By Adam Carrel, Partner, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, Ernst & Young, Australia

Sustainable development has spent years holding back to avoid disrupting a supposedly fragile system, but recent history proves the system can take far more change than claimed, meaning the real question now is whether we choose to act. Adam Carrel, Partner, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, Ernst & Young, Australia shares his thoughts.

Remember when we were the dangerous ones? Remember when the greatest threat to progress, investor confidence and living standards was us? We’ve run so far from these accusations that they look absurd on the page – and they are absurd – but they were hurled at us so regularly that they still gnaw at the collective confidence of Sustainable Development. Boardroom briefings, investor notes, front‑page headlines — the warning was always the same: touch the system and everything breaks.

The problem people had with Sustainable Development back then was that we unambiguously wanted to change the world. We didn’t just want to minimise the risks it faced, we wanted to make it fundamentally different in order to make it fundamentally better. To the incumbent powers at the time though, the world was pretty much perfect, or at least it was on track to be, if the greenies weren’t allowed to stuff it up. Liberal democracy plus capitalism was permanently ascendant, economic growth was pulling far more people out of poverty than foreign aid ever could, and the primacy of the (Western) rules-based order meant that individuals didn’t need the solidarity of social movements to defend their interests.

But this perfection was also deeply fragile. Any interventions to address unintended consequences would apparently bring the whole system crashing down. Carbon pricing, debt relief, living wages, plastic bans, fishing quotas, forest protections, whenever anything like this was proposed corporate interest groups, market lobbyists, and their political affiliates would hit the panic button, saying that investors couldn’t possibly bear the disruption and uncertainty. We never really believed them but it was a scary bluff to call, so we counter-bluffed, we said we could save the world without changing it, one pragmatic market-based mechanism at a time.

We’ve been trapped in this paradox for years: trying to change everything while disrupting nothing. Now, the time might finally be right to set ourselves loose. We’ve been waiting for one of two things to happen and it appears that both might be happening at the same time.  The first is that the world fears its current path more than the one we proposed, the second is that the global economic system shows itself to be far more resilient to intervention than it claimed.

None of this is to discount the chaos of recent events but, at least at the time of writing,  the world economy is clearly able to digest an extraordinary amount. Tariffs, wars, brinkmanship, technological upheaval, oil spikes, none of it pretty but none of it terminal, and all of it far more abrupt and interventionist than anything we ever proposed. And stocks still rally, bonuses get paid, mines still dig, and consumers still buy – the argument that the global economy is too delicately balanced to tolerate sustainable recalibration is defunct. What remains is not a question of feasibility, but of intent.

Just as exhausted is the idea that individualism and nationalism can self-regulate to some happy medium, these forces only draw down on the reservoirs of cooperation and foresight created by others. And those reservoirs are running low. The general public is increasingly aware of the urgency of building this back up.

So, behind the mania of world events, let’s recognise that Sustainable Development has been quietly liberated from its most fundamental constraints. This changes what is now possible. It means that a true era of implementation might be poised to begin. Within our own work, we’ve been thinking deeply about what this looks like at the operational level and invite your feedback on our Sustainable Operating Blueprint.

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The views expressed in this article are the views of the author, not Ernst & Young. This article provides general information, does not constitute advice and should not be relied on as such. Professional advice should be sought prior to any action being taken in reliance on any of the information. Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.

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