Saving the world sounds alluring. Then reality hits and you keep going anyway. A founding note on what this field actually feels like.
A career in sustainability can be a roller coaster. The prospect of saving the world from planetary boundaries overshoot is alluring. You think about the impact you want to make, being a force of good, becoming an expert.
Then reality hits. The first job in corporate where you thought you would be saving marine life from extinction has you writing reports about marine life extinction. Not bad to be busy with the object you love. The shock comes once you realize most people working in 'sustainability' with you, unless you are working at an NGO, care more about the wrong font you selected, whether the report should have 5 pages or 50, whether legal will allow you to write climate crisis instead of climate 'situation', a softened out and completely dumbed down version, stripped of any objective sense to avoid their invested litigation risk.
The ups and downs are many. Yet you keep going, because you imagine: if I leave, then what? Reports still need to be written to give stakeholders transparency. Deep tech still needs to be developed in garages and labs across the world to unlock the change that is needed, at the massive scale and speed that is needed.
You read scientists warning that 1.5°C is almost out of reach and fear that nothing might be enough, you fear your actions might be too small in too big of a world. But everyone in the community you meet knows each other, and you learn that actually not that many people are engaged. So you keep going.
You make a new friend group, all working on sustainability. One is a technical expert in turbine dynamic fluid flow optimisation who spends his days on Ansys creating meshes and has never heard about SBTi. Another is a controller developing finance-related sustainability KPIs for his chapter in the sustainability statement of the company's annual report. You yourself might be a stewardship lead engaging with equity clients on their transition plans, or a data analyst at Sustainalytics gathering data for ratings… The ecosystem is broad. All under the same 'umbrella', no overlap besides the fact you are all in 'sustainability'. With that thought in mind, it's the opportunity of a lifetime to be involved.
The field has developed massively in the last 20 years, from being the hippie tree huggers' hobby to mainstream boardroom presence. Despite pushback and a wave of omnibus-like simplifications and CSOs taking over boardroom strategy talks, the field is maturing, defining itself and finding its way. This all brings advantages and disadvantages, and like everything in life, it's what you make of it that counts.
Local action, global action, small steps and big leaps forward. From the tegels you replace in your own little garden to the square kilometres of green rooftops you convince your employers to deploy, the revolution is local and it is taking over the world. The energy transition is happening faster than any analyst could have ever imagined, and developing economies are leapfrogging incumbents. The next years will be defining for whether we can pull it off, despite geopolitics and all sorts of social and economic crises.
We hope this site will be a source of inspiration for you to go get it and contribute to a better world. Go build great things, write truthful reports, save the state of species and free us from toxic pollution. Not for you but for all of us. Say no to the tragedy of the commons; we are the commons.
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