Q&A: EY’s Gerard Gallagher on Sustainability Consulting

Gerard Gallagher, EY’s Sustainability Lead for EMEIA, has a wealth of expertise and experience in the sustainability world.

After stepping off the main stage at Sustainability LIVE: Net Zero in March 2025, he came by to talk with Sustainability Magazine about his work at EY.

During the conversation, Gerard spoke about the external pressures sustainability departments around the world are facing, including geopolitical tensions, extreme weather events and incoming regulations.

He also looked to the future, spotlighting some of the innovations he is most excited about when it comes to decarbonisation right now.

Could start off by introducing yourself, your role and your work at EY?

Well, I think I've got one of the best jobs in the world right now. 

EY is committed to helping our clients move to a more sustainable long-term business. 

My role is to look after our client interactions and to go to market for sustainability clients all over the world. 

It's a real privilege to spend time with our clients talking about what they're worried about, what the challenges are, and how EY can help or convene support for them. 

So I feel very privileged.

So that's my role, my background is unusual maybe for someone in sustainability. I'm an engineer. I came from the energy sector, so one of the culprits that maybe historically has got us into some of the challenges. 

So I'm sticking around to make sure I do my bit to fix and support creating a more sustainable planet.

You've been sharing your thoughts with our audiences recently, at Sustainability LIVE Malta and Sustainability LIVE London last year. How was Malta?

I was excited by the opportunity to go to Malta and I engaged a lot with our business whilst I was there, but it was funny – I arrived with some insight that for 330 days of the year there’s sunshine in Malta, but I may have been a little bit optimistic about the weather. 

It rained and rained and rained! But it didn't dampen the energy or the enthusiasm of the community in Malta. 

So that was a real privilege to understand what's happening in Malta and help them go through their own pathways.

Let’s talk about your keynote today – what did you discuss?

My talk was about how sustainability professionals have done an amazing job at trying to create awareness for the need for organisations to move to action. 

Right now, geopolitics is overwhelming for everyone, not just for my sustainability colleagues, but for the whole world.

My conversation today was quite a pragmatic conversation about if we want to move to action and we need to move to action, sustainability needs to learn and speak the language of business, the language of growth. And that's quite an unusual thing. 

And I went on to say in my speech, we need to hyper-collaborate to find new value pools for sustainability in the business model. New value pools to fund action. 

I suggested that sustainability has to find a new friend – a friend called capitalism. 

So sustainability and its new best friend capitalism can find value pools that can create growth and help us still maintain our planetary boundaries. 

So I went through a lot of that in detail today, really using the language of business to really challenge our sustainability colleagues to collaborate and start to understand how they can play into a more sustainable, profitable, and growing business, whilst the planet still thrives.

That's very interesting because quite often the discourse of sustainability sceptics is that you can't have profitability and sustainability at the same time. It'd be interesting to know from your perspective how sustainability can be the most valuable thing.

So there's a couple of things. Historically, most organisations have been really focused on what I call the risk agenda to create action. 

We know the risk of climate change. The last 10 years have been the warmest ever recorded and that's set to increase. 

GDP risk went up from 1.8% in 2022 to is anticipated to be well over 10%. 

So the amount of impact that the climate is having on businesses is huge, but that's not enough.

Add to that the geopolitics of the new administration in the US, the Omnibus and productivity drive in the EU, and it is really confusing to understand which way’s up.

So what we are spending most of our time doing is really rolling our sleeves up in a way we've never done before, to get into a very pragmatic short term mindset.

We’re building cases for action with clients that create value for the organisation and the consumers, as well as staying within the planetary boundaries. 

So this is a time where it's roll your sleeves up and get into detail. Now the problem with that is every client is bespoke, every industry is bespoke. It's not a business of generalisms.

If you're an oil and gas client or you're a consumer goods company or a technology company or a bank, you have different pathways. 

Trying to create the case for change requires getting the CFO, the procurement team, the supply chain, the legal team all on board. That’s what we're doing a lot of right now.

It is a massive challenge I expect, but an extremely rewarding one.

There's no big bang. This is a hands-on sport and I'm really proud of the work that our teams have been doing and the impact that helping clients deliver. 

One of the things I keep sharing is to not let perfection get in the way of progress. We need to be pragmatic. Let's look at projects that are six months in length. 

We can create new opportunities to reduce waste, to reduce energy, to move to other more sustainable forms of products. 

All of that, if you have the mindset, delivers tremendous value to organisations.

Are there any innovations or trends that you are quite excited about when it comes to net zero right now?

When it comes to innovation and trends, it's quite easy to go to green tech and technology. 

I talked about the story of UPS today. Their use of AI has allowed them to really optimise their deliveries, saving hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO₂, the equivalent of 20,000 vehicles no longer required on the road. 

But also the part that's not talked about enough is innovation is the way organisations are going about delivering on the commitments they have made and taking that into the operation. 

So I am really pleased and I want to shine a light on organisations that are taking their sustainability strategy into their operations and thinking of ways to get that into the action of their business, day by day. 

It's a process innovation, it's an innovation that unleashes the power of organisations and it's not one that's often talked about, but that for me is really powerful if we want to move to action and get the full power of business behind it.

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