Incorporating Health Risks into Your Sustainability Strategy
Below, Dr. Natalie Egnot, Project Director at Stantec, shares her insights on how taking a more comprehensive approach to considering health risks, opportunities, and impacts can benefit both your company and its stakeholders.
What health risks should companies be considering beyond workplace health and safety?
Companies influence the health and well-being of people through various pathways beyond workplace health and safety. Workplace operations, practices, and policies can contribute to a range of health and well-being outcomes for employees and their families. They also impact other key stakeholders such as consumers, local communities, and workers in the value chain. Beyond impacts to these groups, companies have important dependencies on the health and well-being of these stakeholders that can contribute to business risk.
What are the benefits of using a more comprehensive strategy?
By taking a step back and comprehensively examining how your organization may depend on and influence the health and well-being of stakeholders, you can avoid blind spots in your approach to identifying and managing risk. For example, community concerns about the potential health impacts of pollution, spills, or fires at manufacturing facilities can result in reputational damage and disrupt operations.
Conversely, implementing a more comprehensive strategy can enable businesses to capitalize on opportunities that generate a competitive advantage. For example, requiring suppliers to adhere to ethical labor practices and human rights standards can help protect access to critical materials by avoiding supply chain disruption. Additionally, investing in wellness benefits that address health issues common among your workforce can reduce absenteeism, increase productivity, and improve reputation and staff retention.
What are potential consequences of inadequately managed health risks?
Stantec’s Sustainability Advisory Team has seen firsthand the consequences of not comprehensively incorporating health impacts and dependencies into risk management practices. Potential negative impacts include regulatory intervention, litigation, labor issues, high turnover and absenteeism, product recalls, loss of trust among consumers, poor community relations, supply chain disruption, higher insurance premiums, trouble accessing financing, negative media attention, and reputational damage.
What are common challenges when taking a more comprehensive approach?
The absence of established foundational guidance for businesses aiming to identify, prioritize, and manage their health-related risks and opportunities presents a significant challenge. This is exacerbated by the fact that health impacts on stakeholders are tough to measure and track over time. Further, developing a sustainability risk management framework that is inclusive of health requires investment and collaboration from both sustainability and EHS leaders. Our team has observed that these individuals are often spread thin and siloed within organizations.
Continue the discussion with Dr. Egnot at NAEM’s upcoming webinar, Incorporating Health Risks into Your Sustainability Strategy, on April 29, 2025, at 2 PM ET. Register today!
About the Author
Dr. Natalie Egnot
Stantec Inc.
Dr. Natalie Egnot is a sustainability and public health professional who has a passion for helping organizations design and implement risk management solutions that protect health, advance equity, and generate a competitive market advantage. As a strategic advisor, she supports organizations in operationalizing comprehensive sustainability programming through materiality assessments, target setting, strategy development, and transparent reporting. Dr. Egnot believes that by proactively considering health in sustainability strategy, organizations can reduce risk and maximize benefits to public health.