Putting People at the heart of Sustainability

We think of triple bottom lines, carbon accounting, Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Sustainability becomes an exercise in measurement and a dense, sometimes rigid landscape of scorecards, disclosures, and compliance to navigate.

These tools are essential. They bring rigour and comparability. But something vital is often lost in the process: people!

At the heart of sustainability is a question that’s deeply human, how do we ensure a future that improves lives, rather than just meets scorecard requirements? How do we ensure that as we reduce emissions or transition away from fossil fuels, we don’t leave people behind?

The ‘just’ component of the ‘just transition’.

Moving toward sustainability requires structural change. It touches how we organise economies, transport, food, energy, housing, and production. It shifts the way we cook, heat and cool our homes, move goods, and generate power. These aren’t just technical adjustments. They involve people. They inolve communities, workers, and families whose lives and livelihoods are deeply embedded in the current systems. There will be winners and losers if we neglect these communities.

A coal plant that closes may reduce emissions, but it also puts people out of work. At the same time, a solar plant opening in another province may offer new jobs, but not to the same group of affected people.

So the real task becomes understanding and planning for these shifts. We need to identify who wins, who loses, and how we bridge the gap. This requires innovation. Without this, transitions risk deepening inequality, creating resistance, or polarising society into camps that are “for” or “against” change - depending on where they sit in the system.

Planning for Inclusion

Governments, businesses, and policymakers need to move beyond compliance checklists to think holistically. At each step of the way we need to answer the question of, how do we bring people with us? How do we protect those who are vulnerable to job losses or shifts in industry? And how do we build the skills and systems needed to allow participation in the new economy?

There’s a huge opportunity here, particularly in skills development and knowledge exchange. In the context of African-European relations, for example, there is real potential for collaboration. Europe may be further along in the energy transition, and African countries can learn from their successes and missteps. But it’s not a one-way street. African partners bring insights into energy access in rural areas, managing infrastructure over long distances, and delivering services in decentralised systems. These are lessons that matter, especially as global transitions become more complex and context-specific.

Licensing technology or applying policy models without adapting them to local realities won’t work. Real partnerships mean mutual learning, and recognising that sustainability (if it is to be universal) must be flexible and responsive to different geographies and communities.

Measuring What Matters

One of the biggest challenges in placing people at the centre of sustainability is that social impact is hard to measure. It’s much easier to say, “we reduced carbon emissions by X%,” than to say, “we improved well-being in this community.”

How do you track a child’s journey from early education to a productive, meaningful career? How do you quantify a community’s improved sense of connection, belonging, or reduced loneliness? These things matter. They shape resilience, productivity, and collective potential. But they don’t show up neatly on a balance sheet.

But, we have to try. We need to formalise social impact in ways that allow for complexity, acknowledging that not everything worth measuring can be reduced to a number. This also raises questions about patient capital: How long are we willing to wait to see returns from social investments? A year? A decade? A generation? Investing in people means playing the long game. But if we ignore this side of the equation, we risk building a technically “sustainable” future that isn’t socially stable or inclusive.

Beyond the Tick Box

Sustainability today can feel overwhelming. Between endless certifications, marketing claims, greenwashing, and mandatory reporting, it can be hard for both individuals and organisations to navigate the space. It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of checking boxes, publishing metrics, and refining narratives, while losing sight of the actual impact on the ground.

But we must go beyond that. Yes, frameworks matter. Yes, data and disclosure are important. But real sustainability is about more than compliance, it’s about transformation. And transformation only works when people are at the centre of it.

We need to keep asking: Are we improving lives? Are we widening access and opportunity? Are we building systems that include rather than exclude? If we can't answer 'yes' to those questions, no matter how green the energy, how clean the data, or robust the reporting, we are not building a sustainable future.

Opinions presented belong exclusively to the author(s) and may not represent those of Meridian17.