What happens when sustainability becomes everyone’s job – and the standalone corporate department starts to disappear?
As companies start to integrate sustainability into commercial decision-making, some argue that the function will one day go the way of the chief digital officer – and become obsolete.
Others worry that combining sustainability with corporate communications – as many firms do, particularly in Asia – risks blurring the line between genuine progress and greenwashing.
Working at the centre of this tension is Anita Neville, chief sustainability and communications officer of Indonesia-headquartered Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), one of the world’s largest palm oil producers. The Australian has spent her career navigating these two worlds, having run her own communications consultancy and worked for forest products certifier Rainforest Alliance and conservation group WWF before joining GAR a decade ago.
Neville joins the latest episode of On the Frontlines, which profiles changemakers on the hard edge of sustainable business, to talk about how the job of the chief sustainability officer is changing, and the growing influence of finance over the role in the context of the palm oil industry.
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Any kind of monoculture can be confronting when you see it at scale.
Anita Neville, chief sustainability and communications officer, Golden Agri-Resources
An ingredient found in nearly half of all supermarket products, palm oil is a commodity that supports millions of farmers in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer, and is the lifeblood of many rural economies. But it’s also a sector long associated with deforestation, biodiversity loss, and human rights abuses
In this podcast, Neville also talks about the biggest sustainability dilemmas facing the palm oil sector – traceability, smallholder inclusion, emissions, and biodiversity – and asks if the industry can realistically move beyond monoculture as it grapples with growing climate risks.
Anita Neville worked for Rainforest Alliance and WWF before joining Golden Agri-Resources in 2016. Image: GAR
Tune in as we discuss:
- Is combining communications and sustainability a form of greenwashing?
- Will the sustainability function one day be absorbed into finance?
- If everything is important in sustainability, how do CSOs prioritise?
- Can palm oil diversify away from monoculture?
- How resilient is the palm oil industry to climate risk?
- Can Golden Agri-Resources meet its net zero target?
- How is Golden Agri-Resources including smallholders in its sustainability plans?
- Advice for aspiring sustainability professionals
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
How did you get into sustainability?
I grew up in Brisbane, southeast Queensland, Australia, with a father who was obsessed with the outback. So we went on lots of camping trips. And we had family who were in farming. So I’ve always been attracted to national parks and production landscapes.
When I went to university and studied journalism, I leaned towards environmental stories. In Brisbane in the seventies and eighties under Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland government, you could go to bed, and the next day discover that a heritage building had been blown up and torn down, or the top of a mountain in a national park had been sliced off. So I guess I was environmentally radicalised during that period. And I found ways to tell and to connect to environmental stories through my journalism studies.
Later, I got an opportunity to work for the then-Minister for Environment and Heritage in Queensland, Pat Comben, and weaved a path of working in government, then NGOs and finally, in corporate, which allowed me to work with amazing leaders in sustainability – really knowledgeable technical people, to campaign for issues that I cared about.
Now I get to do that kind of work, but from within the second-largest palm oil company in the world.
Tell us about the tension in your dual role between communications and sustainability. Some people say it could be a red flag for greenwashing – that sustainability is more about messaging than actually doing the work.
I wear two hats – and it’s not necessarily something I would recommend!
I think [the suitability of doing two roles] really depends on the person who’s playing the role. I moved into the chief sustainability function – or added it to my communications function – because of my background; 20 plus years working on environmental issues in international organisations and sustainability and supply chains. I actually wanted to be closer to more of the ‘doing’. Back when I was still working in Australia for Rainforest Alliance, I was in forestry concessions, auditing. So I have that experience of working on the true frontlines of sustainability.
I understand the scepticism – I really do. I’m not a very public relations-y (PR-y) kind of communicator, but I think if you had somebody who was a very PR-marketing type of communicator, I can understand why you might raise some eyebrows there.
But the skills from my communications background are incredibly helpful to me in driving the sustainability agenda in our business. I’ll give you a couple of examples. First of all, I think as a journalist you’re trained to absorb and analyse a huge amount of information – and get to the point really quickly.
Of course, we have ChatGPT for that now! But I’m old school. So being able to synthesise and analyse information really quickly and ask good questions about it is fundamental to being able to determine what your sustainability agenda should be.
The second thing is that I advocate inside this business as much as I advocate for the business outside of it. Being able to read an audience, read a room, understand how to take my language from the field to the boardroom, being able to make a compelling argument – these are all communication skills I’ve learned over my career.
Am I the most technically proficient CSO you’ll ever meet? No. But I have another set of skills that I can bring to bear when I’m influencing the agenda of the business inside the business.
We recently published an opinion piece headlined: Why CFOs will drive the climate transition. The argument was that the people really driving sustainability commitments aren’t necessarily sitting in the sustainability department anymore – they’re in finance. What do you make of this observation, and the idea that in 10 years’ time, there might not be a sustainability function?
Let’s start with the end part. My ambition at Golden-Agri Resources is to embed sustainability across the business, to set us on a path where we don’t need a CSO, because sustainability is being done [throughout the organisation].
It’s a bit of an exaggeration because anyone who’s been working in this sector knows that sustainability today looks very different than in the early nineties when I started working. It is both broader and deeper. It is more technical, and it is evolving all the time. But also the urgency now is so much greater than it was in the nineties – and it was pretty great then.
But do I think that sustainability is becoming a more financial job? Yes. Is it becoming a more business operational function? Yes. And that is important.
I have to be able to make a business argument for why it’s good investment for us to make the changes in the business. And I need allies in operations, in finance, to be able to move the agenda forward.
Most CSOs don’t run profit and loss (P&L) within a business; we’re a cost centre. And businesses are driven by their P&L, so you really do need the financial people to come on board.
I think there is a risk in that because we’re trying to account for a unit of carbon in the same way as a dollar. I think the risk is that you have aligned carbon accounting and financial accounting in a way that we understand money, capitalism and business function – but where we perhaps don’t keep open innovation, adaptation. I think some of those elements need a broader sustainability understanding as opposed to a narrow financial understanding.
Finance is very black and white. Sustainability is shades of gray. I can already see this play out in our own business. Last year, we established a carbon and renewables business unit to sit at the same level as our core business unit. So it has a P&L and does two jobs – decarbonise the core business and commercialise carbon opportunities.
I can see the tension in running a P&L unit when you’re also trying to look for innovation and longer-term solutions, like nature-based solutions, where you need really patient capital at the front end, because it takes a long time for the return on investment to come back.
But fundamentally, sustainability needs to have a business case connected to it. You need to understand the business you’re in if you want to change the business.
You’ve said before that sustainability professionals are being “asked to sprint a marathon”. Also, you’ve said that “everything in sustainability is important”. How do you prioritise?
I’ve also described this job as like trying to drink from a fire hose – because there’s so much to do all at once. On any given day, I can pivot from talking about how we improve or strengthen our human rights due diligence work to how we support smallholder farmers for yield improvement. You are pivoting and context-switching all of the time. So you need to be very agile, mentally, to cover off all of those different areas.
When there are so many areas we could focus on, you have to define it based on both what is material to your business, and where we can have the greatest impact.
So I am always asking: “is this something we should do?” The second question is: “is this something we should lead or should we be participating in a broader alliance context?” Or is this something that we need to keep in view, but maybe it’s not for us for now?
To give you an example, Golden Agri has led on traceability in the palm supply chain. We set out an ambition to be 100 per cent traceable to plantation originally by 2020, but the pandemic [compromised that target].
We’re now at about 99.5 per cent [traceability, from plantation to mill]. That 0.5 per cent that’s remaining drives my boss crazy! But it is a reflection of the variability and volatility in an agricultural supply chain, and really the reliance on smallholder farmers, who are incredibly challenging to map.
Having got to 99.5 per cent traceability to plantation, the richness of the information that we get from our supply chain and our ability to help them lift their performance on sustainability is proving incredibly valuable. The process of doing this has taught us how we can support smallholder farmers better, and how we can intervene with mill suppliers so that they’re sourcing more appropriately. We’re now looking at how we can take that information and apply it to the climate challenge, to the water challenge, to nature, and on human rights issues.
What’s the biggest problem that you are facing right now?
It cycles back to your starting question: will sustainability roles disappear, and will the financial side of the business take over?
I could give you a list of the challenges in delivering sustainability outcomes like training 100,000 smallholders by 2035.
Everything has its challenges, but I think that the one that I am facing most right now is – having set this vision that we want sustainability to be embedded into other people’s jobs – how to let go.
How do I hand off the carbon and renewables part of the business and pass those people who were working for me on things like carbon analytics and data collection to somebody else to manage and lead, and have the confidence that the business will continue down the right path?
I was just talking to my human rights due diligence manager about how we train and integrate human rights as a function within human resources to do some of the due diligence work. How do we build the confidence that we can let things go?
Unless we allow other people to take the lead inside our business and be responsible for sustainability and its delivery, I’m always going have too many things to do. I would have a job for life, but it’s not actually embedding sustainability in the business.
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You have to be able to be aware but not be overwhelmed by those truths [about the climate and nature crises]. Otherwise you won’t move forward – and you won’t get anything done.
Can the palm oil industry move beyond the monoculture model?
I think we need to remember what the end goal is of any kind of agriculture – to feed people.
I have not seen any agroforestry model that can scale to the yield potential that would service a global population heading towards 10 billion people.
We talk about palm and see rows and rows of palm trees – and yes, it’s confronting. But, so are acres and acres of rapeseed and their yellow fields if you’re on a train in the United Kingdom. Any kind of monoculture can be confronting when you see it at scale.
Then the question is: what else can you do?
With palm oil, there’s very much a sense that it is a dead monoculture – but I would take issue with that.
Palm oil is not as sustainable, as biodiverse or as effective a carbon store as a high conservation old growth forest, which is why we set aside conservation areas.
But if you’re looking at the plantations themselves, our chief scientist [Dr Jean-Pierre Caliman] talks about palm plantations being monoculture in terms of what you harvest, but biodiversity-rich in how they exist in the landscape.
He’s talking about biodiversity in all its forms – not just the charismatic megafauna. We have seen fascinatingly rich biodiversity in terms of birds, butterflies, and wild cats across our plantations. With the right kind of agricultural practice – even in a monocultural plantation – you can still see good biodiversity density.
Now, I’m not claiming that it’s the same as primary forest. But I think there is an opportunity for us to ensure that well-managed palm plantations actually have very good biodiversity levels.
These things can coexist. It’s not easy. You have to manage plantations well. And that’s the key thing, is how do we better manage monoculture to provide the necessary food for human existence, but also to find that balance with nature and biodiversity which we depend on.
The more diverse the landscape is, the healthier the soils are, and the more resilient to climate change the plantation is. How worried are you at the moment about the climate resilience of GAR’s plantations?
Climate change is definitely a risk. Indonesia is a climate-vulnerable country. We are seeing flooding in areas we didn’t have flooding before, and you need to get fresh fruit bunches to the mill within 24 hours or they start to degrade.
Our chief scientist does a lot of work on climate adaptation, including looking at the effect of consistent high temperature days on the palm weevil, which is essential to pollination. Pollination is a really good benchmark for future profitability and the resilience of a business.
The findings from his studies showed that even with one in five days over 40 degrees Celsius – which we’re seeing more of – the palm weevils that pollinate palm start to become under threat.
Increased rainfall also affects the palm weevil. Heavy rainfall can affect production by about 20 per cent. Pollination is worth somewhere between US$6-7 billion to the palm sector.
So we’re looking at what we can do to make palm plantations more climate resilient. And what can we do with palm varietals to breed in for drought tolerance, disease and pest tolerance, to make not just our business, but the industry as a whole, more climate resilient.
It is a challenge. And we don’t have all of the answers yet.
How confident are you that Golden Agri-Resources can meet its net zero targets?
We have a 2050 net zero target and we’ve also set near-term targets for 2030 that are aligned to the SBTI [Science Based Targets intiative].
We are reasonably confident [we can achieve that].
The big challenge for a palm plantation company, or any agricultural producer, is emissions related to land-use change. We’re quite fortunate that a lot of our plantations have been established for a relatively long time. So in terms of their historic emissions, they’re cycling down.
We’re also quite fortunate that we’re not heavily planted on peat – less than 10 per cent of our total plantations are on peat. Where we have been on peat, we’re monitoring to see how we could exit those peat areas.
Overall about 53 per cent of the energy that drives our business comes from renewable sources. Palm is also a very circular industry, where you are able to use biomass waste from the palm production process to feed into boilers to generate the steam, to power the mills.
And we’re looking at other ways that we can take biomass and turn it into biochar as a carbon removal solution.
So we are feeling relatively confident. A fortunate part of our industry is that many of the decarbonisation solutions like methane capture on palm mills, these are known technologies. We know how to build and use them. We have a good sense of the cost. It’s really just paving the investment pathway, to determine where you act first.
Once you get beyond 2030. I think everybody is struggling with the what comes next, especially for the harder-to-abate components of our industry, where the technology or solutions are not yet well defined.
Another part of the net zero puzzle is smallholders. How is Golden Agri including smallholders in its sustainability ambitions?
We run our own mills across our own plantations, but as production has declined in some of those areas, we are also sourcing more third-party fresh fruit bunches from smallholder farmers.
There are two programmes that we run – the first is on smallholder replanting. There’s an urgent need for replanting across Indonesia, but when you replant for the first three years, you get no income from that plantation. So many smallholders put it off for as long as possible.
But we get them into a programme that provides bridging financial support to help them in those first three years. That’s a period to look at intercropping and agroforestry techniques as a bridge before the plantation comes online as an additional income driver.
It takes a lot of time, effort, and frankly, money to do these things well. Without smallholders we can’t run our business. It’s self-serving, I’m not going to lie, for us to support smallholders to do better, so that we can ensure that we have the kinds of volumes that we need – and, importantly, that we’re not opening up new areas of land for palm development.
One issue is finance. Who’s going to pay for that? And why aren’t banks making it easier for smallholders to get loans to cultivate more sustainably?
This is a truly frustrating, sticky problem – how to appropriately finance smallholder farmers in any crop, so that they can implement best practices and have secure livelihoods.
I’ve been doing this work for a long time and I’m yet to see real change on the financial side in addressing these questions.
One of the challenges that we see is that the financial world is very heavily regulated and very black and white. They look at a smallholder farmer who perhaps doesn’t have documentation to prove their land title or doesn’t have very high yield returns and they don’t look at it as a good business to bank – they see only risk.
So we are encouraged to bring smallholders together into a cooperative. That in itself has a lot of challenges. You have to find farmers who want to work together. You have to set up shared systems, and so on. And you’re doing all of that to minimise the risk to the financial community. This is true in carbon projects as well – the project is expected to move towards the requirements and expectations of the financial community [but] there’s not much shifting back the other way.
I also think scale is an issue. Everyone wants scale, everyone wants speed. Oftentimes, you don’t need very much money to intervene with smallholders effectively. What you need is many smaller pots of money that can be deployed to individual smallholders, but when we talk to banks about getting support for our smallholder programmes, we’re told it’s too small a ticket for them.
There are huge announcements – a trillion dollars for forests. What I don’t see is deployable funds at the field level for smallholders. And that’s the tension – we just haven’t found an appropriate solution yet.
What advice do you have for people who want to do your job?
Sustainability speaks its own language. ESG, SBTi, TNFD, the jargon is endless – and that can be a real barrier to achieving things within a business. You have to break things down to a language that the business can understand. But even more than that, if you don’t understand how your business works, you can’t show how sustainability will work in your business.
So my main advice would be learn the business that you’re working within. Understand how it makes money, how it operates, so that you can better identify and speak to how sustainability fits in to what they’re doing or where sustainability can add value.
I feel like this role has changed so much, even in the time that I’ve been wearing both hats. I used to say years ago that you needed to be an optimist – otherwise you just wouldn’t get up in the morning.
But I feel like that has got a little flippant in this day and age, where people are truly struggling with crippling responses to the climate and nature crises that we face.
I think you have to hold those truths loosely somehow. You have to be able to be aware but not be overwhelmed by those truths. Otherwise you won’t move forward – and you won’t get anything done.
I guess a lot of people are paralysed by their sustainability roles, right?
Yes – I’m not immune to it. I used to think I was, and be snarky about people saying “I’m so overwhelmed”. I used to think, “Get a spine!”
But sometime in the last two years, I’ve started to think that the situation is scary. Nowadays, people aren’t necessarily coming into sustainability jobs equipped with how to carry these issues lightly.
What I particularly worry about is young people coming in wanting to be managers without the experience. I was complaining about this the other day to a colleague. I had to do replanting – active revegetation management in Queensland. And then I went and campaigned in Parliament. We had to actually do the work.
Now I think a lot of people are being flown into these jobs straight out of university, without real-world experience. It’s not their fault. The world is different now. But it’s very hard not to be overwhelmed in that scenario.
Oftentimes I’m saved by the fact that it’s stuff that I’ve done before. Whereas if you’re coming into the sector now, it must feel like a lot.
Especially as the job’s not going to get any easier, right? Emissions are still rising.
If you absorb those numbers all the time, and if you do so in the context of, “am I doing any good?” You can feel like it’s all pointless.
I have moments where I wonder, “Why am I here? Am I getting anything done? Am I achieving anything?”
I have a good colleague who, when I’m having some of these moments, will say to me, “Anita, you are able to influence how we manage half a million hectares of plantation, 80,000 hectares of conservation area, and the lives of a hundred thousand people who we employ – that’s not nothing.” And I just have to hold that in my head.
