Sustainability about people and enterprises, not metrics

Take soy milk company Vitasoy as an example.

Vitasoy is stewarded by the Lo family. The founder Dr. KS Lo sold soy milk door-to-door as a low cost source of protein from 1940 - a time of food shortages and malnutrition in Hong Kong. Over the eight decades since, the company has been managed with competence, humility and integrity, and now provides healthy dairy alternatives in 40 countries.

What Dr. Lo didn’t know back in 1940, was that plant-based proteins like soy milk would one day be vital for managing a different crisis - climate change. Soy results in less than a third of the greenhouse gas emissions of dairy milk, along with a fraction of the land and water use. However, while Vitasoy’s business drives an important climate change solution – plant-rich diets - it is often not categorised as a ‘climate solutions company’ by sustainability researchers. 

It is stories like Vitasoy’s which show the limitations of top-down, narrowly focused efforts at aggregating sustainability metrics. While we could develop portfolio level metrics and elaborate calculators, which aggregate and quantify the contributions the companies we invest in are making to sustainable development, such an approach would always be heavily laden with assumptions and be driven by abstraction. Has my investment really resulted in 1,000 cars worth of emissions being taken off the road?