Eleanor Fraser-Smith, Head of Sustainability at Victory Hill Capital Partners, says adaptive decision-making is essential to handling the messy, systemic realities of sustainability.
In the race to showcase climate credentials, companies and investors risk falling into what might be termed ‘greenskimming’. Unlike greenwashing, which implies deliberate intent to mislead, greenskimming stems from genuine ambition to ‘do the right thing’ without fully grappling with the messy, systemic realities of sustainability. The outcome is overconfident claims that unravel under scrutiny, leaving organisations exposed to reputational and regulatory risk.
We see this play out in multiple ways. Some Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation Article 8 funds might overstate their ‘impact’, glossing over hard constraints in their portfolios, while companies might find themselves making net zero pledges without mapping scope 3 supply chains. Voluntary carbon markets have amplified this problem. Buyers with the best of intentions purchase offsets, only to discover that projects, whether rainforest protection schemes or cookstove initiatives, prove ineffective or short-lived. So, what was intended as climate leadership becomes reputational liability.
