Leaders in Sustainability Special Report 2023

Since its inception, we have dedicated Green Network Asia as a platform to create an ecosystem of shared value for sustainable development. Our multi-stakeholder communities come from different organizations in the Asia Pacific and beyond with diverging backgrounds, profiles, and interests. Every day, we intentionally advocate that despite all the differences, we all can share value about achieving sustainability for people and the planet. The efforts towards achieving that common goal have never been more urgent.

That’s why we always want to know more about people working on complex tasks to drive sustainability in their respective organizations and communities, including governments, businesses, and civil society. We want to showcase and share their sustainability efforts with the public so people can benefit from learning opportunities from our digital publications.

We’re taking the chance to do that by creating Special Reports that can capture the complexity of working in the field of sustainability, contributed by different actors and stakeholder groups in society. As businesses have been the biggest culprits of harmful practices for people and the planet, we decided to focus our first Special Report on businesses to highlight their responsibility and role in sustainable development. We have interviewed Chief Sustainability Officers – or equivalent roles- in business organizations of various sizes and industries, from startups to well-established multinational companies.

Thus, we bring our inaugurated interview series “Leaders in Sustainability Special Report 2023” to you, showcasing exclusive insights directly from 18 corporate leaders on their organizations’ sustainability efforts. Our team is very proud to initiate this work. We intend to publish the Special Report annually, with a continuously growing list of leaders featured from around the globe, capturing the efforts, progress, and lessons learned from their sustainability journeys.

The challenge in creating this Special Report was real. Despite the exponential growth of CSO—or equivalent—roles globally in the past years, not many organizations are ready to communicate openly to the public about their sustainability commitments, journeys, and initiatives. Through the Special Report, we encourage openness, transparency, and bravery about showing vulnerability, including what has worked and what has not worked, in your organization’s efforts towards sustainability.

In this report, we asked the leaders featured about their organizations and current roles, their corporate sustainability commitments and goals, their most difficult challenges in achieving those goals, and opportunities that they see to address those challenges. We also asked about ESG material issues that they focus on and how to integrate them into corporate sustainability as well as how they communicate their corporate sustainability to internal and external stakeholders. We further asked them about their experiences in 2023—their most exciting progress and lessons learned—and their plans for 2024. Lastly, we asked them to give a piece of advice for other sustainability practitioners around the world based on their real-world experience.

The answers to these questions must have taken a lot of work to articulate. Hence, we sincerely appreciate the leaders who have participated in this Special Report by sharing their insights and experiences in their organization’s sustainability journey. We hope these interviews help enlighten Green Network Asia’s community readers with valuable insights that spark inspiration for everyone to get involved in the movement towards sustainability.

Editor: Nazalea Kusuma

Marlis Afridah

Editor-in-Chief at Green Network Asia | Website | + posts

Marlis is the Founder & CEO of Green Network Asia. She holds a master's degree in Public Policy from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. She is an interdisciplinary public policy researcher and public affairs practitioner with an integrated focus on sustainability and sustainable development. She brings over a decade of cross-sector experience working with think tanks, governments, businesses, and civil society in Asia, with expertise in policy research and advocacy, government relations, and stakeholder engagement.