Taking the Temperature on Sustainability
Many companies will continue to take sustainability seriously over the next 12 months. A recent Honeywell survey of 600 business leaders finds that 90% are pleased with their sustainability efforts over the prior 12 months, and 97% plan environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) budget increases in the next 12 months.
Honeywell’s Environmental Sustainability Index is a newly launched quarterly indicator of trends centering on corporate climate priorities and approaches to environmental sustainability.
The Index breaks sustainability into four categories: energy evolution and efficiency, emissions reduction, pollution prevention, and circularity/recycling. Nearly all respondents (97%) say that they’ve budgeted increases for at least one category, while nearly 75% say they plan to increase budgets for all four categories. More than half of respondents say that their efforts over the previous 12 months were “extremely successful” for each category.
Segmenting the results by industry paints a different, though still generally optimistic, picture. Responses from transportation and logistics professionals, for example, are generally positive when asked how their efforts to reduce emissions are going, but fewer than half (40%) say these efforts were going “extremely well.”
What’s more, 10% state they were not successful in meeting their emissions reduction goals for the prior 12 months. The good news: 73% of respondents working in logistics are optimistic they will meet emissions reduction goals by 2030.