Call sustainability what you want but focus on its financial opportunity

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report reads like a chief financial officer’s nightmare: extreme weather, resource scarcity and ecosystem collapse. These aren’t just climate risks; they’re perilous to the balance sheet.

Such global challenges are already disrupting procurement, delaying logistics, inflating costs and rewriting regulations, putting pressure on margins and exposing businesses to greater volatility.

Therefore, we must stop treating sustainability as a siloed initiative – or worse, a branding exercise or regulatory checkbox – and start embedding it into how we create value, manage risk and build resilience.

The reality is that sustainability has become so complex that it’s easy to forget its point. Beyond reporting frameworks, we must protect the systems our businesses rely on to function, compete and grow. There is a financial opportunity hiding in plain sight.

New York Climate Week offers a timely opportunity to reframe the sustainability conversation as a forward-looking economic strategy as well as an environmental imperative.

Global platforms like these provide a stage for businesses and policymakers to lead with solutions that embed climate resilience into economic strategy. In doing so, they shift the narrative from cost and compliance to competitiveness and growth.

This shift is already underway but our economies are not adapting quickly enough. Climate-driven disruption is no longer theoretical; it’s real, global and expensive. From wildfires in California to floods in Europe, supply chains across the globe are being tested and exposed.

In the last decade alone, the International Chamber of Commerce estimates extreme weather events have cost the global economy over $2 trillion.

Financial institutions are baking climate risk into lending models, regulators are tightening disclosure rules and customers and investors are raising the bar. The companies leading this transition aren’t waiting for mandates; they’re moving fast because they see it as a financial prerogative.

Take IKEA owners Ingka Group. By investing billions in renewable energy and sustainability, it slashed emissions by 30.1%, all while growing revenue by 23.7% compared with FY23, cutting costs and boosting efficiency.

Pre-placing sustainability into its business model is a strategic play rather than a public relations move. When companies have done the thinking, the customer doesn’t need to decide between cost and the planet.

Since 2015, Avery Dennison has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 60% – even as its revenues grew by 46% over the same period.

Yes, this has an environmental benefit but just as importantly, it is introducing future business resilience and cost reduction that makes the case for sustainability so much more powerful.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve let the sustainability conversation get hijacked by complexity, acronyms, frameworks and compliance fatigue. But the fundamentals haven’t changed; it comes down to less waste, more efficiency and smarter systems.

We don’t need more jargon to distract from action. We need solutions.

Supply chains are where inefficiencies often hide, value is often lost and meaningful impact can occur the fastest. Instead of dwelling on the scale of the issue to solve, we need to get practical and actionable.

Whether it’s how goods are made, excess inventory, last-mile delivery or end-of-life disposal, waste is embedded in every layer of the supply chain. Tackling it is one of our greatest opportunities to drive progress and profit.

It is the responsibility of those businesses that cut across global supply chains to seek out those pressure points and discover the solutions required to drive system-level change.

Improving traceability, where we understand the totality of data and operations to maintain all the important information about a product throughout its production and use, is a powerful lever.

With technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID), we can track inventory in real-time, reduce overproduction and cut emissions. In apparel alone, up to 40% of stock ends up as surplus. That’s lost margin.

Avery Dennison’s collaborations already show how impactful these solutions can be. For example, when we worked with a major retailer, we added digital tags to certain fresh items so the grocer could see inventory and shelf life in real time.

Linking stock levels to freshness enabled dynamic in-store pricing, which we expect to reduce food waste by 25–30% and generate a 2% sales uplift by ensuring the right products are available at the right time.

The numbers demonstrate that traceability is good for business and the planet.

New York Climate Week is a reminder that the transition is a business conversation as much as a policy one. It brings together leaders across sectors to spotlight how climate resilience and economic strategy are converging.

To scale impact, we need to reframe the conversation around innovation, margin expansion and future readiness. We don’t need another framework. We’re being overwhelmed by jargon and protocols and losing sight of the goal.

We need to work together to realize the opportunity and value that we can unlock by solving some of our greatest business challenges.

Sustainability delivers when it speaks the language of business: growth, profitability and long-term value. It’s the right thing to do but more importantly, it’s smart.

The companies that win won’t be the ones waiting for regulation; they’ll recognize this moment for what it is: the most significant business opportunity of our time.