Center for Impact Hosts Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability

No corporation will prosper indefinitely without supporting the well-being of the community and the environment. But by taking an active role beyond generating profits, corporations can make a significant positive impact that will contribute to their growth and long-term success.

Traditionally, the business sector has implemented what is known as CSR, or corporate social responsibility. CSR describes a company’s prosocial efforts such as charitable donations, volunteer work and ethical labor practices. However, CSR often runs separately from the company’s core business activities.

Tereza Omabuwa is corporate partnerships manager at the Center for Impact

The newer concept of corporate sustainability, meanwhile, is about ensuring a company’s operations are socially responsible but also environmentally friendly and well-governed for long-term success. Standards have been established to evaluate a company’s behavior in three areas: environmental (impact on nature and the planet), social (effect on people) and governance (how the company is run). Unlike CSR criteria, ESG factors are integrated into a firm’s core business strategy and decision-making processes. Whereas CSR focuses on finite actions to benefit society, ESG involves embedding responsible practices into the business to ensure long-term sustainability and value creation.

At UCLA Anderson’s Center for Impact, part of our mission is to help firms, consumers, investors and stakeholders make decisions that are better for people and the planet. Last year, we launched the Open for Good platform to offer a comprehensive assessment of corporate transparency among firms in the S&P 500, based on 39 ESG categories derived from the World Economic Forum’s Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics. This year, we’ve published the updated State of Corporate Sustainability Disclosure report, diving deeper into performance of companies in key ESG metrics.

A sample of the 2023 data we’ve collected includes:

• On average, companies disclosed 51% of metrics
• The top 10 environmental firms disclosed over 84% of metrics Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions are disclosed at a high rate of over 80%, with a large drop off in Scope 3 (only 56%)
• Social metrics are the most disclosed, at 58%
• The top 10 social firms disclosed over 83% of metrics
• Companies in the S&P 500 disclosed a workforce of 39% women, on average, which falls short of the 47% representation of women in the broader U.S. labor force
• Representation of women on boards was only 29% on average

Leading this research initiative is the center’s faculty director, Professor Magali Delmas. She has written upward of 90 articles, book chapters and case studies on business and sustainability and is author of the award-winning book The Green Bundle: Pairing the Market with the Planet. Delmas also serves on the steering committee of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, a partnership that unites academic institutions to advance rigorous research on pressing environmental issues that the business sector must address.

Professor Magali Delmas welcomes attendees from 47 universities to the 16th annual ARCS conference

In 2024, Delmas was chair of the 16th annual ARCS conference, which was hosted at UCLA Anderson. It attracted some 100 attendees from 47 universities, and included 48 research papers presented in 14 thematic areas, plus 15 Ph.D. candidate research papers. Three insightful plenary sessions dived into the topics of climate innovation, climate storytelling and enhancing the impact of sustainability research. International investing experts in both industry and academe offered perspectives on the role of entrepreneurship in meeting global environmental challenges.

“UCLA Anderson is a leader in corporate sustainability research,” says Delmas, who was ARCS president from 2014 to 2017. “The conference emphasized UCLA Anderson’s research commitment in this area and also highlighted our strengths in entrepreneurship, venture capital and entertainment, all crucial sectors for driving sustainable innovation.”

“Anderson began organizing events on this theme long before the topic was mainstream,” notes Professor Charles Corbett, whose pioneering, data-driven research on sustainability in operations and supply chains has laid out opportunities for forms to adopt cleaner, more sustainable processes and reduce their corporate carbon footprint. A member of the Anderson faculty for 28 years, Corbett, like Delmas, has been a driving force in collaborating with the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and other partners on academic summits and international conferences since the late 1990s.

Plenary speaker Caroline Flammer, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics at Columbia University, presented the Emerging Sustainability Scholar award to University of Toronto’s Kate Odziemkowska and Best Paper award to Tony He of Rutgers

In addition to Delmas and Corbett’s contributions, Anderson faculty Henry Friedman, Christopher Tang, Jane Wu, Chris Poliquin, Siew Hong Teoh and others are steering conversations about corporate sustainability and studying how responsible business practices are imbricated with individual and social well-being.

“Their research, along with the Open for Good initiative, underscores the school’s dedication to producing actionable insights for sustainable business practices,” says Delmas. “By leading the ARCS conversation, UCLA Anderson solidifies its reputation as a hub for cutting-edge sustainability research and education.”

As Dean Tony Bernardo remarked when he opened the ARCS conference, “We see it as essential to both our mission as part of a great public university and to our specific mission at Anderson to develop transformative leaders who will serve their businesses and communities purposefully and ethically.” Indeed, we believe one of the best ways to produce transformative leaders in corporate sustainability is to encourage effective storytelling. Without compelling narratives to move society into action, data and research won’t be sufficient to enact change. We know stories that have moved people toward positive social change. But climate change-related content has not caught up. Stories about climate change focus more on what can’t be done, they push us into paralysis and inaction. In actuality, progress is being made.

More professionals than ever before are helping companies and organizations highlight their initiatives of positive action. The pitfall of many impact-driven organizations is that they do great deal of good, but don’t communicate enough about their successes.

An ARCS session at Sony Pictures Entertainment addressed Hollywood’s role in the sustainability story. We learned that 70% of audiences polled want to see climate solutions onscreen, which means there is a lot we can do to bridge the gap between research and action.

ARCS participants attended a session at Sony Pictures Studios

The Hollywood Climate Summit, currently in its fifth year, brings generations of storytellers together to inspire more climate narratives, though we know the journey is long and thorny. Sustainable Entertainment Alliance (previously known as Sustainable Production Alliance) established a content committee in 2022, as well as laid the groundwork for “green production” in their 2021 whitepaper on film and television industry carbon emissions.

Anderson hosted the ARCS conference in part because California is leading the charge on corporate sustainability, with its recent legislation to mandate sustainability disclosures via SB261 and SB253. At the Center for Impact, we are preparing for these changes via Open for Good, our state of corporate sustainability disclosures annual reports and our executive education workshops.

Despite all these efforts, the global sustainability conversation and research base are ahead of North America, and it is important for us to tackle topics that will better educate our students for the changing landscape of business.