Education for sustainability.

I read on the website Edie.net a short summary of a study conducted by the company SmartestEnergy to a sample of one thousand people, according to which companies are failing when it comes to capitalizing their efforts on sustainability (in this case focusing on environmental sustainability) because they are not being translated into an improved corporate reputation.

The study also shows some interesting statistics, that perhaps can be extrapolated to the spanish reality and to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in general, that is taking into account the economic and social aspects in addition to environmental ones.

Among the statistics, these two facts have particularly caught my attention:

• 57% of respondents believe that a sustainable future is a shared responsibilitybetween individuals, business and government.
• 74% of respondents said they would use a sustainable brand to improve their environmental impact, but 82% of them think they should not pay more for a sustainable product or service.

Both statistics are worth to be commented, being one still a low percentage and the other a high one, and I think both should be used to draw future trends when it comes to promoting sustainability and giving it the importance it deserves.

That just over half of the respondents believe that sustainability is a shared responsibility reveals that we still have to make a huge effort in education for sustainability and also in communication and information (and that is assuming that the remaining 43% have clear and really understand what is sustainability, CSR, or as we like to call it). And that effort should come from two main estates: business and the Administration. Responsible and sustainable companies interested in communicating sustainability must be the first to benefit from it, to take advantage of this differentiation against their competitors, while they also will help to increase that reputation that the study itself states that they can not take advantage from.

Needless to say that there should be left out of that communication the companies that simply do greenwashing, which unfortunately we see quite often. On the other side is the Administration who should inform and educate the public on issues of sustainability and CSR, so the ordinary citizen is aware of that corresponsibility and is able to assume achieving a sustainable future with confidence.

If those who purchase the product or service (which is usually the main stakeholder of most organizations) do not know what is sustainability, its importance and which company is responsible and which is not, we lose the main vector of change for increasingly responsible products and services.

Both in the aspect of businesses and administrations we have a long way to go to achieve informed customers, as businesses still do not report their CSR and its impacts or report them in a biased manner or difficult to understand for the average citizen, and the authorities do not go further than making specific campaigns and also far from being holistic. And in the scholar education field, when will there be a compulsory subject in schools which teaches education for sustainability, not only environmental, but also economic and social? Maybe that subject exists in Spain, but I have made a quick search on Google without results. If any reader knows of any example, please share it as a comment to this article.

When it comes to the increase in the cost of products and services that the customer has to bear, we see clearly that the citizen is not willing to pay more for it. I find curious that statistic because we have seen previously in another studies that the percentage of people who would be willing to pay more for a sustainable product was increasing, which has always surprised me a lot, and then over time you can confirm that the percentage of responsible purchasing products doesn’t seem to have a directly proportional relation to the expressed intention. That tells us that citizens may say they would pay more for a sustainable brand, but at the moment of truth few do, because they really think what this study is telling and that is that in case there are increased costs to be sustainable they should be borne by the company. Needless to repeat in detail all the economic benefits that companies actually manage to achieve when making a strategic, real and properly communicated CSR. These benefits should serve to offer competitive prices while benefiting at the same time the owners and shareholders of these companies, and not simply to “divert” those potential savings for the customer into the coffers of the company.

As the informed and educated in sustainability citizen demands companies to be responsible and that their products and services have therefore no increased cost, it will occur which is being long predicted, and that is the disappearance of the less responsible companies. That is, the realization of the sentence heard at many conferences and events, and read on many specialized media, “the company will be responsible, or it will not exist.”

Hopefully that moment comes, the sooner the better.

NOTE: This article was originally published in spanish and can be found here.