Sustainable Strategy Brief – Issue #3

Demand for technologies that support climate resilience and adaptation could create a $1 trillion opportunity for private capital by 2030! – McKinsey 2025

McKinsey asserts that the changing world presents significant investment opportunities for investors to create value alongside resilience benefits.

Boardroom questions to open with
→What are our material physical climate risks and resilience dependencies mapped to our P&L?
→ What is our ESG value proposition on resilience – are we simply reducing our footprint and risk, or are we enabling customers/communities to adapt?
→ What are the 3–5 areas we must master to deliver credible business cases?

Why this brief? Who it’s for?

In a world where strategy and finance interact with sustainability and ESG, the difference between aspiration and impact lies in how you frame the problem and how you execute.

Sustainable Strategy Brief is a monthly newsletter for
→ Boards and executive teams (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and CSOs).
→ Senior leaders responsible for strategy, finance, risk and transformation.
→ Organisations that want to turn scarce resources into sustainable value.

Each edition offers insights on the following topics:
→ Frameworks and tools that help embed sustainability into your core strategy.
→ Overcoming the implementation gap between vision and turning strategy into results.
→ Moving from reporting to P&L-linked execution.
→ Board-level playbooks, case studies, and metrics across various industries and markets.

Boardroom questions for you
→ Who around your table is responsible for sustainable strategy, not just target setting?
→ Do you see the implementation gap present in your organisation?

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We have successfully launched a YouTube channel @SustainableStrategyBriefLive

Episode 2: Turning sustainability growth ambition into credible business cases went live on January 14, 2026, with 493 people registered to join us.

Our discussions and questions reinforce that the sustainability debate has shifted from morality to business-facing.

Together with Allen Cedeno, ESG & Sustainable Finance , Expert and Michael Baxter – The ESG Show, we developed ten key lessons around – Turning sustainability growth ambition into credible business cases

Key Lessons
Here are ten lessons:

Move from compliance language to capital logic – Can you explain the case in investor/CFO terms (cash, risk, WACC, unit economics) rather than solely ESG narrative?
Capital logic beats compliance in funding decisions – Is the funding rationale explicitly tied to capital allocation criteria and strategic trade-offs?
Finance must co-own the baseline – has Finance signed off the baseline, data verification, and the assumptions register?
Model downside, not just upside – do you show downside scenarios, sensitivities, and what can disrupt the case?
Pilot with controls, or don’t pilot – is the pilot designed with controls, measurement discipline, to ensure real impact?
Use rigorous financial metrics (NPV/IRR/Payback) – are NPV/IRR and/or payback stated with cash timing and key assumptions?
Write stop rules first – are explicit stop/scale thresholds written up-front with decision rights?
30/60/90 deliverable cadence – is there a 30/60/90 cadence with named deliverables and owners (not activities)?
Audit where value leaks – have you quantified value leakage (waste, rework, claims risk, supplier hotspots) and targeted it? day cycles, not one-off hero projects – with around 70% of sustainability projects still failing to deliver, we argued for 30/60/90 day cycles that keep momentum visible quarter after quarter, instead of big-bang programmes that eventually stall.
Reputation = revenue or risk, not feelings – is reputational impact expressed as revenue lift, risk reduction, or cost of capital—not sentiment?

Next steps→ If these themes resonated, do watch a short 1m. 20sec video about what sustainable growth ambition really means – and share it with a colleague.

The Three-Word Test for Investment-Grade Sustainability: Revenue, Resilience, Reputation.

Most “sustainable growth ambition” statements don’t fail because of the intent. They fail because they can’t survive the first hard funding conversation.

You’ve probably seen the pattern:

A business case may have a strong narrative. Then the CFO and/or investment committee ask three questions to determine whether it’s a decision-quality strategy or just an aspiration:

1. What changes in the P&L?
2. What risk comes off the balance sheet (or out of our downside)?
3. What do we stop doing if the evidence doesn’t show up?

Boards fund evidence, not ambition.

The decision-framing move that changes everything

In the SSBL community, we keep coming back to a deceptively simple framing device: Is your sustainability agenda primarily about revenue, resilience, or reputation?
Leadership teams often try to claim all three. This leads to long decks, scattered initiatives, and no capital reallocation.

This often results in lots of activity but limited traction.

The solution isn’t better storytelling—pick the job first, then build investment-grade logic.

What does this look like?

The 3 Rs
1. Revenue: customer value proposition, economic rationale, route-to-market, pricing power.
2. Resilience: quantified risk reduction, controls, downside scenarios, insurance logic.
3. Reputation: measurable trust outcomes, licence-to-operate milestones, governance guardrails.

Once you choose, the pathway becomes decision-quality: value driver → baseline → initiative → metric → decision gate. Now leaders can scale, adjust, or stop—based on results, not rhetoric.

A quick self-check you can run in 10 minutes.

Ask your leadership team to answer these, in one sentence each:

1. Our primary driver is revenue / resilience / reputation because __.
2. The one metric that proves it is working is __.
3. Our baseline today is __ (with date + source).
4. The first decision gate is in _ weeks, and we will scale/adjust/stop if _.

If you can’t answer these, you don’t have a strategy—you have a narrative.

If you watch the 2min clip – How to turn a good sustainability story into a credible business case, you’ll recognise the core point: boards fund evidence.

Final call: To access the full SSBL episode and curated video clips, subscribe now via @SustainableStrategyBriefLive and stay updated with the latest insights.

Remember, sustainable strategy is not merely a statement of intent; it is a repeatable system for converting resources into advantage—measured in costs, revenue, risk, and trust.

Warm regards, Paul