Croda, dentsu international, Ingka Group, and Majid Al Futtaim form new group designed to accelerate the development of cutting edge sustainability practices
The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) has today announced the formation of a new group of forward-looking international businesses that aims to help companies “set a truly sustainable business path across key areas such as nature, climate, circular economy and inequality”.
Dubbed the Business Transformation Group, the initiative will bring together Croda, dentsu international, IKEA parent company Ingka Group, and Majid Al Futtaim in a bid to co-create new approaches for building inclusive, nature-positive, circular, net zero, and resilient business strategies and models.
The group then aims to develop a series of tools to help support the wider business community as it strives to meet the raft of net zero emission and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) that has been adopted by leading corporates over the past two years.
“Business leadership and transformation are critical to support the transition to a climate neutral, nature positive and socially inclusive economy,” said Aris Vrettos, director of CISL’s Centre for Business Transformation. “We look forward to working as a group to achieve our mission in demonstrating what a sustainable business looks like and helping companies to implement the organisational transformation necessary to deliver it.”
Anna Lungley, chief sustainability officer at marketing and communications giant dentsu international, said there was an urgent need for organisations of all types to overhaul their business models to tackle escalating environmental challenges.
“Society is facing some of its greatest challenges,” she said. “The transition towards a climate neutral, nature positive and inclusive economy will require business model, and sector-wide, transformation. Business and brands have no choice but to respond. But whilst we now understand the challenge, we don’t yet have all the answers. The Business Transformation Group will bring together organisations with the data, insights, creativity and innovation to co-create, design and test scalable approaches to accelerate the transition to more sustainable business models”.
Her comments were echoed by Håkan Nordkvist, innovation and development manager at Ingka Group, who said there was a compelling case for businesses to co-operate across different sectors.
“We are in the decade of action for securing a sustainable future for humanity,” he said. “We know that radical collaboration is the only way to transform into a sustainable business and create a sustainable economy. We therefore look forward to working with CISL, the other founding members of the Business Transformation Group and all other organisations that want to collaborate with us.”
The launch of the new group comes just days after the Corporate Leaders Group of businesses published a report warning that the recent wave of net zero targets was not being matched by sufficiently credible and ambitious decarbonisation strategies.
The report stressed that the scale of recent climate action from UK businesses has been “impressive”, with a four-fold increase in companies pledging to set science-based emissions reduction targets since the start of last year, and as many as one in 10 UK firms now committed to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
But it also warned that the vast majority of firms are still yet to establish the goals and strategies that should drive climate action across their organisation. To date, over half of FTSE 100 firms are yet to align their plans with a 1.5C warming trajectory, the report noted, while only 23 of the current FTSE100 and FTSE250 companies have an approved 1.5C-aligned SBT, representing just a fraction of Britain’s largest corporates.
