Organisations across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region have been taking steps to become more sustainable. However, organisations need to be more innovative than ever to ensure successful implementations of their sustainability initiatives. Industry leaders need to align sustainability goals to business objectives while complying with increasing regulatory demands.
The latest IBM annual CEO study, “Own your impact: Practical pathways to transformational sustainability”, developed by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), surveyed 350 CEOs from the MEA region about their biggest challenges. The survey found that more than half (52%) of MEA respondents rank sustainability as among their greatest challenges in the next two to three years, up from 12% in 2021.
Leveraging technology to overcome challenges
Regulators and governments across the MEA region have developed corporate disclosure requirements around environmental impact, and ESG reporting is slowly becoming a mandatory requirement for regional businesses. To enable greater transparent reporting, organisations must look into large scale adoption of AI and other exponential technologies that enable data collection and insight generation at a scale and speed impossible by traditional reporting methods.
An outstanding example of this is our latest collaboration with Statistics Centre Abu Dhabi (SCAD) where we deployed our IBM® Turbonomic® Application Resource Management (ARM) solution to help SCAD create the right balance between carbon neutrality and application performance. Through automation and smart AI functionalities, IBM Turbonomic is set to help SCAD minimise energy consumption and reduce its carbon footprint by 17 tonnes, equivalent to charging 2.1 million mobile phones or 3.11 annual households electricity consumption.
The journey to sustainability
According to the IBM IBV CEO Study, only 60% of surveyed CEOs in MEA have been implementing at least some aspects of their sustainability strategies. However, many organisations with good intentions are stalled at the planning stage because implementing sustainable practices is complex and they don’t know how or where to make an impact.
So how can you turn strategy into results?
The first steps to build and operationalising sustainability
Becoming more sustainable is an opportunity to innovate, make a difference and grow. Take action by following these three steps:
- Define your Sustainability goals – To succeed, your business needs to set and act on clear environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, then execute with exceptional data discipline across the enterprise.
- Establish your ESG data foundation –Collect, correlate, visualise, and analyse relevant data to deliver transparent, verifiable, financial-grade information.
- Operationalise your sustainability goals – Full benefit can then be achieved by leveraging the links between this system of record for ESG data and the underlying operational systems that run across all the departments and business units of your organisation. With these links in place, you can automate feedback loops that enable actions based on insights.
Focus on three key operational areas:
- Intelligent facilities and assets —The data you collect by monitoring and recording from your organisation’s physical assets and real estate facilities can fuel insights to drive significant energy savings, optimise waste management and provide predictive maintenance data to help reduce unplanned downtime.
- Resilient IT infrastructure —Upgrading IT infrastructure with newer, more energy-efficient equipment can help you reduce energy consumption. You can improve customer experiences and productivity by boosting business resiliency.
- Circular supply chains — Encouraging reuse and providing customers with transparent sourcing data for the products they buy is something more consumers are demanding. Deploying intelligent workflows and taking advantage of automation opportunities can not only reduce waste but also optimise fulfillment and delivery paths with lower carbon footprints. Solutions powered by AI and backed by blockchain can help you progress toward a net zero supply chain.
Organisations across the region are gradually recognising sustainability as a business imperative and growth driver. As sustainability rises higher on corporate agendas, it is important that business leaders reflect on these questions – What is the sustainability goal I want my business to achieve?, How do I align my business operations to that goal?, What are the right technologies that will help me get there? Only then can they turn sustainability ambition into action.
