Sustainability is moving closer to the data

Sustainability is moving closer to the data

A sovereign wealth fund and a lab-tech company both filled their top sustainability seat this month. Look at what each person is being asked to do, and you see the same shift.

Two sustainability appointments landed this month, at GIC and Agilent Technologies. We read the news so you don't have to. What stood out was less who took the seat, and more what the seat is now for.

Start with De Rui Wong, the new Head of Sustainability at GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. Wong is an internal promotion. He joined GIC in 2019 and has worked in its Sustainability Office since it launched in 2022. He succeeds Emily Chew.

What's telling is the framing. Wong set out three priorities, and none of them leads with ESG. Back the energy transition where the economics hold up. Find returns in climate adaptation and resilience. Manage physical climate risk across the portfolio. For an investor, sustainability is becoming a question of what the portfolio is exposed to and where the returns are.

Then there's Mignon Senuta, the new Head of Sustainability at Agilent Technologies. She joins from Mattel, where she spent two years building the toymaker's climate strategy and its first supplier greenhouse-gas inventory. So she arrives having already done the hard part once: getting emissions data out of a supply chain that wasn't set up to give it.

That matters, because of where she's landed. Agilent has committed to cutting its supplier footprint by 30%, and its own Scope 1 emissions rose 54% between 2019 and 2024. This is not a reporting role. It's a supplier-data role with a target attached, and the data has to hold up.

That's the shared thread. At GIC it's portfolio exposure, at Agilent it's supply-chain footprint, but in both cases the sustainability seat is being defined by the numbers underneath it rather than the narrative on top. The people taking these jobs are being handed a measurement problem, not a messaging one.

That's the part most teams aren't ready for. The number is about to land in front of people paid to be sceptical, and increasingly it's owned by the people who buy, build and decide. The org chart is moving faster than the data underneath it.

We built DitchCarbon for the moment that number gets scrutinised. If your Scope 3 number couldn't survive that meeting today, let's talk.