Last week, 40,000 people gathered under the glass and iron dome of the Grand Palais in Paris for Change NOW: three days that brought together leaders, investors, and practitioners working to reconcile business and sustainability.
In a session on business accountability, two voices stood out for their precision and timeliness. Gauthier Acket, newly appointed Head of Global ESG at KPMG International, and Fredrika Klarén, Head of Sustainability at EV-maker Polestar, made the case for corporate sustainability to be understood and implemented not as a posture but a condition for survival.
We are not in the era of voluntary commitments and goodwill reporting anymore. We are in an era of compressed margins, disrupted supply chains, resource constraints, and a workforce that increasingly evaluates employers on whether their work means something, its purpose. In the current environment, companies treating sustainability as a lipstick service exercise are not only misaligned with values but also misaligned with commercial reality.
What the numbers actually say
Acket from KPMG shared the example of an Indian retailer with whom his consulting company has worked to reduce their emissions. In doing so, their EBITDA increased by 10% while their emissions fell of 8%.
This is the argument that is often missed by sustainability practitioners: reducing environmental impact and improving financial performance are not in tension. In many cases, they pull the same lever.
Acket argued that a company developing its transition plan, is the best opportunity to plan the business development for the long run, reaching far more than just a reporting obligation. Corporate sustainability is not a compliance baseline, but the business development plan.
Just arriving from a work travel in Asia, Acket said that in that region companies are not asking how to adapt to the current landscape of uncertainty and geopolitical disruption. On the contrary, they are asking how to lead in becoming more competitive, and efficiency and sustainability are key levers.
The trust deficit nobody is fixing
Klarén from Polestar explained that consumers are more and more sceptical of sustainability claims because those claims have too often been vague, unverifiable, or flatly contradicted by the product in their hands. Polestar’s answer, she said, is transparency as their vehicles come with a full Life Cycle Assessment, published openly. Reducing the carbon footprint of vehicles is not a marketing figure but a business goal.
Klarén’s points to a basic corporate sustainability principle: trust is not built by better messaging; but by making the evidence available before anyone asks for it.
What this means for how companies communicate
At 10 Billion Solutions, in the last six years, we have observed that there is a gap between what companies are doing on sustainability and what they are saying about it. Some are doing serious work and communicating it poorly; while others are communicating confidently around work that does not yet exist or it is not impactful. Both ways erode credibility and both carry commercial consequences.
The organisations moving fastest are the ones that have stopped treating sustainability communications as a function separate from sustainability strategy. When the narrative is built on the same foundation as the transition plan, when what you say reflects what you measure and what you are genuinely targeting, the communication becomes credible by construction rather than by effort.
The key takeaway from Acket and Klarén’s interventions at Change NOW: Sustainability is not an aspiration; it is architecture.
10 Billion Solutions and Corporate Sustainability Stories
10 Billion Solutions, we work with organisations closing the gap between their climate and sustainability work and their story. Not by polishing language, but by building the communications strategy that reflects the architecture underneath the company or institution. If this resonates with where your organisation is right now, let’s discuss: use the contact form or send us a direct email.
