By Renee Thompson, Sustainability Director, Wesco International
Sustainability and security have long been treated as separate concerns — one focused on the planet, the other on protecting business. Many people don’t realize how much common ground they share, and recognizing this connection is increasingly important.
Why These Two Things Are Being Talked About Together
At first glance, sustainability and security seem very different. Sustainability is about how an organization manages its environmental impact—generally focusing on topics like reducing energy use, cutting carbon emissions, and minimizing waste. Security is about protecting the organization from harm, focusing on safeguarding data, defending systems, and keeping operations running safely.
So why are the two increasingly being discussed together now? Because the risks they deal with are starting to overlap in ways that are hard to ignore. A major storm that floods a data center is, all at once, a climate event and a security incident. A supplier without environmental governance may also lack standards across the board, including those for handling sensitive data. These aren’t coincidences, they are patterns.
Both sustainability and security are really about the same thing: making sure your organization can keep operating, today and in the future.
The Shared Language of Resilience
The word that brings them together is resilience, the ability to withstand disruption and bounce back from setbacks. Security teams have used it for years to describe systems that can withstand attacks. Sustainability professionals often use it to describe how businesses and communities cope with climate events, resource shortages, and shifting regulations.
Once you frame the goals of both teams this way, the overlap becomes clear. Reducing an organization’s dependency on a single energy source makes an organization more environmentally responsible and less vulnerable to outages. Knowing exactly who is in your supply chain helps you track emissions and reduces the risk of a security breach.
Where the Overlap Shows Up in Practice
Think about the buildings and systems that organizations rely on every day. Office buildings, warehouses, and server rooms all consume energy and need to be physically secure. When an organization upgrades to smart building technology to reduce its energy footprint, it installs connected devices, such as sensors, automated controls, and networked systems. Those same systems need to be secured against unauthorized access. A greener building and a safer building are, in this case, the same building.
The same logic applies to supply chains. Most organizations today source products and services from dozens, hundreds, or possibly thousands of external partners. Tracking the environmental information of those partners, where materials come from, and how much carbon their operations produce, requires the same kind of detailed supplier mapping that security teams use to understand who has access to their systems and data. Many organizations are starting to combine these assessments into a single process, saving time while building a more complete picture of their overall risk.
Practical examples of where sustainability and security meet:
- Smart building upgrades that save energy also introduce connected devices that need to be secured.
- Supplier audits for environmental standards and security practices can be run together.
- Business continuity plans increasingly need to account for extreme weather events.
- Reducing energy waste in data centers lowers costs, emissions, and points of failure.
- Transparent reporting requirements for both sustainability and security push organizations to improve record-keeping and data governance across the board.
The Role of Regulation
In the EU, for example, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CRSD) requires larger organizations to report not just on their carbon footprint but also on broader risks, including operational and digital risks that could undermine their ability to meet their sustainability commitments. This is new territory for most companies and their compliance teams, and it is nudging sustainability and security colleagues to work more closely together than they ever have before.
For many organizations, the compliance process itself is where collaboration begins. A shared deadline has a way of bringing people to the same table.
What This Means for People and Culture
Beyond systems and processes, there is a human dimension to this shift. People working in sustainability and security often face the same internal challenge – making the case for investment in something whose benefits are difficult to see. You cannot point to the cyberattack that didn’t happen, just as you cannot show someone the emissions that weren’t produced. Both require organizations to look into the future and trust that prevention is worth the cost.
The shared experience of advocating for future-focused thinking in organizations that often prioritize short-term results has become an unexpected bond between professionals in both fields. They are increasingly finding that they have more to learn from each other than they once assumed.
The best organizations are not asking whether this is a sustainability problem or a security problem. They are asking: What is the right thing to do to keep this organization safe and responsible in the long term?
A Starting Point, not a Destination
For most organizations, thinking about sustainability and security together is still relatively new. There is no single established model for how to do it. The important thing is to start looking for connections by noticing when a decision in one area has implications for the other, and to make sure the right people are in the conversation when it does.
That might mean a joint review of a supplier shortlist. It might mean including sustainability considerations in a business continuity plan. It may mean scheduling a regular conversation between two teams that have historically had little reason to meet. Small steps, consistently taken, tend to compound.
Over the next decade, the organizations that successfully navigate this collaboration will likely be the ones that stop treating these as separate problems a little earlier than everyone else.
