Timo works in industry. He has a natural science educational background. He has worked as a sustainability professional for fifteen years and is approaching forty.
“I don’t want to work somewhere where I am considered as noise, as someone nagging”
Timo has been interested in biology since he was little. He has always been curious about how nature works and how humans affect it. He therefore went for a university education within biology. “But I soon found out that the studies led to quite research-oriented professions. I wanted to work more practical. Closer to societal processes.” Timo thus went in a more systems-oriented direction, with focus on sustainability. He was not particularly engaged in sustainability issues, but was attracted to the holistic approach.
Today, Timo works in industry. He is documenting according to reporting regulation, and is working strategically. He believes his work contributes to sustainability as “the industry represents a rather large source of environmental impact.” Still, he does not see the majority of his potential to influence internally in his own company. “The most important work I do is to push the whole industry. If we can set a standard that there is a marked for, and supply a product that is more sustainable than that of our competitors, it has a much greater impact than the emissions we can control internally.” I ask him if he would consider working for a competitor, someone who is not best in class when it comes to sustainability like his current workplace. “It depends,” he answers. “The whole company would need to be on board and work for sustainability. I don’t want to work somewhere where I am considered as noise, as someone nagging.”
Timo’s greatest motivation for taking on his current job was curiosity. He wanted to be on the inside, to understand how industry works. Sort of in the same way as he wanted to understand how ecosystems work as a child. Before working in industry, he was a consultant for many years. Timo feels like he has a much greater ownership of the issues he works with now. He has learnt how to navigate the organization, earned a mandate, and found out how to influence internally and externally. “But there are also external forces that affect my possibility to impact; the market has become so much more sustainability focused in a very short time.” Timo has work experience from a time when sustainability was not yet a hot topic. “When I worked as a consultant in oil and gas the environmental work was bullshit, it was only about compliance and communication. But I am sure it has changed.”
A sole focus on compliance is a criterium for Timo for a job where sustainability professionals have limited impact potential. “The work you do must lead to a change.” Therefore, Timo believes some research and consultancy work has little value. “There is a lot of research you never see the effect of. And if a consultant does a life cycle assessment for someone, he or she does not have control over the usage of the result. It can be used for something positive, to generate change, or for greenwashing”. Timo also believes that sustainability professionals have a moral responsibility for their choice of workplace if they have the word “sustainability” in their role name. “There are consultancy firms where coworkers down the hall enable tax fraud for their customers. Is that a desirable workplace for a sustainability consultant?”
Timo thinks that the largest impact potential for sustainability professionals lies in roles with decision making power. And in policy creation jobs, either as a politician or as a bureaucrat. Within industry, Timo thinks it is advantageous to work in sectors with large environmental impact. “And the larger the organization the larger the potential you have for impact.” But the most potential for impact, as Timo sees it, is to be found abroad. Working for the EU or in industries in the Middle East or countries like Brazil with immense challenges connected to societies surrounding the factories. “But then you would have to give up everything, there would be no work life balance left.”
Impact potential is anyway not the primary driver for Timo. His main driver has always been his interest in understanding connections. In a long perspective he is worried about the connection he sees between the way we have organized society and resource use. “As an ecologist I can see that eternal growth is not going to work.”
Meaningful sustainability jobs 