Single-issue standards got us this far, but businesses don’t operate in separate systems. Here’s why sustainability practitioners are starting to think in systems, not silos.

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Contents

1. The challenge of single-issue standards
2. The idea of being ‘future fit’
3. Future-Fit fundamentals
4. More than a reporting tool: the Benchmark in practice
5. Practical value for companies, investors and advisors

Ask a sustainability team what keeps them up at night, and increasingly the answer isn’t a single issue; it’s the collision between issues. Standards, frameworks and regulations have encouraged (and pushed) businesses to take sustainability risks like climate, nature, and human rights seriously. But even with careful disclosure drafting, it is difficult to capture the connections and trade-offs between them.

Now is the time to step back from issue-by-issue compliance and ask the bigger question: what would it take to address business sustainability as one interconnected system? That’s the case for whole-business sustainability thinking, and why the Future-Fit® Business Benchmark (FFBB) deserves a closer look.

The challenge of single-issue standards

Standards like IFRS S2 and the TNFD exist because climate and nature are urgent, complex, and were historically underreported or ignored by business. Both standards have forced companies to take these risks more seriously.

The challenge of issue-specific standards is that businesses don’t operate in separate climate, nature and social systems – an issue sustainability professionals are already grappling with.

Some organisations have combined their climate and nature disclosures, endeavouring to in some way reflect this inherent interconnection within the confines of mandatory disclosure requirements. But even this doesn’t go far enough in showing that all systems are connected, and that all business activities involve trade-offs across them. A decarbonisation decision can shift risk onto a supplier or supply chain worker. A biodiversity offset can create a community land-use issue. Disclosing against a single-issue standard, by design, won’t surface those trade-offs and impacts.

The idea of being ‘future fit’

Some sustainability professionals around the world are adopting a more systems thinking approach to sustainability strategy and performance. They are seeking ‘future fitness’, to become a business that minimises its negative impact on people and planet while building the capacity to keep doing so across one interconnected system.

These professionals are using the FFBB, which draws on decades of systems science – from Planetary Boundaries research on Earth’s tipping points, through Doughnut Economics’ social floor, to the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development’s model for decision-making in complex systems – to give businesses a single, whole-of-system view of their impact, and of the progress they’re making to address it.

Future-Fit fundamentals

The Future-Fit Business Benchmark helps organisations measure, manage and improve their sustainability performance by providing a science-based destination, a holistic and practical roadmap, and a way to prioritise actions that create long-term value for both the business and society.

For a company to be truly sustainable according to the FFBB, it must do everything it can to eliminate its own negative impacts that undermine wellbeing and degrade the environment. This is reflected in its 23 Break-Even Goals, which capture impacts across all aspects of the company’s value web, including safeguarding employee and community health, ensuring products do not harm people or the environment, and responsibly managing natural resources.

In the Future-Fit approach, everyone must do their part to enable life to flourish on Earth forever – the Benchmark’s ultimate goal. It’s not enough to offset negative impacts in one area with positive impacts in another. Once an organisation is actively reducing negative impacts, they can consider opportunities to act as a force for good by advancing one (or more) of the Benchmark’s 24 Positive Pursuits.

Returning to our earlier example of a decarbonisation decision that shifts risk into the supply chain, reporting against the Break-Even Goals (BE) would force this trade-off into view rather than letting it hide behind a single emissions number. An organisation pursuing BE06 or BE18 (Operational or Product GHGs) through supplier switching would also need to report against BE04 (Procurement), BE11 (Living Wage), and BE12 (Employee Terms), so it can’t claim carbon progress while quietly overlooking poor conditions for its supply chain workers. Both impacts surface at once, reflecting the interconnectedness that underpins the Benchmark’s ambition.

Where biodiversity credits create community land-use issues, progress on BE08 (Operational Encroachment) via an offset would sit alongside reporting on BE09 (Community Health), presenting a balanced view that doesn’t prioritise the ecological benefit over the community impacts.

More than a reporting tool: the Benchmark in practice

The FFBB is useful well beyond reporting or measurement: the Benchmark and its supporting resources provide ideas and inspiration to shape your sustainability agenda. This is how Austrian jeweller Swarovski used the Benchmark to inspire their sustainable product guidelines and approach (see page 26 of their 2025 Sustainability Report for details).

German heating company Viessmann and New Zealand RV company Tourism Holdings Limited (or thl) used the Benchmark to develop their sustainability strategy, and provide progress updates in their corporate reporting.

The Benchmark also underpins the Sustainable Business Coach tool, which supports financial services business customers and brokers with Virgin Money UK, Bank of Ireland and Aviva to assess and address their impact on the environment and society.

Practical value for companies, investors and advisors

For sustainability practitioners, the FFBB helps set whole-of-business ambition rather than fragmented, topic-specific targets, providing one reference point for prioritising action across every issue that matters. It provides a range of ideas, initiatives and prompts that can guide engagement within your organisation and with your stakeholders to advance progress in your priority areas. Initiatives like the Sustainable Business Coach show how you can engage with the Benchmark to support the sustainability journey of key customers, partners or suppliers. Deciding to adopt a new approach now, when the focus is so firmly on mandatory reporting, is not a small undertaking – but it is a worthwhile one, to make visible the trade-offs and impacts that are actually taking place, so that well-intentioned companies reduce harm, rather than transfer it.

For investors, the Benchmark offers a way to assess systemic resilience across a portfolio, rather than exposure to any single risk category, and to identify which companies are genuinely building resilience rather than managing one narrative at a time. More complete information can drive better company engagement, supporting investment confidence.

For advisors like BWD, Future-Fit offers us a rigorous, science-based structure that can be used, in whole or in part, to support clients transitioning to genuinely integrated sustainability strategy. BWD draws on the Benchmark precisely because it does what single-issue standards can’t: hold the whole business in view at once.

Single-issue standards will keep serving their purpose: driving disclosure on risks that regulators, investors and society have decided can no longer be ignored. That’s necessary, and it isn’t going away. But in this time of topic-by-topic global standards transformation, the systems thinking embedded in the Future-Fit Business Benchmark feels fresh and focused on our long term future.

Along with its insightful resources, the most exciting thing about the Future-Fit Business Benchmark is its heart, captured in its objective statement: that everyone must do their part to enable life to flourish on Earth forever.

In an environment focused on investor information needs and five-year corporate strategy cycles, the opportunity to contribute to flourishing forever is one worth taking.

About the Author

Susan Dyster is Senior Strategy Manager and Reporting Lead at sustainability strategy consultancy BWD Strategic, and a Future-Fit Accredited Advisor.