'Sustainability' Targets: Helpful or Harmful?

One of the most common ways of talking about sustainability in business is by setting targets. Helped by the proliferation of the idea that data is king, quantitative targets that in theory hold an organisation accountable to some numerical amount, fill our airwaves.

From H&M’s 100% sustainably sourced materials by 2030, to PUMA’s 35% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, what do they mean and are they even helpful?

Most scientifically orientated professionals working in the sustainability space would argue for and against them. On one hand, they can be a powerful motivator for businesses and industry. They can galvanise Executive Boards and signal market opportunities.

However, in the fashion industry especially, where a business’s operations are constantly changing, data quality can be extremely poor. It can be nothing short of impossible to determine baselines required in order to set the targets, let alone report on progress.

Most importantly, the majority of stakeholders essential to the implementation of these targets are not owned by the business setting them. Manufacturing suppliers, distributors, logistics and impact investors can be left wondering how they could even be set.

Even with the most advanced supply chain software, it is phenomenally complex to collect the data required. Cultural, commercial and political issues constantly block progress on this issue and unsurprisingly, not many businesses are actually willing to talk about this.

As we enter the year 2020, surely it makes more sense to focus on qualitative targets that clearly focus industries on urgently required, system level change. Targets that look more like principles such as ‘zero waste to landfill’ or ‘zero use of virgin plastics’.

It allows not just the business, but their stakeholders and the industry it operates within to align around a core target and then measure progress in their own quantitative way.

In this new era where sustainability is no longer about growing a business and just trying to do a little less harm, we must find more efficient and effective ways to make progress.

This is nowhere more relevant than in the climate action space. It takes nothing less than a god dam PhD to understand how to set and report on emissions reductions targets. In the midst of global climate crisis happening around the globe, wouldn’t it be far more powerful to set a target to focus all (not a percentage of) our efforts on renewable energy?

Imagine if at the signing of the Kyoto Protocol the stakeholders in the room said ‘Fuck it. We don’t have time for this.’ and just focused on transitioning to renewable energy sources instead of complicated emissions reductions targets far too easy for businesses to dismiss.

In my opinion, regenerative sustainability offers the biggest opportunity for us to urgently restore our natural systems and so prevent further climate crisis. Re-wilding and restoring natural systems and transitioning to a regenerative economy actually offers us hope.

Hope that we can halt massive biodiversity losses, total collapse of our food systems, poisoning ourselves through our air and consumables and apocalyptic climate events.

But re-wilding is exactly that; wild. So let’s not get hung up on setting targets to 'offset' carbon emissions or plant X tree's so your business looks good, let’s just get on and do it.