“You can have all the great ideas you want, but nothing will happen if you don’t have supportive senior management and corporate culture,” says Bláthnaid Byrne, group treasurer at AGL Energy (AGL). “By the same token, existing culture benefits from and needs champions to push ideas.”

Byrne compares the way individuals within large organisations represent sustainability to innovation in corporate culture, in the sense that innovative people need a supportive culture to thrive while, on the flip side, companies benefit from fostering innovative individuals within their ranks.

Contact Energy (Contact) provides an illustration of how this can work in practice. Louise Tong, the company’s head of capital markets and tax, was prepared to champion the development of a certified green borrowing programme but required institutional support to make it a reality.

“I floated the idea with our CFO and found him to be very supportive, on the basis that the initiative is perfectly aligned with Contact’s purpose and direction. I then flagged the idea with the board, giving it the chance to add any insights or concerns while we were still in the early stages. The board members were also very supportive,” Tong reveals.

This was a positive development but hardly a surprise given’s Contact’s track record in capital markets. The company was, for instance, the first to issuer under New Zealand’s same-class exemption rules that facilitate retail debt offerings. Tong tells KangaNews: “I think it’s fair to say we have never been afraid to innovate with our funding – and indeed we have done so on a number of occasions. A green borrowing programme aligns well with our corporate culture and values, I think – and should help kick-start this aspect of capital markets in New Zealand.”

The point is that companies are not necessarily making financial sacrifices to develop and deploy environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles across their operations. For one thing, the better established a sustainability framework is within a business, the more it becomes simply part of day-to-day corporate life. Sustainability also provides competitive advantages.

“We’re very much driven by a business-case approach to sustainability,” says Nina James, general manager, corporate sustainability at Investa Property Group. “As you work away at it over 10 years or more, it becomes business as usual. This has allowed us, in the last three years, to focus much more on the next big steps and the major advantages we can go for.”

In many ways, having a robust sustainability framework is plain good business sense. “Absolutely it’s an economic decision as well,” Byrne tells KangaNews. “It is not in the best interests of shareholders to invest in something we believe, within the next decade, is not going to stack up against new technology that’s coming to the market.”

Identifying the true value to the business of nonfinancial risks and opportunities can make it easier to embed sustainability at the heart of the corporate decision-making process. “Although we are talking about ESG issues, there’s a framework here by which we can discuss these kinds of issues at higher levels including senior management and the board,” says Richard Clifton-Smith, senior manager, sustainability strategy at AGL.