Economics 3.0: Siloed Sustainability Management Is Now a Liability

Silos don’t just slow you down — they create risks you can’t see until they hit cash flow.

That used to be an operational inconvenience.In 2026, it’s a material reputational, financial and compliance problem.

Here’s why: The drivers of business resilience, growth, and value have fundamentally changed alongside risk and stakeholder expectations - but management systems haven’t.

Today, depending on the sector, 70–90% of enterprise value is driven by intangible and sustainability-related factors: governance quality, workforce stability, supply-chain resilience, regulatory exposure, environmental and social dependencies, and trust.  These aren’t “soft issues.” They directly influence revenue durability, cost of capital, insurance exposure, risk, resilience, growth, and valuation.

Yet most companies still manage them like it’s 2015:

• Sustainability sits in a separate function with separate tools — disconnected from operations and ROI

• Finance runs the P&L without visibility into upstream dependencies and exposures

• Operations manages performance without a consistent view of what’s financially material

• Risk teams are expected to assess exposure with fragmented data and narrative inputs

The result is predictable: You optimize one part of the system… and accidentally break another.

You reduce carbon in one area while increasing supply chain fragility.

You cut costs and lose talent stability.You publish a “strong” report and still get hit with regulatory scrutiny because the underlying data isn’t audit-ready or even available.

This is the failure mode of Economics 2.0 thinking: measuring parts, managing silos, and calling it strategy. Economics 3.0 is the whole-systems era. Performance is interconnected. Risk moves through the enterprise like electricity. Stakeholders and markets are pricing that reality in real time, and regulatory enforcement is increasing.

This all means the new competitive advantage isn’t another dashboard. It’s a shared intelligence layer that connects finance, operations, sustainability, and risk — so leaders can:

• identify what’s financially material

• map it to operations and the P&L

• quantify exposure and trade-offs

• produce verifiable, audit-ready intelligence and reports.

Because narratives don’t manage risk. Systems do. So here’s the question: Are you still managing sustainability as a silo… or managing the business as the system it actually is?

Elisa Turner, Founder Impakt IQ