The need for organizations to operate sustainably, while prioritizing people and planet has never been so important. From climate change to labour injustice, businesses have the responsibility to understand their true impact in the world. With this, spending by companies on ESG and sustainability consulting is set to more than double over the next five years. At Quest Sustainable Solutions has been providing what it calls end-to-end sustainability solutioning and value addition.
In addition to consulting, the organization helps implement solutions & projects too, while many agencies often provide advisory services and not implementation. When it comes to the ESG challenges, they take a distinctly human-centered approach to address the complexity that surrounds them. In an exclusive interview, Anveshi Gutta, CEO,At Quest Sustainable Solutions walks us through the unique traits of the company:
How Is Your Company Positioned In The ESG And Sustainability Consultancy Space? What Impact Has At Quest Created In The Market?
Our focus has been intended to draw attention to our knowledge in both technical areas, such as environmental sustainability, climate science, information technology solutions, and human behavioral areas, such as culture, behavioral shifts. We are uniquely positioned with this blend that not just addresses the sustainability and ESG needs today, but makes sure that these results are longlasting.
Our client conversations have clearly indicated an increasing focus on involving stakeholders seamlessly in their sustainability agenda. In order to drive this at both institutional and individual levels, we need to focus on both the organization’s cultural shift and the individual’s behavioral shift. This is where we engage in an advisory mode and deploy our in-house developed methods and technology solutions that address our clients’ ESG and Culture needs, in tandem. This helps them achieve their committed goals and that is the impact our team leaves behind with each engagement. We believe in strong collaborative engagements with every corporate client.
Kindly Tell Us About The Various Services You Provide, And Explain Your USP.
Our services are built around typical enterprise needs on ESG/Sustainability across the lifecycle– Understanding, Planning, Pursuing, Scaling up, and Reporting. Each organization is distinctly positioned in the Sustainability journey and our services are catered based on their context.
Depending on their needs, we offer a balanced mix ofadvisory, education, technology, and implementation services. Our services are ably supported by CLIMASTACK, our robust methodology and technology stack. The pre-baked components in this comprehensive stack consider the ESG and Culture dimensions, and accelerate our service delivery. This sets our service delivery approach distinctly apart and is our USP.
In terms of service offerings, we offer regulatory compliance like BRSR, decarbonization roadmaps, materiality assessments, life cycle analysis, in-house skilling & capacity building, and more. At the same time, we have also partnered with industry events as the ESG knowledge partner, like the one with NASSCOM CoE when they launched their Enterprise Innovation Challenge.We have also published practical guides for enterprises to help them in their journey. These are titled ‘Transitioning Corporate India into the BRSR Era’ and‘Sustainability Spotlight on SMEs’.
Addressing the Sustainability Challenge through Corporate Actions Can be done through a balanced mix of ESG. ‘Culture’ would be the catalyst to The mix, that amplifies the impact and Makes it long lasting
Kindly Enlighten Us About The Mission And Vision Followed By At Quest.
We believe that there is only one master key to addressing the climate challenge, getting the people act right and this reflects in our mission and vision statements. As a social enterprise, we envision a world where green choices and sustainability actions are people-owned and peopledriven. In order to get there, our mission statement is ‘to drive behavioral change across key segments of our society towards a green, livable planet, in a truly holistic manner’. Through our engagements, we want our clients to transition behaviors, both at an institutional level and at an individual level. Every individual across the board-CXOs/Board of Directors, Senior Leadership, Mid-Management, Employees, need to get into the act. Beyond the corporates, we also have two other streams of our work focusing on sustainability education at schools and personal sustainability transitions by urban individuals. We approach the sustainability conversation differently for each of these segments since each segment has its own perspective on things. This bespoke approach reflects in the CLIMASTACK as well.
What Are The Major Factors That Set You Apart From Other Players In This Segment?
We identify ourselves as a social enterprise. This means that we have a strong focus on the impact we leave behind with each engagement we take up. This would be an impact on client’s key stakeholders, including the community and the planet. With this philosophy, we engage with our clients strategically, even during short duration assignments. We are ideally positioned to deliver strategic impact through sustainability roadmaps, that are typically implemented over longer durations. This is because there are several stakeholders, multiple dimensions, and it’s a multi-year exercise. We also have a strong appreciation that not all businesses are the same.
From large enterprises to smaller businesses, and everyone in between, each one needs a different strategy to sustainability. With sustainability being such a broad concept and because of other reasons, such as the fact that organizations come from different sectors and are at different stages of development, we realized the need to consider each sustainability journey differently. Therefore, we’ve introduced a methodology called the Climate Care Maturity Model (CCMM) within the CLIMASTACK. The five stage CCMM allows you to comprehend where a business can begin, because they have a certain level of maturity on climate care, and how they can continuously move up the maturity model, with the most relevant guidance.
Are You Coming-Up With New Services To Expand Yourcurrent Service Portfolio?
We have identified the right mix of the services in our portfolio to cater to the needs of our focus segments. We will be in a constant process of refining our present solutions into much more robust components, as we advance. In addition, we are rightly positioned to deliver to the corporate needs around regulations like the BRSR in India. We deploy our complete stack and ensure sustainability reporting goes beyond being an annual ritual. As every organization will view it differently, we will continue to publishing a lot of our own thought leadership, white papers, and technical papers on how each of these services could be useful for a small business, a medium-sized business, or a large business.
Tell Us About The Future Roadmap Of Your Company.
It seems obvious to me. The truth is that many leading businesses have announced their ‘Net Zero pledges’ over the past 2-3 years. They are therefore making plans and drawing efforts to reduce their emissions to zeroby a specific date. And right now, they’re figuring out the different levers they can explore so they can hit their pledged goal of net zero. And, here is where I think our company’s future roadmap will line-up. We will be the go-to partner for an effective execution of their ESG commitments.At the same time, the sustainability reporting regulations across the globe is evolving.
Addressing the Sustainability Challenge through Corporate Actions Can be done through a balanced mix of ESG. ‘Culture’ would be the catalyst to The mix, that amplifies the impact and Makes it long lasting
For example, the BRSR (Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting) is a major milestone in India’s regulatory landscape and is mandatory from FY22-23. It puts India on par with other major economies that have proposed similar sustainability reporting regulations for their jurisdictions, in the last year or so,like, EU (EFRAG ESRS), US (SEC), Singapore (SGX), UK (SDR), and of course the much-anticipated global baseline from ISSB (IFRS). We see ourselves catering to effective Sustainability Reporting across geographies, and definitely so with BRSR in India.
Anveshi Gutta, CEO
Bringing years of hands-on experience and expertise in helping organizations improve their Eco Credentials.
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