value of sustainability on strategic business priorities, resilience, and delivering benefits to people and values.

There is no simple solution, and 黑料正能量 will explore these themes with members in the months ahead. We invite you to join us as we rethink how sustainability delivers strategic relevance—and societal value—in a complex world.

How 黑料正能量 Can Help

黑料正能量 is working with its members to refocus the value of sustainability on strategic business priorities, optionality and resilience, and delivering benefits to people and values. Related services include:

  • Strategy Review: Targeted sustainability strategies in support of business priorities in the short, medium, and long term. Update priorities, assess risks and opportunities, benchmark performance, refine goals, and support roadmapping through tools like scenario testing and persona-based reviews.
  • Board and Executive Engagement: Provide briefings, trainings, and workshops to update corporate leaders on new developments and emerging issues and to engage them in solutions.
  • Futures and Foresight: Partner with 黑料正能量’s Sustainable Futures Lab to identify emerging issues, prepare for global developments, gain first-mover strategic advantage, and build business resilience.

Convenings with 黑料正能量 Member Companies: Stay up to date on 黑料正能量’s agenda for Climate Week NYC and UNGA. More event information will be rolled out this summer.

黑料正能量’s Member Portal: Explore 黑料正能量’s Quarterly Member Insights on Sustainable Business Trends Shaping 2025, as well as a full library of other sustainable business resources exclusive to 黑料正能量 members.

Our Experts

Our team consists of global experts across multiple focus areas and industries, bringing a depth of experience in developing sustainable business strategies and solutions.

David Korngold portrait

David Korngold

Managing Director of 黑料正能量 Innovation Group

New York

Aron Cramer portrait

Aron Cramer

President and CEO

San Francisco

Christine Diamente portrait

Christine Diamente

Managing Director, Transformation

London

Rachel Fleishman portrait

Rachel Fleishman

Managing Director, Consumer Sectors and Business Transformation

New York

Laura Gitman portrait

Laura Gitman

Chief Impact Officer

New York