Achieving business sustainability goals is now a top priority for organizations focusing on reducing the negative global impacts of the goods and services they provide. Consumers, investors, and organizations' own employees are increasingly calling for change, encouraging businesses to take a closer look at environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. From building more sustainable value chains to transitioning to net-zero operations, digital technologies offer excellent solutions for helping businesses achieve sustainability goals.
According to a recent sustainable technology survey, aligning sustainability goals with digital technologies requires three key elements for an effective sustainable technology strategy.
Keep reading to learn more about crafting a successful sustainable technology strategy. Also, find out how embedding sustainability into digital technologies is driving and scaling sustainability to help achieve business sustainability goals.
In Accenture's recent survey, "Uniting Technology and Sustainability: How to Get Full Value From Your Sustainability Strategy," over 560 businesses with revenues greater than $1 billion reported that technology is either "important" or "very important" for achieving their sustainability goals.
Accenture's research reveals that digital technologies are crucial enablers of sustainability. In fact, businesses with comprehensive sustainable technology strategies are generating up to 2.6 times more shareholder value than their competitors. Using the power of digital technologies, these organizations are enabling and scaling sustainability while ensuring the technologies themselves are more sustainable, too.
Sanjay Podder, Technology Sustainability Innovation lead at Accenture, states, "Every business must be a sustainable business and technology is a critical and fundamental enabler — from improving transparency and traceability in global supply chains, to helping measure and reduce carbon emissions."
"It is no longer simply optional to put sustainability at the core of how organizations operate," Accenture's Sanjay Podder explains. "A sustainable technology strategy — one that embeds sustainability in technology, drives sustainability by technology, and scales sustainability by engaging the ecosystem — will help companies deliver 360° value and contribute to the achievement of their broader sustainability goals."
According to Accenture, a successful sustainable technology strategy yields greater value, growth, and performance by delivering on the following three key elements.
Ensuring that digital technologies are sustainable requires embracing carbon-aware and carbon-efficient "green" technologies, tools, and solutions. Sustainability in technology also means promoting efficient green cloud-based connectivity to secure systems with regulatory governance mechanisms that ensure privacy, transparency, accessibility, and fairness.
Digital technologies are essential for building a sustainable organization. For example, digital technologies enable measuring, decreasing, and eliminating an organization's carbon footprint. It was 70% of survey participants who used artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to successfully reduce emissions in their operations and production facilities.
Scaling sustainability means addressing sustainability on a greater scale, extending efforts beyond usual boundaries to pursue ESG alliances with the entire ecosystem of business partners. Organizations also address sustainability on a global scale by setting targets for meeting the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). And 43% of survey participants belong to industry collaborations and groups advocating for eco-friendly technologies.
The overriding conclusion of the Accenture sustainable technology survey is that delivering on the sustainability agenda is impossible without sustainable digital technologies. If achieving business sustainability goals is a top priority for your organization, Aegex Technologies is a leading expert on sustainable digital transformation and a global supplier of enterprise-class intrinsically safe digital technologies.
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