Integrating sustainability throughout our business
Our approach to sustainability reflects how our business is interlinked with nature and society. In our experience, adopting a stakeholder perspective is the best way to inform and prioritise our strategic direction on sustainability.
The sustainability landscape is dynamic, with themes constantly evolving as the importance of specific challenges increases and knowledge around each theme improves. Over the years, we have developed a systematic approach for identifying sustainability themes and underlying challenges, and for integrating sustainability into our business through dedicated sustainability programmes. The illustration below shows the different steps of our approach.
Our strategic radar
Each year, we undertake a sustainability themes analysis to build a focused world view of strategic sustainability themes. In our experience, adopting a stakeholder perspective is the best way to understand the many complex ways our business is interlinked with society and nature.
In our analysis, we map and prioritise the sustainability themes that are important to our stakeholders – including NGOs, industry, policymakers, customers, employees, and investors – and to our business. Conversations with stakeholders and internal subject-matter experts allow us to consider issues such as the level and intensity of attention a theme receives from stakeholders, and whether any international Frameworks describing best practice have been developed. To gauge the potential impact on our business, we also assess when a theme could impact our business, the degree and type of impact it could have if not addressed adequately or quickly enough, and our ability to influence this.
The analysis provides a clear overview of the sustainability themes that we find are impacting the market dynamics of renewable energy – or will do so in the short to medium term – and our Board of Directors and Executive Committee use it to inform and prioritise Ørsted's strategic direction on sustainability.
Our analysis clearly reflects how our business is impacted by stakeholders, and how our success and long-term resilience depends on us delivering value to our stakeholders.
See the full results of our 2021 sustainability themes analysis (pdf)
Read about our 2021 programme performance
