Toward Sustainability: Understanding the Challenges

Introducing the CES Sustainability Initiative

On Feb. 13, 2024, the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies (CES) hosted its inaugural sustainability roundtable to introduce the CES Sustainability Initiative. The workshop, held under the Chatham House Rule, was led by CES energy and sustainability fellow Rachel A. Meidl. This report is intended to serve as an aide-mémoire to those who took part and a general summary of discussions for those who did not. The unattributed views expressed are those of the participants.

The CES Sustainability Initiative has five objectives. It aims to: 

1. Advance and maintain the scientific rigor required for progressing ideas that are foundational for the multifaceted concept of sustainability.
2. Connect the interactions of policy, economics, and technology to Rice University’s core educational, research, and outreach missions to demonstrate leadership in sustainability.
3. Serve as a nonpartisan partner and central resource for businesses, the government, investors, and other stakeholders to understand the risks, unintended consequences, and opportunities of the global sustainability transition, and to develop, implement, and evaluate sustainability strategies across life cycles and multiple geographies.
4. Stimulate cooperative alliances with strategic partners throughout Rice University and beyond to inform successful sustainability strategies across the corporate sector and government agencies.
5. Establish sustainability as a core organizing principle for the economic advancement and welfare improvement of individuals, businesses, and society as a whole.

The Workshop

Participants — Participants included representatives from major integrated oil and gas companies, independent oil and gas producers, petrochemical and chemical companies, alternative energy companies, packaging, waste management and environmental services, recyclers, energy technology providers, start-ups, the banking and financial service sector, sustainability and energy consultants, various trade associations, and academia.

Key Points — The workshop focused on understanding the challenges faced by different organizations across the energy ecosystem as they grapple with incorporating sustainability into their long-term planning and strategic visions. Key discussion topics included: defining sustainability, challenges and obstacles in measurement and data, consumer behavior and education gaps, profitability/commercial/financial viability, and the impact of environmental and social concerns and investor sentiments on sustainability’s future development.

Future Plans — This event was the first of a series of engagements, roundtables, workshops, and focus groups that aim to foster discussions, inform research strategies, educate and bridge knowledge across sectors, bring awareness, and cultivate collaboration around the complexities of sustainability strategy and planning.

Background and Framing the Discussion

Sustainability will be a hallmark of successful transition pathways. Analysis of the future of all forms of energy and energy-related issues across intricate supply chains — from raw materials to manufacturing to delivery of final products to consumption and end-of-use — requires data- and science-driven insights to a broad range of risks and trade-offs along transition pathways that fully consider environmental, socioeconomic, and financial sustainability.

Developments across the energy and resource landscape in the last two decades highlight that understanding the global interconnectedness of environmental concerns, energy and resource markets, their complex supply chains, and the factors that shape them, is growing ever more important in sustainability discussions. This underscores the continuing need for data-driven, nonpartisan research on globally complex issues. An integrated, holistic, ecosystem-based approach that deliberately bridges a wide set of interdependent disciplines is required to address the multifaceted issues of today and tomorrow to yield effective, lasting, sustainable results.

Sustainability ensures long-term shared prosperity while contributing toward economic development, a healthy environment, and a thriving society for current and future generations. In the vanguard of a sustainable future, resilience — the capacity to absorb, recover, strengthen, and adapt in the face of disruption — is a cornerstone of strategic foresight. Resilience and sustainability are deeply intertwined. In a world where transformation is the only constant, sustainability is not just an ideal but a foundation of all systems. This calls for a paradigm shift to systems-level thinking — where resilience is woven into the very fabric of institutions, digital landscapes, geopolitical strategies, critical infrastructures, supply chains, and ecological, social, economic, and cultural frameworks.

Trends suggest that sustainability will remain a dynamic and critical area of focus in 2024 and beyond. The current milieu — characterized by persistent supply chain constraints, escalating geopolitical discord, ongoing shifts in the global economic order, multidimensional energy and material transitions, and acute waste issues — has catalyzed a greater emphasis on resilience measures, sector-specific reporting frameworks, and enhanced material and product stewardship across life cycles. These developments, among others, are propelled by a combination of regulatory mandates and consumer advocacy, signaling a pivotal shift in the operational and governance paradigms of the modern enterprise.

This report focuses on four overarching topics on issues around sustainability: 

1. Providing context on the dynamics.
2. Exploring challenges and opportunities.
3. Increasing education and awareness. 
4. Considering the financial/commercial aspects.

In the following sections we explore these issues, outlining the concepts that need to be considered and how to approach them.

Dynamics of Sustainability

Sustainability is as a balance between the economics and the least energy- and resource- intensive pathways and the best environmental performance and social outcomes across life cycles and throughout supply chains. Sustainability is an ongoing and dynamic effort, not a static end state. It will evolve over time as new data, information, and learnings are revealed.

Three Pillars: Integrating Environmental, Financial, and Social Vectors

The concept of sustainability is often described through the framework of three pillars: environmental, financial/commercial, and socioeconomic. These pillars represent the different dimensions that need to be balanced to achieve sustainable development. To give context to the issues, many factors need to be considered, including the dynamics, the catalysts, the framework, and the principles of sustainability.

Balancing the System

The pursuit of sustainability is fraught with challenges, risks, and trade-offs, and often influenced by Western perspectives and solutions. It requires ongoing adaptation and resilience, so sustainability strategies need to be flexible and responsive to new information and global contexts.

Sustainability involves quantifying and understanding these risks, trade-offs, and unintended consequences — from a life cycle perspective — across a service or product’s entire value chain. These holistic considerations contribute to long-term system equilibrium, as well as positive investor returns and welfare improvements. Achieving sustainable growth requires balancing the environmental, socioeconomic, and commercial/financial dimensions — the three legs of the sustainability stool (Figure 1). Innovation, market design, and policy bind the constituent parts, buttressing the sustainable growth platform. If any one of the legs fails, sustainability is not achievable.

Figure 1 — Balancing Sustainability

If not managed in a transparent and realistic way, sustainability can produce unintended consequences that exacerbate inequalities, trigger rebound effects, and shift burdens across global systems. In a web of intricate supply chains, fragile ecosystems, and affected communities, the delicate equilibrium of managing supply and demand exposes business vulnerabilities in satisfying societal needs, all against the backdrop of highly polarized political and social systems. The perceived allure of sustainability “wins” can mislead the public if the entire life cycle of the products and technologies is not scrutinized — from material sourcing through complicated transportation networks to use and to end-of-life management. An equitable energy transition cannot be achieved by simply deploying presumed solutions in isolation. It demands the stewardship of products and technologies throughout, which requires a deep understanding of the origins of materials, the human rights and environmental implications of extraction and processing, and ownership once they have served their purpose.

Consider Social and Environmental Externalities — Without recognizing relationships with and within the system, things in isolation cannot be sustainable (e.g., paper straws, bioplastics, solar panels, electric vehicles, etc.). An electric vehicle is not sustainable if the social and environmental externalities across the lithium-ion battery supply chain are not considered — from mining, processing, smelting, trade, transportation, manufacturing, and disposal across the global supply chain to the lack of recycling and recovery options for the battery at its end of life. The geopolitics and human rights violations involved in such processes and transactions, as well as the potential of operating in sensitive environments and collaborating with corrupt regimes or ineffective governments that have weak or absent environmental, safety, and labor laws, can also affect a system’s overall sustainability profile.

Include in Corporate Planning — Sustainability must be a vital part of a company’s long-term strategic goals, capital allocation, and business model. Any definition of sustainability must include financial success for all those in the supply chain — from operating companies that supply the raw materials to original equipment manufacturers and their vendors through to, ultimately, recyclers and other end-of-use market parties that are crucial to the circular systems. Profit and loss weigh heavily on the minds of existing and emerging market participants as companies respond to unfavorable societal sentiments, myriad government policies, and regulatory and market signals. Sustainability will continue to face hard realities and remain a complex interplay of supply and demand, where companies and investors representing businesses across the entire life cycle judiciously balance profitability and capital returns against the imperative of fostering improved environmental and social outcomes. This balancing act is not confined to a single segment of the supply chain — it applies to the complete life cycle, underscoring the necessity of a systems-level approach to sustainability. This existing bias and unbalance will remain if the focus continues to concentrate on limited segments of the life cycle.

Avoid Carbon Tunnel Vision — While climate change and carbon emissions are urgent issues demanding action, a narrow focus that fails to acknowledge the interdependency of other sustainability factors across the full supply chains creates dangerous blind spots. An overemphasis on one aspect will create market distortions, destabilize the system, shift risks, and leave systems vulnerable to disruptions. This makes societies, governments, and industries less resilient and less sustainable in the long run.

“Carbon tunnel vision” at one stage of the production or use process can mislead by ignoring the carbon (or other) impacts of the entire supply chain. It can also result in neglect of other critical issues — such as biodiversity loss, resource depletion, affordable goods and services, and social inequalities — and failure to address energy reliability and security (Figure 2).

Figure 2 — Sustainability Blind Spots: Carbon Tunnel Vision

The Role of ESG

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is an investment-focused reporting and disclosure framework that centers on financial risk and returns. It is hardwired into financial markets with varying sets of criteria based on standards set by lawmakers, investors, and ESG reporting organizations. Compliance with the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, ESG reporting frameworks, and the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission's stalled climate disclosure rule are climate- and emissions-centric, which are just two categories in the broad sustainability domain. While ESG can be a means toward sustainability, it should not be confused as representing sustainability. Choosing whether to focus attention and resources on ESG issues specifically, or more broadly on sustainability, is not simply a question of perspective, but of intention. The true risks and opportunities of sustainability cannot be captured with a restricted focus on ESG standards.

After this general overview, the next section illustrates sustainability issues in the context of a specific field of commercial activity: the industrial gas industry.

What Does Sustainability Mean in the Industrial Gas Industry? 

Three critical factors influence the success of sustainability initiatives within the industrial gas industry: financial viability, market demand, and environmental responsibility.

• Financial Viability — Sustainable initiatives require sustained investment. For some firms, substandard company economic performance can lead to the abandonment of these efforts.
• Market Demand — The industry relies on customer adoption of clean technologies that utilize industrial gases for emission reduction. Without this demand, the market for sustainable solutions remains limited.
• Environmental Responsibility — Industrial gas firms must be aware of their environmental footprint. This includes actively offsetting carbon emissions and investing in decarbonization technologies.

Energy transitions require innovation and a pioneering spirit. Companies must act quickly and prudently to showcase or adopt new technology. However, rigid regulations, protracted rulemaking, societal opposition, ongoing litigation, and lack of incentives can slow the pace of technology invention and industry development. Two examples:

1. Regulation and proposed production tax credit rules make compensating for the cost of hydrogen difficult. The industry needs more incentives, as opposed to penalties, to drive decarbonization to customers in an economical way. To make clean hydrogen economically viable, creating a demand side that will pay a premium for clean hydrogen is critical. Without sufficient demand and supply, market development will eventually cease.
2. Within the U.S., there are multiple investment opportunities, all of which come with caveats. However, government-funded opportunities such as hydrogen hubs focus on stimulating the supply side of hydrogen, so investors must take the demand side into account before investing.

Some question the overall societal benefits of achieving supply chain sustainability, given concerns about potential trade-offs and unintended negative social and environmental consequences.

Strong financial and commercial performance is a prerequisite for progress. This performance must be achieved while maintaining a balance between sustainability goals and profitability. Given that shareholders have not shown a willingness for lower returns and individual pioneering ventures may not always be profitable, one approach is to focus on long-term strategic objectives over short-term financial gains — the idea is to prioritize broader global performance metrics for measuring success. Creating a sustainability strategy and vision allows companies to focus on the end goals, making companies less reactive to short-term shifts and financial losses. In the longer term, however, clean hydrogen must become profitable to be viable at scale.

Challenges and Opportunities

In this section we examine some of the main challenges and opportunities that arise when thinking about sustainability: 1) defining it, 2) life cycle assessments, 3) questions around data, and 4) risks, trade-offs, and misleading realities.

Defining Sustainability

The lack of a universally accepted definition and standardized measurement system for sustainability complicates efforts to definitively categorize actions as positive or negative. This ambiguity hinders clear distinctions between beneficial and detrimental sustainability practices. Acknowledging the multifaceted and interconnected nature of sustainability, one possibility is to emphasize the United Nation’s definition as a foundational principle with room for further context-specific considerations: “Sustainable development requires an integrated approach that takes into consideration environmental concerns along with economic development.”

There are issues as to the practicality of incorporating a comprehensive sustainability assessment into risk management processes. A comprehensive assessment of every conceivable sustainability risk, under a broad definition, could result in an unwieldy and inconclusive analysis. This data overload could hinder progress and delay critical decision-making.

Metrification of Corporate Sustainability: Life Cycle Assessments

Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) calculate “the environmental impact of products or services throughout their entire lifecycle.” The expansion and appropriate scoping of LCAs will grow in importance as they become mainstream in business strategy and financing decisions and continue to underpin major policy decisions. For instance: 

• LCAs will be a requirement for the implementation of the U.S. Treasury Department’s eligibility for receiving certain energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
• The direction of the United Nations Global Plastics Treaty indicates a strong likelihood that LCAs will be a significant part of the standards and regulations affecting recyclers once the treaty is finalized.
• ESG investments are often rationalized with erroneous LCA outcomes.

Now that LCAs are increasingly being used in policymaking and investment decisions with global ramifications, it is more important than ever to understand and acknowledge the challenges and uncertainties that LCAs present. Failure to contextualize and properly scope a study has led to gross misinterpretation by decision-makers and the public and has resulted in misguided policies that shifted risks to vulnerable parts of society.

LCAs can be a rigorous scientific tool to systematically check assumptions, spotlight problems, clarify choices, prioritize resources, and target interventions to guide more effective policy and regulatory solutions. However, they do present several limitations that influence results and, ultimately, interpretations. Scope and boundaries matter, data access and data quality can be challenging, temporal and regional aspects cannot be ignored, integrating a broader range of impacts including social and economic aspects will alter the sustainability profile, etc. Thus, LCAs should not be the sole basis for decision-making. If society’s goal is to align with the principles of sustainability, then taking an honest examination of the life cycle social-environmental, social-economic, and environmental-economic issues will become even more important in the future.

Quantifiable Metrics vs. Qualitative Narratives — LCAs rely heavily on quantifiable metrics like emissions and carbon footprint. This focus can overlook other crucial sustainability dimensions that are qualitative or subjective. Attempting to force these aspects into a purely numerical framework can lead to an incomplete understanding of the challenges and potential solutions. Not all markers of sustainability can be standardized or fit easily into numerators or denominators, so the complexities are often disregarded or edited to make them fit, which results in mischaracterization of the problems and their solutions.

Many governments, industries, and investors rely on qualitative narratives because the actual life cycle data are not considered, do not exist, or do not reflect the story they want to tell. Numerous facets of sustainability are inherently qualitative and cannot be standardized across geographies — community well-being, land use, placing a monetary value on a healthy ecosystem or the life of an endangered species, ethical considerations, and cultural preservation are difficult to express in numbers. Qualitative narratives should be viewed as complementary to data, not as a substitute for it.

Sustainability efforts should support a dual qualitative and quantitative approach. An example from the workshop described their company’s sustainability reporting as generally comprising a mix of quantitative data and qualitative narratives regarding:

• Environmental stewardship of its property or facility.
• Health and safety of workers and people using their products.
• Thriving people and communities — the economic impact on direct communities.
• Progress markers — describing how their products connect with rest of supply chain and end users.

To effectively incorporate sustainability into a private or corporate enterprise, it is crucial to move beyond universalized reporting frameworks and really integrate sustainable practices within the organization’s structure and strategy.

Questions Around Data

Can data help to better inform priorities and decisions? Given the ambition for more data or quality data, is our society (in particular, the world’s political systems) actually capable of effectively weighing alternatives and taking the kind of disruptive measures that are going to be necessary for systems-level sustainability? Collecting data and standardizing all elements within the sustainability domain is difficult due to several factors:

1. Vast scope, complexity, and interconnectedness of sustainability issues.
2. Lack of universal valuation of economic, environmental and societal dimensions across cultures and societies — what is considered a “good” environmental practice in one region might not be so elsewhere.
3. Qualitative versus quantitative data.
4. Quantifying ethical considerations is subjective and depends on cultural norms, personal values, and even historical context.

Risks, Trade-Offs, and Misleading Sustainability Realities

With the immediate pressures of climate change and the urgency to incorporate alternative energy resources like wind and solar, there is an overt focus on the benefits of these energy transition technologies, but a clear absence of strategy around identifying and quantifying other risks and externalities, such as waste disposal or associated environmental and social impacts across the entire life cycle. Waste management is typically not addressed strategically and is often an afterthought in the design phase and business planning.

Conversations today often overlook the fact that sustainability comes with a series of tradeoffs and must balance competing values. The reality is that everything costs something. We can only understand the costs and benefits of various, often competing, actions with a systems- and life cycle-driven approach.

It is often presumed that sustainability is a win-win situation, but in reality there are many competing priorities and trade-offs across life cycles and global supply chains. A common narrative among sustainability enthusiasts is that sustainability is not about reducing risk but realizing opportunities. This assumption suggests that making sustainability-driven decisions is straightforward. If everyone wins, no one must sacrifice anything, and therefore no one must change. Although this reasoning makes sustainability more palatable and less threatening, it has given rise to the notion that everyone and everything can somehow be sustainable. For true systems sustainability to progress, some practices, materials, conveniences, and profits — even entire companies — cannot continue to exist as they do today.

This raises the difficult question of “What do we value most and who gets to decide what is more valuable to societies?” With most sustainability efforts being driven by OECD interests, who gets to decide on: 1) disadvantaged communities’ standard of living, 2) the health of the ecosystems they occupy, or 3) how to avoid the potential financial costs and environmental impacts that accompany solutions that develop infrastructure to manage the waste they produce?

It may not be possible to achieve or avoid all three of these goals simultaneously. This means that there will need to be compromises and difficult choices made about which objectives to prioritize. For example, a critical consideration in defining sustainability is ensuring it fosters continued improvements in the quality of life for all. Plastics have demonstrably improved living standards in many regions of the world. However, the mismanagement of plastic waste has had a detrimental impact on the very environment that sustains those communities. Striking a balance is crucial. Is it socially sustainable to impose bans or restrictions on those same populations and remove access to affordable household, personal care, and food and beverage products because their utilization of them is damaging their environment? Doing so would strip them of nutritional and sanitation gains that have fundamentally changed their lives for the better.

Increasing Education, Communication, Collaboration, and Awareness

Lack of education, flawed marketing, and competing policies have impacted sustainability strategies as well as the interpretation of sustainability by consumers and board members. There is an extensive disconnect between the sustainability aspirations of boards and C-suite executives versus the operational, engineering, and tactical realities of employees in the field and at facilities. Achieving sustainability goals necessitates a two-way communication approach and a 360-degree decision-making process. Senior leadership requires practical insights from operational personnel for feasibility assessments. On the other hand, company executives must enhance sustainability education within the organization to ensure all levels of an enterprise understand strategic objectives and how they relate to their roles within a company and the communities in which they operate.

There is a need for increased communication across value chains, especially with manufacturers and end-of-life entities such as recyclers and waste management. Antitrust law prohibits, or at least inhibits, the kind of collaboration that will be needed to drive meaningful change. As we widen the aperture to a more holistic and effective approach to sustainability, it will be necessary to integrate a legal perspective that explores ways to preserve competition while enabling more collaboration to solve systemic problems.

Human and Social Dimensions of Sustainability

Traditional demand-side economics postulates that increased consumer spending fuels business expansion, job creation, and ultimately, economic growth through a multiplier effect. However, the dialogue around sustainability has predominantly focused on the supply side, neglecting the role of consumer behavior. Sustainability and the circular economy concept forces society to think, behave, and value things differently. A deeper understanding of consumer spending patterns, preferences for sustainable products, and willingness to pay for sustainability initiatives is critical. While negative externalities are a significant concern, a more balanced approach that acknowledges the potential benefits for consumers and society is also necessary.

Shifting material use — for example, replacing plastics with novel bioplastics —requires a behavioral science approach. Untested bioplastics with inferior physical and mechanical properties may need significant adjustments in consumer behavior or increase costs. Therefore, successful implementation involves integrating multidisciplinary insights from behavioral economics, sociology, psychology, and communication strategies. While investor buy-in for the financial merits of sustainability is imperative, underlying value must be addressed to achieve lasting change. Ultimately, navigating energy and material transitions necessitates a long-term perspective.

Financial/Commercial Sustainability

Companies have a dual responsibility — to act in accordance with consumer demands for sustainability while fulfilling their fiduciary duties to stakeholders by creating value. There is a clear need to balance profitability and returns to capital with an evolution toward better environmental and social outcomes. A systems-level approach is key.

The challenge remains what to focus on under the expansive sustainability domain, how to prioritize, and where to begin. To assume renewables are sustainable by default is inaccurate and short-sighted. If society values sustainability, the entire supply chain across full life cycles must be considered, and this includes understanding the commercial/financial pillar just as much as the social and environmental dimensions. Businesses that supply the minerals and materials to alternative energy need to be profitable just as businesses at the end of life to manage the waste need to be financially and commercially viable. 

This is not the case for most energy transition technologies being deployed under government incentives and rules due to anti-industry sentiments on mining, plastics (a critical input for solar, electric vehicles, wind, etc.), chemical manufacturing, and recyclers — all critical players across the entire energy value chain. This opposition to locating much of the supply chain development in industrialized nations encourages businesses to operate in countries with corrupt regimes, weak or absent labor laws, and deficient environmental standards, which ultimately shift the sustainability profile.

It is far less complicated to implement sustainability in practice when projects are profitable or have a clear path for profitability. But too often, sustainability is imposed on thin-margin businesses, such as extractive industries and commodities production, and then attempts are made to engineer “risk-reward” scenarios in the financial marketplace. Meanwhile, targeted sustainability metrics are mandated alongside existing environmental and social requirements that project developers must satisfy in order to achieve regulatory approval and remain in compliance. Even if robust sustainability metrics are established for risk management, financial considerations remain paramount in a free market system. Projects lacking a strong return on investment are less likely to secure financing.

Pathways to a Circular Economy

A circular economy “reduces or even eliminates waste and pollution, keeps materials at their highest economic value, recirculates products and materials through the value chain, reduces use of non-renewable minerals, fuels, and feedstocks, and creates regenerative systems.” Even so, a circular economy does not inherently guarantee sustainability. It is important to ensure any circularity efforts do not come at the expense of broader sustainability goals.

In the context of a circular economy and energy transitions, supply chain considerations and material availability may vary. Current policies do not incentivize the use of carbon, opting rather to store it long-term. The urgency of achieving rapid decarbonization has intensified interest in carbon removal technologies, particularly those capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) from emissions. However, the current lack of robust markets for captured CO2, either for direct use or for conversion into advanced carbon materials, creates a potential supply glut. This means that alternative solutions for CO2 storage or utilization need to be explored, while carefully assessing potential unintended environmental consequences associated with carbon capture methods.

Future Directions and Key Takeaways

The CES Sustainability Initiative is a valuable resource for aligning the roles of industry and government to optimize opportunities and minimize the risks associated with global sustainability transitions. The initiative’s first workshop focused on understanding the challenges faced by different organizations across industries, sectors, and value chains as they grapple with incorporating sustainability into their strategic visions. The event marked the beginning of a series of cross-sectoral engagements to explore and influence future discussions and research, particularly focusing on the evolving role of organizations in embedding sustainability into their long-term strategic objectives. Two broad themes emerged:

Innovation Through Collaboration — Collaborative partnerships are a powerful force for innovation and opportunity. Through cooperation, organizations can gain systemic insights, share data, and foster circular pathways that bridge upstream innovations with downstream solutions. This interconnected approach redefines competition, amplifies collective strength, and reshapes industries for a resilient future.

Strategic Approach — It is vital to map a strategy to identify and prioritize risks and trade-offs, track trends, assess challenges and best practices, ascertain how to commercialize sustainability across supply chains, and where opportunities can be. 

The stage is set for continued exploration and collaboration in the field of sustainability. Focusing on these key concepts and questions will help shape the road ahead:

1. Evolving Role of Organizations — Understanding the evolving role of organizations in incorporating sustainability into their long-term strategic goals emerged as a pivotal concern, emphasizing the need for a dynamic approach to sustainability integration.  
    
2. Reimagining Sustainability — Diversifying corporate sustainability to foster new ideas and self-critique, signaling the need for a paradigm shift in sustainability thinking.  
    
3. Prioritizing Sustainability Issues — Identifying and prioritizing the most pressing sustainability issues for companies and devising actionable case studies and strategies is a critical area of focus. Questions such as these arise:
   • How to prioritize and place value on long-term sustainability planning and incentivize longer-term thinking in markets?
   • How can companies distinguish value-creation and ethical concerns from risk-reduction measures and strategic opportunities to ensure resources and actions are focused on creating value?
4. Intersection of Business and Sustainability — Emphasizing the need for financial viability and exploring the commercialization of sustainability in every step of the supply chain to maintain systems-level sustainability standards.  
    
5. Minimum Sustainability Ambition — Asking whether a minimum sustainability ambition and progress should be defined and measured to guide sustainability efforts.  
    
6. Risk-Based Approach — Exploring how to establish a risk-based approach using a hierarchy of actions for sustainability activities, considering the salience of the impact and available resources.  
    
7. Behavioral Science and Economics — Determining how behavioral economics and the role of consumers can be incorporated into sustainability approaches.

This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.