Blogs

25 June 2024 - CISL's Interim CEO, Lindsay Hooper, writes: In an era of disruptions, polarisation, complexity and increasingly intricate environmental debates, the core business case for sustainability remains: business cannot thrive on a dead planet.Whatever issues dominate political agendas in this mega election year, this is not the time for bus…

24 June 2024 – Dr Nina Seega, Director of CISL’s Centre for Sustainable Finance, asks what's needed for the Nature Restoration Law to be a success.Campaigners exploded with joy when EU ministers finally agreed to pass the controversial ‘Nature Restoration Law’ [in June 2024].Backing the law — whose approval had been delayed by the refusal of variou…

17 June 2024 - Ben Kellard, Director of Business Strategy, reflects on the challenges and enabling practices that emerged from discussions with cross-sectoral CSOs at our recent Forum. As recently reported, we recognise that CSOs have a tough role to lead the system change needed to create a sustainable economy.  So, CISL convened a Forum for thirt…

03 June 2024 – Dr Martin Porter, Executive Chair, CISL Europe, discusses the crucial need for sustainable business to be directed by public policy and for business to embrace its role in activating change for a sustainable future.As we have learnt more about the urgency and scale of the challenge of moving to a genuinely sustainable development mod…

31 May 2024 – With a raft of global elections in process or looming, and with geopolitical tensions and conflict dominating political agendas and decision-making fora, we face a decade more important than any other.One of the dominant strengths of CISL is in our convening power and collaborations which help influence and shape the policies we need …

28 May 2024 - Dr Kayla Friedman, Course Director for the Master’s and Postgraduate Certificate in Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment (IDBE), with The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), showcases her ideas to address the housing situation the UK is facing.With the UK election just around the corne…

24 May 2024 - Dr Tim Forman, Senior Teaching Associate and Course Director of the Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment postgraduate courses, calls for built environment practitioners to consider climate change and climate risk more holistically to achieve ‘climate-smart’ buildings and infrastructure.Although some view climate change a…

2 May 2024 - The government has warmed to one group of protesters while clamping down on others. Writing in the New Statesman, Priya Rajasekar explores the politics of protest and the implications for business.More than a hundred 'go-slow' tractors, with a handful blaring their horns as they rolled past the Houses of Parliament, caught the nation’s…

30 April 2024 - Dr Livia Ventura, Prince of Wales Global Sustainability Fellow, explains how the recently approved Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive by the European Parliament will impact businesses across Europe and beyond.In the context of shifting legal trends affecting boards globally, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence D…

25 April 2024 – Dr Nicoletta Piccolrovazzi considers key lessons business leaders can draw from social change programmes.Broadening Perspectives: Insights into Social JusticeWe constantly hear of concepts that are central to sustainability agendas:  the triple bottom line, double materiality, environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. Consid…

Updated 23 April 2024 - Business intelligence that seeks to promote the social dimension of ESG needs to engage with the diversity and wealth of knowledge that emerges from the human behind the data.The recent culture wars on business self-regulation through ESG have once again highlighted the tension between business profitability and social respo…

23 April 2024 - Bianca Drotleff and Krisztina Zálnoky reflect on why a socially just transition to a circular economy is essential to ensuring equitable benefits for all workers if the EU is to deliver upon its Green Deal ambition to ‘leave no person and place behind’ in the pursuit of climate neutrality by 2050.Circular economy and just transition…

15 April 2024 - Governments must step up to support clean energy companies facing a number of challenges in today's shifting world order, writes CISL's Katherine Quinn.After dropping its initial £28bn investment pledge, Labour is back in the green policy game, with Keir Starmer promising that the UK will become a world leader in floating offshore w…

3 April 2024 - Publicly-funded social infrastructure is disappearing, but supermarkets and other retailers are providing communities with much-needed space and resources. Caroline Lee and Rosa Marks ask if it is time to recognise supermarkets as social infrastructure.“A great human meeting place.”1It may come as a surprise that what Nobel-Prize-win…

25 March 2024 - In this blog, Khanyi Mlambo, CISL Senior Associate, discusses the need for a comprehensive leadership approach to sustainability challenges in South Africa and beyond.In recent years, we have witnessed increasing inequality, the destruction of livelihoods, infrastructure, and communities due to impacts of global warming, across the …