Irish businesses ‘underprepared’ for sustainability, net-zero shift, research claims

Irish businesses are largely underprepared to move to net zero emissions, a new survey has found, with a significant number yet to even put a strategy in place.

According to the UCC Sustainable Futures report, 20 per cent of Irish businesses have yet to start their sustainability journey or set commitments for targets for critical sustainability issues. Some three in five said they do not have a dedicated sustainability strategy in place, while 35 per cent said there were unaware of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which requires larger Irish businesses to publicly disclose information on how they engage with environmental, social, and governance issues from January 1st 2024.

The UCC Sustainable Futures report, The Sustainability Transformation: Assessing the Readiness of Irish Businesses, is designed to assess the level of business preparedness for a sustainable future. Government targets have committed Ireland to reducing emissions nationally by 51 per cent by 2030 and to become carbon neutral by 2050.

The survey, which questioned 380 SMEs and larger enterprises in a range of sectors across Ireland, found that less than 10 per cent consider themselves sustainable, or well-advanced on the journey.

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“We’re at an inflection point in terms of climate change. It’s one of our most urgent challenges globally, and this decade now will be extremely important in terms of setting us on a path to a sustainable net-zero enterprise of the future,” said Dr Marguerite Nyhan, Associate Professor in Future Sustainability & Environmental Engineering, University College Cork. “What’s absolutely certain is that businesses from micro enterprises right up to global multinational are all going to play an extremely important role in this sustainability transformation.”

The survey also suggested that Irish businesses underestimate the scale of what is needed to get to net zero emissions by 2050. Only 22 per cent of Irish businesses having committed to a net zero target.

One area that may be causing hesitation is in the potential cost of implementing sustainable strategies. However, that may be an unfounded fear, Microsoft said. “There isn’t a small business that doesn’t want to be sustainable,” said Anne Sheehan, General Manager, Microsoft Ireland. “However, I think from pledge to progress, I think what the report brings out is that we have not moved the dial anywhere near where we thought and actually, while there are forces affecting small to medium and large enterprises, actually being a sustainable business doesn’t mean it’s going to be more expensive for you if you can get the right strategy.”

More than 80 per cent believe digital technologies are important in accelerating their move to sustainability. But 64 per cent said they had not adopted digital technologies to support their sustainability efforts or were only in the early stages.

“I think that there is significant opportunity for digital technologies to help transform business operations for a sustainable net zero and nature positive future. By harnessing these technologies appropriately to manage and monitor and track progress on key sustainability issues, this may advance large scale environmental sustainability efforts across multiple sectors,” said Dr Nyhan. “It needs to go beyond , ticking the box and needs to move into action now.”

Part of the issue may come from a leadership level. Almost 70 per cent have not assigned someone to develop and implement a sustainability strategy, while 69 per cent do not have someone tasked with identifying environmental sustainability priorities. Around two-thirds said they had not yet developed the required sustainability skills or basic competencies.

Ms Sheehan said Microsoft believed it could play a role here. “We will make a number of resources available on our Microsoft Sustainability Learning Centre,” she said. " You’ll hear a lot more from Microsoft, on how we bring this very specifically to the SME community and how we simplify it for them, so I think we’ll play our part.”