The people who buy now own the carbon

The people who buy now own the carbon

A procurement chief, a former CIO and a company lifer all took the sustainability seat this month.

Three senior sustainability appointments landed across June and July, at Nestlé, Cisco and Accor. We read the news so you don't have to. What stood out was where each of these roles now sits inside the business, and who's being trusted to run them.

Start with Coline Pont, the new Chief Sustainability Officer at Accor. She isn't a sustainability lifer. She's a career procurement leader, most recently Group Chief Procurement Officer at AXA, and Accor's own CPO before that. This is her first sustainability-led role.

This is a great move. We all know sourcing is where most emissions come from, so putting a top procurement person in charge makes perfect sense.

Then there's Antonia Wanner at Nestlé, who moves from Chief Sustainability Officer to Chief Communications and Sustainability Officer, and picks up a seat on the Group Executive Board. She came up through procurement and sales before running ESG.

Colin Seward takes the CSO role at Cisco after 25 years inside the company, much of it in IT, including a stint as CIO for EMEA. He's succeeding Cisco's first-ever CSO. His stated first priority isn't a campaign or a pledge. It's sustainability data systems.

That's a telling choice at a hardware company watching its supply-chain emissions climb with the AI buildout. Putting someone who knows IT in charge of reducing emissions is a pattern we're seeing more and more. It's now an operational challenge like any other.

That's the part most teams aren't ready for. The number is about to land in front of people paid to be sceptical, a CEO, a CPO, a CTO, and increasingly it's owned by the people who run sourcing. 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.

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