Can we afford sustainability? If the answer is yes, how do we get there?

There is a growing trend among business schools that are turning their attention to the role that the environment plays in corporate strategy. In light of that trend, the Yale School of Management recently published the spring edition of their Magazine, Qn, dedicated entirely to answering the question: “Can we afford Sustainability?”. When Yale shared this question with alumni months ago, I jumped at the opportunity to write about our work in EDF’s Corporate Partnerships Program. Check out the feature that resulted — “Where are the Win-Wins?” — describing our partnership with private equity leader, Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts.

While the entire magazine presents articles and interviews that offer a resounding “yes” to the question posed above – “Can we afford sustainability?” –the distance between where we are now and where we need to go can still feel overwhelming. Joel Makower recently wrote in his environmental blog, Greenbiz.com, that at the current rate of change we won’t see absolute emissions reductions until 2030. This implies that the private sector’s contributions to-date in addressing climate change have only made a dent in the overall reductions needed to stabilize the climate. What remain illusive are the pathways for the private sector to finance and execute the transition to a more sustainable economy at scale.

We think our work in Corporate Partnerships addresses this challenge head on by creating pathways to help get us to a scale that matters, faster. Our work with Wal-Mart is helping to develop strategies to transform thousands of supply chains around the world. The EDF Climate Corps program is putting in place the infrastructure needed to overcome organizational barriers to capturing energy efficiency by training MBA students and sending them to leading companies around the country. And the Innovation Exchange is focused on developing information platforms to disseminate best practices and thought leadership across the private sector. What all of our projects in the Corporate Partnerships Program have in common is the fact that they are building compelling evidence that we can afford sustainability and that our strategies, if taken to scale, will add up to real change.

And we’re in good company. Yale hosted a webinar titled “Where are the opportunities and risks in sustainability?” yesterday as a complement to the Qn magazine, featuring alumni leaders in the fields of sustainable investing, consulting and business development. For the most part, they were bullish on sustainability. Nancy Pfund, managing partner at DBL Investors, a venture capital firm committed to achieving social, environmental and economic returns, proposed that we have not yet seen the “Facebook” of sustainability. Talk about a business that achieved scale quickly! Hopefully a next generation of market-changing sustainability businesses is just a start-up investment away. Check out the webinar, available online, to hear more.