Sustainability

The interconnected spheres of environmental, economic, and social sustainability are essential for conserving our planet and its resources. Researching these areas enables us to create pathways to an inclusive and fairer society at the global, national, local, and individual levels.

From economics and accounting to SME engagement, our enduring work has practical applications in tackling the challenges of achieving net-zero, reducing carbon footprints and delivering sustainable business. By supporting and developing adaptable environmental, economic and social pathways, we help to achieve the goal of a more sustainable planet.

Our researchers worked with the government in Brazil to introduce a new Amazon deforestation reduction initiative; educated and worked alongside African organisations on clean water enterprises; produce systems to reduce waste across business supply chains; and develop and embed sustainable accounting practices.

Transcript for Sustainability Research at Lancaster University Management School

Sustainability and climate change are question areas that are of primary importance not only to academia, but our society, and our governments. If we don't think about and if we don't act on issues of sustainability, then it's our futures that we are destroying. And we really do need that message to go out through every piece of work that we do. I think sustainability is very important for the Management School. And it's not just environmental sustainability that we're talking about. We're also talking about social and economic sustainability. What we want to do here is investigate actually how we can make organisations and businesses much more resilient in the future, so that they can work comfortably. In LUMS, we’re committed to developing solutions to the Societal Grand Challenges. We want to achieve net zero, to reduce carbon footprints and to find sustainable solutions to business practices. I think it's tremendously important that LUMS engages with sustainability and climate change. It's a huge societal challenge, for not only the UK, but globally and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, do bear this out. Sustainability research is important for Lancaster University Management School for two reasons. An internal one, in that all management schools are carriers for their colleagues’ ideas. And there are a lot of scholars here at Lancaster for whom sustainability research is at the heart of what they do. So that means that there's a strong presence in the school of people who are interested in the topic area. And our job as research leaders is to allow those colleagues to flourish. But there's also an outward-facing role as well. We are a Civic University. Lancaster University Management School wishes to do impactful research that changes people and changes problems in the world. And sustainable development would be one of those big problem areas. So hence it's really sensible subject to be pursuing from both that internal and that external perspective. Plastic packaging is one of the key pollutants in our current world and we need to reduce the amount of plastic packaging that goes into the world. So it's been really important to try and find out why we have plastic packaging and what we can do to reduce it, The Plastic Packaging in People's Lives (PPiPL) is taking a holistic approach to rethinking the consumer attitude-behaviour gap. And we're using food plastic packaging as an exemplar. Now in simple terms an attitude-behaviour gap is the difference between what I say I'm going to do and then what I actually do. And the holistic approach recognises consumers don't operate in a vacuum. So they operate within infrastructural and market conditions. So we are looking at the pre-consumption elements, the supply chain, consumption elements, working with households, and post-consumption elements where we're thinking about what happens to plastics after they get discarded. Our natural world is in quite a state of change, whether that be climate change or biodiversity collapse, but also the introduction of a lot of novel materials into the environment. At the same time, inequality is rising. It certainly got worse over the pandemic, with the global financial crisis, it's got worse. And so as a result, there are these social problems where people aren't as fortunate as ourselves. And that in turn creates a lot of conflict and tension in the world. Underpinning both of those social and environmental aspects is the economic system. And this is where we get closer to business, because the economic system creates these adverse outcomes, and we need to find a way that the economic system can address them. Proactive and responsible and sustainable business is one way to get into that outcome that we're looking for. And business is a very important partner in sustainable development. Environmental justice is about treating people fairly, regardless of their, income, gender, race or ethnic background, and meaningfully involving all these people as well, in sustainable development and, implementing environmental policies, and, working towards social justice in this way. It’s about making sure that everybody is treated fairly when it comes to environmental issues. And it particularly tries to address the disproportionate burden, experienced by people of colour and people from minorities. And economists can contribute to this topic because they're mostly interested in understanding cause and effect. Now sustainability has become one of the key issues in family business research. And the reason for that is that it is very closely related to how families will endure in business over time. Therefore, families are not only interested in themselves being able to create a firm that will last over generations, but the impact that business will have on society, on the environment, and on national or international economics. Modern slavery is estimated to affect 50 million people globally, with most cases in the private sector. Regulators and researchers assume that by mandating reporting on this issues, this is going to improve practice. However, this relies entirely on the quality of such reporting. My research with my colleague Steven Young focused on improving effectiveness and transparency of modern slavery reporting. The B-School to ESG-School project is about transforming our curriculum, our postgraduate curriculum. B-School is business school, which is what we already are. ESG is about the environmental and social and governance standards for business. So the aim of the project is to completely transform our curriculum the way we teach, the way we embed those ideas of ESG into our curriculum in order to actually prepare our students for the world out there that they're going to meet. The importance of this project really is that if you look at the world that the students leaving this university are going to be working in, they are going to have to be dealing with issues of the environment, social issues and the governance mechanisms that control those areas of their working lives. So preparing them for that is vitally important.

The Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business

The Pentland Centre delivers world-class research and works with global corporations, national organisations and regional SMEs to make a practical impact on social and environmental sustainability. 

Discover some of the Pentland Centre’s work to tackle key issues for the future of the planet, from sustainable oceans to the circular economy.

Pentland Centre

Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives (PPiPL)

The PPiPL project focused on how plastic food packaging is embedded in consumers’ day-to-day lives. It involved researchers and industry leaders across the supply chain, from production and sales through consumption to waste disposal and recycling.

The Plastic Packaging in People's Lives Project

The Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives (PPiPL) project focuses on how plastic food packaging is embedded in consumers’ day-to-day lives.

Plastic Packaging in People's Lives

PPiPL's research

Find out how PPiPL’s work with packaging manufacturers and retailers can help improve consumer behaviour towards plastics.

Plastic Packaging in People's Lives

Ocean stewardship

For companies to become ocean stewards, there are many issues to be resolved. The SeaBOS initiative focuses on addressing: illegal fishing, forced labour in supply chains, antibiotic use in seafood production, plastic pollution in the oceans and the response to climate change. Researchers can create more impact when working in close partnership with industry to tackle these issues.

Professor Jan Bebbington reveals how her work as part of the SeaBOS project is bringing together 10 of the largest seafood-producing corporations in the world with academics that range from ecologists to accountants, to champion ocean sustainability.

Sustainability Benchmarking

Sustainability benchmarks – rankings based on companies’ performances relating to certain criteria – are becoming increasingly important and can shape corporate behaviour.

Transcript for Sustainability Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a really interesting exercise; it's where somebody gathers a group of organisations together that have something in common and evaluates their reporting practice against some sort of standard criteria and you get a best to worst list out of it. There is now an increasing number of benchmarks out there and we know that they have an effect. What it does is it sort of creates an ordering as opposed to a direct measure of how people have done, so it's that ordering that then makes people look at those above them in their list and think "oh perhaps I could do better" and for those to look at those below them in the list and feel superior. We should really start by defining what a benchmark is because there's many different ideas that people might have, but we're really looking at how companies are being evaluated by third parties. There's lots of different benchmarks out there so we might think about for example credit rating or more recently ESG ratings, but we're looking at how companies are evaluated on different aspects of their social, environmental performance or disclosure. There are two really interesting findings about from the study on benchmarking. So if we start from inside the benchmark, what we uncovered inside that black box which people rarely get to see is just how messy it is. So the benchmark developer changed the weights, changed some of the items which you'd expect because it was a practice-based piece of work where they're wanting to change what they're looking at year on year. The second thing which is the external facing work is really exciting because what we managed to uncover is that people who were benchmarked changed what they did; they increased the amount of reporting, they made their reporting became more like the benchmark than it was before, but really interestingly only some of them. So those who were interested in knowing what their peers did, those who already were quite transparent got much better, if you didn't care you didn't get better. In this project on benchmarks and sustainability we look at the inner workings of benchmarks to understand a little bit more as to how they work and what are some of the effects that they have. Not only does research show that they have an effect in terms of the audience they actually impact how different stakeholders make decisions, so you can think about investors, you can think about consumers, but also at the same time companies react to them, so they have an effect on companies that are being benchmarked and so it becomes increasingly important for us to understand how they work and what they do. This work has impact in two distinctive areas and the first one it helps us understand why reporting might lead to behaviour change within firms because we assume that is a case and there's lots of demands on companies to provide information about what they're doing, but if in providing that information nothing happens then it's a bit of a pointless exercise. So what we are able to ascertain from this work is something about those internal changes alongside the reporting changes. The second thing which was an unexpected finding for us is that the whole benchmarking exercise ended up being an exercise in companies learning how to be responsible, how to articulate what they doing and how to provide information. Sometimes reporting isn't about external audiences it's about companies learning how to be better at what they do as well. When we think about what type of impact this work might have it's important to know that this is a historical benchmark that no longer exists, but at the same time we're trying to see what types of lessons do existing benchmarks and future benchmarks want to take forward if they want to be successful in changing corporate behaviour and making companies more sustainable.

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