Buro Happold becomes a Sustainable Brands Member

Buro Happold recently joined Sustainable Brands (SB), a global network of industry leaders who see addressing social and environmental challenges as essential to business innovation, value creation, and positive impact.

Sustainable Brands hosts engagements throughout the year where members come together to share experiences and discuss opportunities to advance sustainability across industries. In March of 2022, Buro Happold’s Kirsten Melling and Kathleen Hetrick presented at the Design Innovation membership meeting, sharing the firm’s approach, including successful and failed project examples, to prioritizing social impact across environmental, social, and governance strategies (ESG)

The presentation provided the opportunity for Buro Happold to share experiences, discuss lessons learned and facilitate breakout sessions to encourage SB members to brainstorm their own ideas for implementing social impact. Buro Happold offered three market observations regarding the often-silent S, known as social impact, in ESG to start the discussion.

• Historically, organizations have focused their sustainability commitments on their environmental strategies, limiting their commitment to and measurement of social impact
• There is broad shift across industries to prioritize not only areas of direct impact such as operational carbon and resource consumption, but to quantify the indirect impacts organizations have on the people and communities throughout the supply chain
• There is a substantial gap between setting goals and achieving results, leaving companies stuck in implementation limbo with progress slowing or stalling

Buro Happold shared a few experiences and recommendations for closing the gap between action and intention, aiming for both environmental and social change at once.

• Embed social impact into environmental solutions: There is an opportunity to take a “yes, and” approach when it comes to ESG strategies. As organizations solve environmental challenges, they should also take a social lens, ensuring environmental strategies have positive social outcomes.
• Engage new voices and perspectives: Getting an outside perspective uncovers blind spots in social impact. Within a company, environmental teams should engage teams focused on social impact (R&D, DEI, HR, Supply Chain etc.) to find synergies. Organizations must also do the hard work to authentically engage the communities they touch – ensuring health, wellbeing, and quality of life does not suffer due to business operations.
• Resource the Roadmap: Without the right people, processes, policies, and funding in place when the E+S roadmap is created, organizations will struggle to prioritize execution. If commitments are made, then organizations need to back them up with the resources to execute them, and accountable leaders inside the organization must not sign-off on making commitments without it.

Buro Happold will expand on these topics over the course of 2022 in collaboration with Sustainable Brands. To see more details on our recommendations and discussion, download the linked presentation or reach out to Kirsten Melling or Kathleen Hetrick to learn more.