Businesses intent on long-term viability need to shape core decision-making through a lens of sustainability. In her keynote presentation at the Trialogue Sustainability Symposium, National Business Initiative (NBI) CEO Shameela Soobramoney called on businesses to centralise sustainability rather than employ it as a set of policies and pledges layered on top of a business-as-usual approach.
“We gather at a time when sustainability can no longer be treated as a language of good intentions. It is becoming the language of consequence…[with] companies discovering too late that the systems on which their profits depend have been quietly eroding and weakening around them.”
Speaking at the launch of the inaugural Trialogue Sustainability Business Tracker 2026, she highlighted how the financial, social and ecological systems that companies depend on are under chronic strain. The antidote is for sustainability to become the driving factor behind capital allocation, supply contacts and performance measurement and reward.
Environmental risk is financial risk
Commenting that “Environmental degradation is no longer an externality, it is a balance sheet risk with a human face,” Soobramoney called for environmental concerns to factor into financial planning.
She referenced the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a grouping of more than 100 central bank governors, whose 2025 short-term climate scenarios describe climate change as a current reality already reshaping financial systems, and whose long-term scenarios project global GDP losses of around 30% by 2100 under current policies. Many parts of Africa are among the regions likely to face far more severe losses even sooner.
The NGFS has linked the degradation of freshwater systems, forests and biodiversity to macroeconomic and financial stability risks, including a growing frontier of litigation tied to biodiversity loss and pollution.
Citing the Potsdam Institute’s 2025 Planetary Health Check, Soobramoney spoke to the breaching of seven of the nine planetary boundaries on which life depends, including ocean acidification, newly crossed alongside climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows and novel entities.
She described the recent subsidence issues in London, where prolonged drought has caused significant property damage and driven a wave of expensive insurance claims that clearly illustrate how environmental risk is converting directly into financial exposure for households, insurers and property markets.
Social cohesion as infrastructure
Soobramoney referenced South Africa’s 30% unemployment rate and 60% youth unemployment rate as evidence of the social challenges facing the country. She argued these are not simply social indicators but governance ones, where exclusion is undermining trust in the institutions meant to serve communities and, with it, investment opportunities.
Social cohesion, she argued, is essential infrastructure, as essential to a functioning investment environment as roads, ports, electricity and water.
Sustainability ambition outpaces action
Referencing the Sustainable Business Tracker’s findings, Soobramoney noted that many companies have moved faster on sustainability commitments than on the systems needed to deliver that sustainability in practice.
She said that companies tend to commit to sustainability targets before establishing a clear business case, that board-level debate on sustainability trade-offs remains limited and that sustainability performance is rarely reflected in supplier contracts or remuneration.
Noting that many organisations are still trying to manage 21st-century risks with 20th-century systems, Soobramoney pointed out that the cost of conviction without calculation, governance, capability and measurement will be revealed in inflationary shocks, asset impairments, food and water stress, insurance retreat, fiscal pressure, migration, conflict risk, and weakened trust in institutions.
A collaborative path forward
Soobramoney positioned collaborative action of the kind the NBI works to facilitate as necessary where individual companies cannot resolve systemic risks alone. She noted research suggesting that companies are not, on average, scaling back their sustainability ambitions, a sign that there is still room to close the gap between commitment and practice.
She closed by invoking the Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti’s formulation of interdependence, closely linked to the concept of Ubuntu: “I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.” In the context of sustainable business, she framed this as more than a moral insight, but a governance one. A company depends on its workers, its communities, the ecosystems it operates within and the trust it holds with all of them. Where those systems weaken, she said, the enterprise weakens with them.
