The latest report of the Leonardo Centre introduces a groundbreaking behavioural approach to assess corporate sustainability—moving beyond ESG scores, which often reward risk-focused, symbolic actions over meaningful impact. Using the GOLDEN Dataset of 1M+ initiatives from 15,000 companies, researchers categorise sustainability actions into Advocacy, Preparation, and Transformation.

Key insight: Transformational actions—those embedded in core business strategy—deliver the highest financial returns, outperforming advocacy and preparation efforts by a clear margin.

The study introduces two new tools: Business Impact Maturity and the Impact Finance Maturity Model, helping financial institutions align capital with real sustainability outcomes.

Key takeaway: Companies that integrate sustainability into innovation and strategy outperform. We need finance to shift from ESG scores to behaviour-based, impact-driven decision-making.

Download the full report here.

This publication builds on the GOLDEN Sustainability Dataset. It addresses the important question of whether there is a trade off between sustainability and profitability as many sustainability critics try to make believe us. The question has been studied for decades with conflicting results. But now enabled by the results of the analysis of the GOLDEN Sustainability Dataset this publication breaks new ground by connecting the type of corporate sustainability strategies and behaviour with shareholder returns. In this report the researchers at the Leonardo Centre at Imperial:

• Share the key features of the data used for the analysis of portfolio risks and returns based on the characteristics of company sustainability initiatives.
   
• Leverage that data to empirically test a range of propositions related to the impact of sustainability behaviour on risk-adjusted returns. 
   
• Propose a complete Business Impact Maturity (BIM) model to evaluate Company sustainability performance, including the purpose, strategic, organisational and cultural elements of maturity.
   
• Distil the key insights emerging from the results of the analyses and conceptual developments into key implications for different stakeholder groups including businesses, investors and financial institutions,  policymakers and international institutions.

Download the full report here.

In his blog on Rewilding Markets, John Elkington, one of the thought leaders on sustainability reflects on a conversation with GOLDEN's president, Maurizio Zollo, about the opportunities provided by the GOLDEN Sustainability Dataset allowing a fresh look on the challenges for systemic change.

Companies are missing their climate goals with misaligned behaviour

The latest Leonardo Centre on Business for Society scientific paper -published in Nature Communications - finds:

The aim was to better understand what differentiates companies that are able to reduce their emissions to levels compatible with the targets of the Paris Agreement and those that aren’t. The research team analysed 1,900 companies in high-emitting sectors (Energy, Industrial, Material, Utilities), a subset of the GOLDEN sustainability database of over 800,000 sustainability initiatives extracted from over 40,000 corporate sustainability reports published by over 9,000 companies.
Companies with emission pathways aligned with the targets of the Paris Agreement focused more effort on developing innovative solutions to meet their energy goals and the investment in renewable resources, as opposed to managing existing assets. In contrast, the focus of misaligned companies lies more heavily in risk-mitigating activities, such as the modification of existing assets and procedures.
Read the full story and download the paper:
https://lnkd.in/evxy8WXj

Thanks from the whole Leonardo team - to authors Simone CenciMatteo BuratoMarek Rei and Maurizio Zollo for your excellent work.