Does going green pay off?

Does going green pay off? Research published in the World Review of Entrepreneurship, Management and Sustainable Development hopes to answer that question from a sustainability performance perspective.

Environmental concerns are changing not only the natural landscape but the economic world too. There is a need to understand how so-called stakeholders can influence and affect the commercial and business world in efforts to address environmental concerns including climate change and fossil fuels, plastic and other pollution, as well as food and water security, and resilience to natural disasters. Moreover, the push to ‘green’ the commercial world is driven by marketing as with anything commercial.

Husna Ara, Jasmine Ai Leen Yeap, and Siti Hasnah Hassan of the Universiti Sains Malaysia, in Pinang, explain that worldwide organizations have begun to embrace the concept of sustainability and moved towards environmental strategies to this end. The team’s review found that investing in green marketing does not have an immediate positive impact on commercial success despite the growing awareness among consumers of a multitude of environmental concerns. However, it feeds a company’s sustainability agenda and they suggest that by improving environmental and social performance economic benefits will be gleaned while concomitantly helping to address many of the issues we face globally.