Sustainability Value Triangle Report
Unlocking Business Value: Finance, IT, and Sustainability Functions Collaboration Leads to Greater Impact
New global research from the Sustainability Value Creation Partnership shows that companies who deeply integrate sustainability into their core strategy can accelerate value creation through sustainability.
While two-thirds of leaders recognize sustainability as critical to commercial success, only 37 percent report that it is very integrated into the core of their organization. This gap, unchanged from last year’s study, poses a challenge because integration is the key to unlocking financial and strategic value.
Highly integrated companies reap the rewards of increased innovation, better sales, enhanced reputation, and improved cost control. This success is driven by the effective collaboration of sustainability, finance, and IT functions, which together identify the biggest opportunities, size their financial impact, and automate the meaningful data needed for effective decision-making.
The research illustrates that each of the three functions bring unique strengths to the Sustainability Value Triangle that the others depend on, and together this allows for greater integration which in turn drives more commercial value.
About the Research
In 2024, GlobeScan and Salesforce published a report titled Sustainable Value Creation: Closing the gap between stated commitments and operational realities. This research identified major gaps between high ambitions on corporate sustainability and limited capital allocation and integration.
In 2025, this new research report – The Sustainability Value Triangle – builds on that work and focuses on solutions capable of closing the gaps identified previously. To conduct the research, we formed the Sustainability Value Creation Partnership, bringing together Accounting for Sustainability (A4S), SustainableIT.org, and the ERM Sustainability Institute, along with the original research partners, Salesforce and GlobeScan.
The 2025 research findings are based on insights from 320 senior executives across corporate finance, IT, and sustainability functions and highlight a growing urgency to demonstrate sustainability’s business impact.
