25 January 2023 — Executives need to start or scale up their environmental strategies sooner rather than later because a crisis could hit their brand and business anytime, Temasek Chief Sustainability Officer Steve Howard said at a Makati Business Club event. 

“The cost of inaction is more dramatic and worse than the cost of action,” Howard said at MBC’s “Planet vs. Profit: How ESG’s Environmental Framework Impacts the Future of Businesses” event on Jan. 25 “You can be paralyzed as a business leader, thinking there’s too many choices. You just have to get stuck in and do it, and you have to take some risk in the process. Unleash the entrepreneur in you, and take some risks on it, because standing still is not an option.”

Howard was part of a panel that included Columbia University Prof. Caroline Flammer and John Davis of South Pole, an environmental project developer, funder, and consultant. They exchanged views on the different ways businesses can engage with civil society and the wider business community to come together as a collective and spur systemic change through policy and collaboration with government.

The event, which marked Zero Waste Month, was part of MBC’s ESG Executive Series, a partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), an independent, non-profit affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The forum was attended by participants coming from the academe, national and local government agencies, agriculture, energy, chemical, utilities, consulting and research sectors.

“We take sustainability and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting as a requirement for businesses, anything but the smallest of businesses it’s a sort of given that they should do that.” Temasek’s Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) Mr. Steve Howard declared