CSOs and other reporting staffers have a moral duty to push through

Here’s the intro from this Ralph Thurm newsletter:

My latest Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter ‚Sustainability Officers and Experts feeling the heat of collapse … how to react‘ has clearly been the most read one in a long time. I received a ton of private messages (and a few public responses) from people in the sustainability field expressing their personal pressures and how much they suffer by the workload and complexity they’re now facing.

They are concerned about a set of standards delivering an – my words – interoperability myth, just serving the standard setters, but not the reporters. Thousands of pages of standards, guidance documents, Q&A brochures, comparability matrixes and interpretations, an unbearable mass of nothing but compliance and – again my words – collapse documentation. Many also can’t grasp the literal siege by ESG consultancies offering expensive services that promise deliver on that compliance. Sustainability, well that’s something different. Many said ‘that’s not why I stepped into sustainability in the first place, but now I am required to comply with the regulation, how much should I let go of my own vision?’

Others, also in public, criticised that I’m actually not throwing a lifeline to the CSOs and other sustainability experts, not giving them a pep talk, but actually would argue to give up. Really, is that what I wrote?

Let me put that into context: we’re in overshoot of ‘carrying’ capacities and undershoot of ‘caring’ capacities for 50+ years. We’re reaching irreversible culmination points. Nature cries havoc, it’s on the news every day. Governments, financial markets, big NGOs (under corporate strait jackets) and corporates deliver no vision, just curing symptoms, many of them cocoon and even move backwards (also known as the ‘ESG backlash’). Incremental sustainability reporting delivers literally nothing for true sustainability.

In that situation, I recommended the use of the UN Sustainable Performance Indicators as the only ‘authentic’ way to measure ‘real’ sustainability, or for the sake of ALL industries, the true level of non-sustainability (because that’s simply the reality, and why not saying it to at least create a new baseline of honesty).

Not shying away from that is not a heroic act, it’s a moral duty. And still, obfuscation with the exiting standards like ESRS, ISS and/or GRI seems to have the preference, while the UNSDPI are compatible, and offer the ONLY objective way of defining materiality, and reduce risk and greenwashing litigation potential. Tell me how that is NOT throwing a lifeline, at least for the short-term.