July 01 2025 at 03:41AM
Summary of From Delivery to Impact: Why Project Managers Need to Be Sustainability-Literate
Since 1950 the world population has been increasing at high speed, and so are things like other socio-economic trends like energy use, water use, paper production, tourism and so on. This directly has an impact on our earth system trends like levels of Carbon dioxide levels, surface temperature and tropical forest loss. Pressure from investors, consumer preferences and regulatory drive businesses transforming to net zero to become more sustainable.
Sustainability is becoming part of companies strategy, and so impact project managers and their projects. With the strategic partnership between PMI and Green Project Management (GPM) earlier this year, sustainability has become a key part of the project management profession. Focusing on integrating sustainability into every aspect of project planning and value delivery.
Shushan Khachatryan van Krimpen explained what sustainability literacy means. Starting with understanding the key areas of business sustainability transformation like carbon emission reduction and supply chain. Next you make a diagnostic to check the projects impact on those key areas and is it possible to be mitigated? KPI’s and stages of your project to apply sustainability diagnostics were discussed. In fact, during all project management cycles you need to have an eye on this! If not done, it might impact your company by reputational damage, regulatory non-compliance etc.
Key takeaways:
- Sustainability is a shared responsibility
- Start early with the project sustainability diagnostic
- If you’re looking for short term savings to skip sustainability, it will cost you more on the long term
Resources to learn more on this topic were shared to become a sustainable ready PM and how to start implementing.
Missed the webinar? Members can look it back on our website on the Knowledge Center.
