Is the day of the Chief Sustainability Officer over? According to Sophie Beckham, the answer is a resounding no.

“Sustainability leadership is more important now than ever,” she believes. “We're in a dynamic environment geopolitically and, for many of us, internally. If we continue to provide pragmatic solutions that enable business value, we will be successful. 

“This isn’t a moment to back away – it is an opportunity to be practical and focused on aligning sustainability with business objectives.”

Change to - As Chief Sustainability Officer at fibre-based packaging company International Paper (IP), she is responsible for the sustainability of IP and its products. Founded in New York in 1898, the company follows a customer-centric approach that is reflected in Sophie’s work.

The evolution of the Chief Sustainability Officer role

The seat of the CSO often used to be held by a sustainability specialist who ensured compliance – mostly voluntary, sometimes regulatory. Fast forward to today and, while the CSO role is continually evolving, an organisation’s sustainability lead must do far more than comply.

Sophie’s work focuses not just on how the company can reduce its environmental impact, support suppliers in value chain decarbonisation or engage the community, but how her work can drive real business value.

“In most cases now the CSO is expected to have enterprise fluency – in areas including finance, supply chain, business operations and customer expectations,” Sophie explains. “The collaboration between those different parts of our organisation and my office is at an all-time high.

“It's actually quite a challenge for the individual in the CSO role to be all things to all people, but it's equally important for us – as we are upskilling – to think about how the role we play helps deliver risk management and long-term resilience for our business. We can't do that unless we have the big picture and all of the skills associated with, for example, business acumen, front and centre.

In addition to working with her colleagues in other departments of IP, Sophie “upskills” by working with external strategic partners, including as a board member for several NGOs.

“Collaboration with others outside of our industry – as well as the pre-competitive collaboration in our industry – is really critical to be able to move the needle,” Sophie says. “We can't scale without the insights of others.”

Managing short-term, long-term and value-driven priorities

Sustainability leaders are constantly juggling a multitude of expectations and priorities. Managing goals that stretch decades into the future, while working in organisations that often operate towards quarterly targets, is a challenge that few other C-suite roles face. 

“With the short-term driving some of our day-to-day work – and it needs to – we constantly have to consider our organisational mission, our values and continue to be the sustainable packaging solutions provider of choice,” Sophie says. “If we can keep those things as our north star, what we're doing today is building resilience for the future in the space of sustainability.

“This is why it's so critical for sustainability principles to be embedded in our business strategy –  it doesn't then matter if it's a quarterly or a decadal ambition, as long as we're moving forward on those things every day. We're going to be sustainable in the long run and continue to work as a company that proudly delivers sustainable packaging solutions.”

Where sustainability was once a ‘nice-to-have’, leaders are now working to embed the principles into broader company strategy. For Sophie, the driving force behind the change is a continued theme of tying sustainability to long-term value creation.

She continues: “We have a really customer-centric business strategy with which sustainability has to walk hand-in-hand for the business to be the flywheel that drives innovation. It drives our value proposition, supply chain and resilience throughout our value chain.

“Fundamentally, we've shifted from sustainability being layered on top of the business to sustainability being laser-focused on real impact - dependencies that drive business value, areas that our customers care about and projects that are durable.”

The shift is a journey – not an overnight fix. Sophie’s advice for leaders taking on that challenge is, first and foremost, to listen – to customers about their requirements, to suppliers about their capacity and to stakeholders about priorities. IP continues to learn a lot from actively listening.

Sophie expands: “The big shift that we're seeing is from customers and stakeholders who are focused broadly on big corporate goals to looking at what specific products are going to deliver in terms of its positive impact on nature or the reduced greenhouse gas emissions associated with the product or circularity.

“Everything has shifted from being broad-scale corporate ambition to considering what specific products are delivering and how that helps the company or customer meet its goals while ensuring that it's still fit for purpose.

Sustainable forestry 

Many companies have environmental factors that are intrinsically linked to their operations. For IP, forestry is at the top of that list. Part of its 2030 strategy was a goal to restore and conserve one million acres of ecologically significant forestland – which the company has surpassed years ahead of target. 

“Sustainable forestry is fundamental to our business strategy,” Sophie says. “Forests provide our raw materials as well as all the ecosystem services of carbon, biodiversity and water quality.”

Working with forests means working in defined areas, with a resource that requires active management from harvest through regeneration. The mills that IP works with are mammoth – often the size of football fields – and the fibre the company buys comes within 100 miles of the mills. 

“We need to have a long-term view of the forest resource to ensure the sustainability for the future, so that we can continue to secure the availability of our most important raw material,” Sophie explains.

There are two key strategies in play here – both centred around stakeholder influence. 

Having built long-term relationships with its fibre suppliers, IP harnesses trust to work with those suppliers to advance sustainable forest management practices on the ground. IP also works with partners on a landscape level to think about forest sustainability in terms of species habitat and biodiversity conservation, reforestation and wildfire management. 

Sophie adds: “There are a lot of resilience concepts that are best leveraged by working with partners on the ground who really understand local communities and conditions to be able to have an impactful, positive impact on nature in those landscapes.”

Two such partnerships are with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and the American Forest Foundation (AFF), both of which supported the forest conservation achievement and whose work goes beyond directly impacting IP sourcing areas to wider regional geographies. 

Sophie says: “The work AFF is doing in the Family Forest Carbon Program (FFCP) is pioneering new areas of innovation and value for forest landowners who are not just managing their forest land for fiber and an economic return, but for carbon and how that can translate into high-quality carbon credits that are interesting to companies like IP and a whole lot of other end users.”

Success tomorrow and beyond

As the demands on the Chief Sustainability Officer evolve, Sophie sees agility and value continuing to stand firm as pillars of success. 

“In sustainability we have to be agile and understand that we're operating in changing conditions,” she goes on. “If we can't make sustainability sustainable in the company, it's never going to be a critical and fundamental core part of business strategy.

“I have transitioned my mindset from success only looking like achievement of any one specific sustainability target, to a both/and view that focuses on practical steps aligned with our customers' goals, aligned with our investors' expectations, and in tandem with our business strategy and our business leaders.”