Giving Compass' Take:

• PwC’s 21st CEO Survey shows that CEO's only worry about sustainability issues "to some extent."  The author discusses what might need to happen for corporate leaders to start making concrete action toward sustainable outcomes.

• Can donors play a role in encouraging more action from corporate CEOs to invigorate CSR missions?

• Read about a new model of business philanthropy.

To what extent are CEOs worried about sustainability issues?

According to the latest PwC’s 21st CEO Survey, the answer in general is ‘to some extent.’ Climate change & environmental damage is #9 on the list of CEOs’ concerns globally. However, there is an interesting geographical divide: While CEOs in Western Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America include it in their list of top ten threats, climate change & environmental damage is absent from the top ten lists of CEOs in the rest of the world.

But maybe, just maybe, the right question is not how much CEOs are concerned about this or that issue, but what do they actually do about it? After all, we already know that attitudes ≠ behavior as demonstrated by endless surveys showing how consumers want to support sustainable brands.

I would like to take it one step forward and suggest that if we want to see any meaningful change in CEOs’ attitudes and more importantly activities we do need progressive investors to act more like ‘barbarians at the gate.’ The reason is very simple – it seems like CEOs pay a lot more attention to investors who “amass large stakes in a company and, through brute force, push for changes in the company’s leadership and business practices.”

Letters offering a sustainable vision are important and can have some impact, but even if they represent so and so trillions of investment, they are just letters. I’d like to remind Fink and others the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), with its network of investors and purchasers, representing over $100 trillion that has done great work increasing business’ levels of environmental disclosure worldwide, but has not managed to move the needle, i.e. getting enough companies to comply with the Paris agreement goals or adopt the Sustainable Development Goals.

Read the full article about CEOs caring about sustainable change by Raz Godelnik at Triple Pundit.