Saving the Planet - $12 Trillion Opportunity

A recent report concludes that meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in just four out of 60 sectors (food and agriculture, cities, energy and materials, and health and wellbeing) could open up market opportunities worth up to $12 trillion a year in less than 15 years.

How can we create $12 trillion a year in market opportunities by 2030? How about by meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals? The goals, a set of 17 stretch goals and 169 related targets championed by the United Nations, are ambitious.

But to get there, we have to break out of the zone of incremental change, or “Change-as-Usual.” Incrementalism has its uses, but it is worrying to see even committed business leaders treating the goals as an incremental change agenda. Their assumption: if we do more of what we have been doing, but a little bit faster and a little better, we can deliver many – if not most – of the goals by the target date of 2030. Mistake. Big mistake. Huge.

Instead, we have to admit that our planet has strict boundaries on the activities it can support, and that by exceeding these boundaries, we’re helping climate change to accelerate at an alarming pace. There’s an urgent and intensifying need to shift toward real breakthroughs.

To help support those moving in this direction, Volans and PA Consulting have joined forces with the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest sustainable business platform, with over 9,000 corporate members, to create Project Breakthrough. In the process, we have developed what we call “the Breakthrough Compass” to map the emerging landscape of risk and opportunity. Our conclusion: instead of pursuing incremental goals, we need to start chasing goals that will have 10x or 100x the impact on anywhere between a million and a billion people. 

The horizontal axis (“impact”) tracks the spectrum of outcomes created by business, from negative to positive. The billion-people-impacted scale may seem far-fetched, but two brothers define the outer limits here. Google’s Larry Page invests in solutions that potentially benefit a billion people, while his brother Carl (at the Anthropocene Institute) focuses on problems that could disadvantage – even kill – a billion of us. The vertical axis (“scale”) moves from incremental change to increasingly exponential outcomes.

To address the realities of climate change and other ways in which we are increasingly overrunning planetary boundaries, we must now shift our mindsets, technologies, and business models from left to right, and from bottom to top.

Business models

The sustainability industry has labored to identify issues that are “material” across the triple bottom line, not simply in financial terms. It has developed sophisticated tools to help companies build and test the business case for action, or inaction. But the spotlight must expand to business models, the essence of how wealth is created.

Business models need to become exponentially more social, lean, integrated, and circular. The challenge is to ensure that emerging technologies meet difficult-to-reach social goals, while being “lean” across scarce forms of capital, integrated from the point of use right out to the edges of the atmosphere and biosphere, and part of an increasingly circular economy.

One example comes from Patrick Thomas, CEO of the advanced materials company Covestro. In a recent interview by the Project Breakthrough team, he discussed why his firm developed – and then chose to license — a technology for turning carbon dioxide into plastic.

“If you make a breakthrough in innovation, you cannot keep it to yourself,” Thomas explained. “That’s very, very important. It’s a different way of thinking about how you make money. To keep it to yourself runs the risk that it would die. If you license it to everybody else, you guarantee that they change their view, they change their method of operation, and they adopt your technology. And that’s why we went from nothing to commercial manufacture of a product in less than 10 years… That is way faster than traditional innovation technologies where everything’s kept secret. You’ve got to blow things open.”

Only if we make the shift from incremental to breakthrough logic will business realize the huge market values now being forecast – and only if we succeed in accelerating a critical mass of business leaders into the breakthrough zone will the sustainability forecast truly brighten.

Source: Harvard Business Review

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• Environment
• Environment
• Environment
• Environmental