Among businesses in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (Benelux), the focus of sustainability spending has moved well beyond marketing and communications strategies, to creating the digital infrastructure and data platforms needed to meet fast-arriving European regulations and move the needle on ambitious sustainability transformation roadmaps.
In particular, the transparency required by the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSDR) raises to a whole new level the question of what needs to be reported and acted upon to improve environmental and social impacts. Substantial investments to build the required data platforms are helping to fuel the large increase in sustainability spending that we found in our recent survey of 3,000 executives, conducted in partnership with Oxford Economics, including 191 in Benelux.
In addition to data reporting requirements, businesses will also need to invest in changing the full value stream, from where raw materials are sourced, to how products are manufactured. Conversations about sustainability are moving beyond the low-hanging fruit of internal operations into the supply chain and how products and services are made and delivered along their entire lifecycle.
These upstream and downstream areas are where sustainability impacts—and ambitions—are often highest. Consider the EU Digital Product Passport now in development, which will feature a QR code revealing everything from where the product originated to who was involved in making it, to how it can be recycled.
Even beyond compliance, sustainability is very much on the Benelux radar, notably in the Netherlands. As one of the highest density countries in the world, businesses are operating in a culture that’s well aware of the limits of the linear—as opposed to a circular or regenerative—growth model. For example, excessive nitrogen levels in Dutch waterways caused by meat and dairy farming are both an urgent issue and a wakeup call.
Recognition is growing of the opportunities inherent to bringing sustainable products and services to market. Here, the challenge lies in substantiating these claims, using high-quality data and product environmental footprints, especially with new EU laws banning misleading green claims.
Most companies understand that technology will be essential to accomplishing these goals, and—as seen in our study—are only starting to exploit its full value, such as artificial intelligence/machine learning to get better insights more quickly, intelligent automation to manage vast data volumes, and blockchain to enable supply chain transparency.
We’ve developed five recommendations for how Benelux businesses can outperform their markets by embedding sustainability at their core.
