Stop Calling It ESG & Sustainability - It’s Financial Risk - And Must Be Managed That Way

The sustainability/ESG conversation circulating is outdated—and much of it is noise.

It reminds me of the early internet era, when everyone argued about “websites” and “e-commerce” while missing the real point: it wasn’t a trend. It was a new operating system for business.

We’re doing the same thing now.

We keep debating sustainability and ESG as if they were standalone topics, even though the market has already moved on.

Here’s what we actually know in 2026:

Up to 70–90% of enterprise value now sits in intangibles.And yes — sustainability is a major part of that. But it’s not a separate category. It’s embedded in the intangible drivers that determine performance:

• revenue durability

• cost of capital

• risk exposure

• resilience & growth capacity

• trust and reputation

So let’s say the quiet part out loud:

Intangible risk is financial risk.

And “non-financial / ESG / sustainability” is a labeling problem — and a systems intelligence failure — not a materiality problem.

Yet most companies are still trying to manage these drivers with old-paradigm tools:

• narrative disclosures dressed up as strategy

• static ESG scores that create false confidence

• siloed systems that don’t connect intangibles to operations, the P&L, or the balance sheet

That isn’t sustainability’s failure.

It’s a management failure — and in some cases, a deliberate refusal to evolve because too many businesses (and vendors) are invested in protecting the outdated model or simply not prepared to keep innovating.

Just like the people who dismissed e-commerce in the 1990s.Look how that turned out.

We’re entering Economics 3.0 — the whole-systems era — where performance is interconnected and dynamic. AI has simply accelerated what was already true: you can’t manage complex systems with static systems. You need dynamic intelligence that can see dependencies, trade-offs, and second-order impacts across the full ecosystem.

And here’s the part executives, investors, and boards should sit with:

We’ve seen this movie before.

Before 1929, financial reporting was inconsistent, narrative-driven, and easy to game. Companies could hide risk in plain sight. Then the crash came, markets repriced reality brutally, and standards evolved.

We’re at that same inflection point with intangibles.

Disclosure is no longer optional. Narratives no longer work.

What wins now is verifiable, auditable, decision-useful intelligence.

Financials explain the past.

Dynamic intangible business intelligence that connects intangibles, tangibles, and financials is what explains what drives future value — and Impakt IQ was built to be that missing layer.

So where are you in your evolution to Economics 3.0?

Elisa Turner, Founder Impakt IQ