Our Systems are calling time for Investment

Authored by Paula Kensington FCCA - FutureValue Director, Group Finance & Beyond Sustainability

In reflecting on my 35-year career in finance and operations, I’ve often found myself contemplating the question: Why is sustainability so hard to achieve, and how do we even begin writing the business case for it?

In times of financial pressure, the priority has firmly been about making more money, optimising short-term revenue rather than focusing on long-term efficiency improvements. As a result, internal operations, including essential systems and day to day methods of working were often left to operate with minimal investment, leading to underdeveloped processes that struggled to keep pace with demand.

This lack of investment in our operational infrastructure and reporting capabilities has created what I now see as a "systems debt." Over time, this neglect has led to an environment where internal teams were forced to manage with manual workarounds and temporary fixes.

Unfortunately, it’s taken us years to realise the full impact of these short-term decisions on our ability to collect, interrogate, and report against new climate and sustainability metrics.

We now face an existential challenge that, in part, may have been driven by our own lack of long-term systems investment. Which leads me to question how can we operationalise sustainability when our systems are already underperforming?

Addressing the Systems Debt

One of the biggest obstacles to operationalising sustainability is the systems debt created by decades of underinvestment. As we prepare to comply with new climate and sustainability reporting mandates, we find ourselves asking whether we can afford to allocate significant portions of our annual profits or in fact whether shareholders and boards will support such an investment. After all, climate & sustainability reporting is often seen as an added burden, rather than a value-added function.

The decision we now face is whether we re-engineer our existing systems to enable data capture and analysis for climate & sustainability—or start from scratch. Not only will this require significant capital investment, but it also demands a commitment of human resources and cross-departmental support.

So, the crucial question remains: How do I operationalise sustainability across the business?

Three Key Areas to Focus On

1. Setting a Strategy: To successfully integrate sustainability, the first step is setting a clear strategy. This includes defining the actions your organisation must take to meet its climate and sustainability objectives. I recommend structuring your climate & sustainability efforts across three timeframes: NOW (12 months), NEXT (18 months to 3 years), and FUTURE (5 years+). Each phase should have defined activities, clear accountability, and success measures which tie into your overall strategy.

2. Redirecting Funding and Resources: Sustainability requires investment—not just in systems, but in people, technology, and processes. Allocating a percentage of current profits, capital reserves, or other financial resources to sustainability initiatives will be key. Tracking performance against these activities, setting clear expectations with all stakeholder groups, both internal and external, to ensure buy-in and commitment at every level of the organisation.

3. Mapping Capital Allocation to Risk Management: Lastly, integrating sustainability into the core of your business means linking it to your risk management systems. You should map out the intersection of all five forms of capital (financial, human, intellectual, natural, and social) with your organisation’s risk management strategy. Incorporating climate-related risks and opportunities, as defined by the ISSB, will help you understand how sustainability fits within your broader risk landscape, ensuring that these considerations influence strategic decisions across all areas of your business.

These three key focus areas will areas come as no surprise to the CFO’s and finance professionals reading this. Which has prompted me to deepen my enquiry here as to why it’s difficult for the CFO to operationalise these steps. Afterall, we are fully aware that transformation requires a strategy and usually a funding requirement so what are the steps that I can take to move these three points forward?

Perhaps the best way to respond and share value is to discuss why this is difficult, for the CFO to install within the organisation.  I see three mindset issues that all point to a feeling of missing out, or to rephrase that, should a stakeholder suffer a degree of loss?

1. Is someone going to miss out (perhaps one or more of our stakeholders is going to be asked to forgoe something), effectively give up something that they value. Now it’s time to reset expectations of all stakeholders by circling back to global regulations tightening up asking business to do better for the environment.

2. Our spreadsheets are missing something – whether that’s a new row that we assign a sustainability cost or climate opportunity to, so that we can effect change in the way in which we model our sustainability initiatives? Perhaps resetting the discounted cash flows [DCF] using a weighted average cost of capital [WACC] that extends payback periods and includes returns which include all the non-financial impacts required that might include the cost of repaying nature.

3. The organisation’s strategy might be missing out when it comes to assessing how sustainability action can deliver more than a de-risking or cost reduction impact. If adherence to mandated reporting is being seen as a de-risking strategy then the investment required to fund this may seem un-exciting and difficult to fund. Whereas companies embedding sustainability into every business stream then the opportunities can allow for optimisation and efficiencies across the whole value chain. Even offering a competitive advantage for companies to embrace sustainability as a strategic advantage.

Conclusion

As CFOs, we need to lead our organisations through the complexities of operationalising sustainability. It’s not just about meeting new reporting requirements—it’s about transforming how we do business. By addressing our systems debt, setting a clear strategy, reallocating resources, and ensuring alignment with risk management, we can make sustainability a core part of our business strategy.

This is the first step toward operationalising sustainability and ensuring that our businesses thrive in an increasingly sustainable world.

At Future Value Global, a regenerative development company operating across ANZ and Papua New Guinea, we’re on a transformative journey. As a privately held company we started life with founders capital and close family and friends as investors. Now, in our fourth year of business, we’ve just begun delivering renewable energy projects in PNG, funded by both the UK and Australian governments.

2024 was a year of action, as we simultaneously laid the foundation for strong, sustainable systems, processes, and policies across our global business whilst busy in delivery mode of multiple projects across PNG and the Philippines. As we turned into 2025 our business focus expanded from community and country impact and looked to include company impact too.

We know that the global business community has the ability to shift gears and drive action into meaningful change that will positively impact countries, industries, people and place.

As the CFO and Director for Beyond Sustainability, I’ve dedicated myself to ensuring that sustainability is embedded at the heart of our operations. While we’re not yet a reporting entity, we recognise the critical importance of preparing ourselves for compliance with global sustainability standards. This includes aligning with ISSB requirements, which has helped me gain clarity on the necessary data, systems, and skill gaps that need to be addressed.

We recognise the need to optimise our supply chain and to recognise that we are a player in the supply chains of many others. That means sustainability and climate action across all forms of capital, the environment and our ability to positively impact and influence our social footprint which is deeply rooted within our fundamental heartbeat.