The actual work of sustainability or ESG on the ground is different to what is read in textbooks or white papers. An understanding of culture and power is critical to what gets done and what gets excluded. An ethnography of sustainability under works is needed.

A lot of folks often do not realize that I have made a living being an experienced environmental engineer, air quality modeler and as an ESIA Practitioner. I would like to scale up my engineering credentials in the months ahead in the climate risk domain.

The basics of engineering are imperative in the climate transition era.

As the new IPCC Synthesis Report states that time is finite for climate change mitigation, we need to ramp up access to transition finance, in which ESG as a lens has a way to funnel and structure the funds to the right targets and in a responsible way.

ESG is seen as an aggressive risk metric for factoring into DCF on a balance sheet, but when we look ahead as regeneration and resilience it transforms into a paradigm fit for net zero.

When i look across the Arabian Sea from Juhu Beach or the Gateway of India in Bombay, I see the shores of the Sharqiyah and the Batinah Coast, of a Bayt lost, alive in the memories of wet feet in Sur or Shatti Al Qurum, as water splashes the feet in Silver Beach, Juhu.

Cataloging, critiquing, analyzing, intellectualizing is only part of the climate action story. Building solutions rather than sermons will enable ripple effects to bring the needed interventions for adaptation.

In the era of ESG, DEI and Responsible Capitalism, Women’s Day is each day.

We celebrate the moment to normalize the elation to embed in the quotidian.

Happy Women’s Day!

There is an antidote to competence greenwashing coined by Dr Kim, which is deep ESG expertise built over 15 years in my case in eleven countries. Certifications are great for signaling but they might not be the skill levels needed on the job. Deep skills are developed over the years.

If one perceives ESG as reporting towards climate compliance, one is clearly missing the woods for the trees as sustainability is about survival at the planetary scale, however at the human scale it is dignity of work that drives any transformation, digital or net zero. Without people as key actors in a process which is participatory rather than performative, no climate transition dialogue can achieve its stated outcomes. ESG at the entry level is compliance, as regulatory hygiene but higher up on the value curve it can serve as a lens to solve wicked problems for the transition’s era.

Software can capture data, and churn out a report, but culture will determine enterprise value. ESG is about enterprise value. The cacophony regarding ESG is generative, as it mainstreams ESG as business and reporting frameworks give guidance on how to embark on the journey. We are dealing with businesses and sometimes sustainability professionals forget that sustainability is not the only element on the C Suite agenda, it is merely one of them.