Helping businesses be sustainable

HAILING from the United Kingdom, Dr Gary Kendall graced this month’s Green Business platform meeting to share on sustainability and how businesses should focus on issues that can be addressed in order to be more sustainable.

Kendall, who is a strategy and sustainability specialist, is now working on Nedbank’s Fair Share 2030 strategy, through which the bank aims to get money working for the future. Previously Kendall spent three years in Cape Town with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, helping business leaders in South Africa to better understand the mounting system pressures that are changing their operating context.

“Our impact as humans is not always predictable and neither is it always desirable. Our economy is just one giant machine that takes sunlight and transforms it into something that we as humans need,” said Kendall.

Giving the audience a slide show presentation at the Rietvlei Zoo Farm, Kendall explained how humans have impacted the earth and its natural resources, saying that China alone consumes more than half of the world’s commodities. “We can’t have human society without flourishing nature and we can’t have an economy without human society,” he said.

Kendall has been working at the intersection of business strategy and sustainability for over eight years. During this time he served as executive director at SustainAbility in London, advising several leading companies on their strategic sustainability responses, including Ford, Shell, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, A.P. Møller-Mærsk, Anglo American and Sasol.

His commitment to the sustainability agenda began when he joined WWF’s Climate and Energy programme in 2006, where his main interests were the causes of and solutions to society’s dependence on liquid hydrocarbon transport fuels. This followed nine years in the downstream oil industry with ExxonMobil, spanning diverse roles from research and product development through sales, marketing and business development. Working across Europe, the US and Asia offered Kendall first-hand insight into the sustainability challenges faced by one of the world’s most problematic sectors.

Kendall concluded with a profound quote from John Elkington: “Sustainability … is about the fundamental inter-generational task of winding down the dysfunctional economic and business models of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the evolution of new ones fit for human population headed towards nine billion people, living on a small planet already in ecological overshoot.”