Sustainability

2025-03-11 Francesco Perrini

Why Sustainability is Worth It (Even if Showing It Off is No Longer in Vogue)

“You’re good, and they throw stones at you. You’re bad, and they throw stones at you,” sang Gian Pieretti and Antoine at the Sanremo Festival in 1967. Fifty-eight years later, the sentiment described in the Italian song risks silencing the conversation on sustainability. The term 'greenhushing' refers to companies minimizing or completely avoiding communication about their environmental goals and results in order to avoid criticism or negative reactions. The term gained traction in late 2022 when South Pole, a Swiss sustainable finance consulting firm, released a report revealing that ...

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2024-12-10 Sylvie Goulard

Biodiversity Credits: a New Market to Protect the Planet

Our economies are dependent on Nature, as are our health and our wellbeing. However, as services from nature are rarely priced, its vital contribution remains largely invisible, as its deterioration. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which plays the same role for nature as IPCC for climate, biodiversity loss is ongoing at an unprecedented scale and pace, because of climate change and overuse of natural resources. Since 1970, the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73%, as measured by the WWF Living ...

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2024-11-18 Francesco Perrini, Stefania Carraro

A New Approach to Sustainable Supply Chain Management

In recent years, growing regulatory pressures and stakeholder expectations have heightened the need for transparency and accountability across entire production chains, driving companies to adopt new management models. On September 10th, Italy officially adopted Directive 2022/2464/EU – known as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) – through Legislative Decree 125/2024, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale. Replacing Directive 2014/95/EU (Non-Financial Reporting Directive – NFRD), the CSRD significantly expands the scope and transparency requirements for companies concerning ...

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2024-07-26 Sylvie Goulard, Francesco Perrini, Stefano Pogutz

To Be or Not to Be: Sustainability Between Strategy, ESG, and Reporting

Driven by a series of institutional and political pressures—from Climate Conferences to the Green Deal, from Non-Financial Reporting and Sustainable Finance Directives to those on transparency and greenwashing—the debate on corporate sustainability has often become muddled and highly ideological in recent years. With over three decades of experience in sustainability management, and having observed and studied the actions of many managers and organizations, we aim to clarify what corporate sustainability truly is and what it is not. The roots of corporate sustainability lie in corporate responsibility ...

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2024-05-27 Sylvie Goulard

Beyond illusions, within limits: business and the sustainability challenge

Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have drawn on natural resources as if they were limitless. The air and water, the soil, the fish and the trees, all living things seemed at our disposal. Economic science has long suggested that wealth results from the combination of only two factors of production: capital and labor. As Jean-Baptiste Say wrote in 1803 in his book on Political Economy: “Natural resources are inexhaustible, because otherwise we would not obtain them for free. Since they cannot be multiplied or exhausted, they are not the subject of economic sciences”. We have ...

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2024-04-16 Sylvie Goulard, Francesco Perrini, Stefano Pogutz

Research, Sharing, and Impact to Address the Sustainability Challenge

Excellence in Sustainability and Governance - eSG Knowledge Platform is the name of the SDA Bocconi platform that brings together and coordinates all research activities on these increasingly urgent topics. Sustainability, understood in an integrated and cross-cutting way, is studied starting from global challenges on environmental, social, and governance issues that lead companies, international organizations, public, and governmental institutions to rethink their future. In this perspective, the eSG Platform proposes innovative and pragmatic solutions through research activities and analysis ...

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