Global Sustainability Manager

Global Sustainability Managers own an organization's sustainability program across international operations — measuring emissions in each region, engaging suppliers worldwide on sustainability standards, building the data infrastructure to report across different frameworks (CSRD for Europe, SEC climate disclosure in the US, CDP and TCFD across all of it), and getting business units in different countries actually moving on sustainability commitments rather than just tracking what they're doing.

The multi-jurisdiction reporting dimension is technically demanding and getting more so. CSRD mandatory disclosure in the EU requires a different level of materiality assessment and assurance than US voluntary frameworks. Science-based targets need to account for operations in countries with different grid emissions factors, different supply chain intensity profiles, and different access to renewable energy. Reporting across all of these simultaneously, with consistent methodology and credible data, requires systematic investment in data infrastructure that many organizations haven't built yet.

Getting global business units to act on sustainability commitments is the organizational influence challenge. A manufacturing plant in Vietnam, a distribution center in Poland, and a sales office in Brazil are each under different regulatory pressure and responding to different stakeholder expectations. The global sustainability manager can't mandate; they have to make the case that sustainability investment makes business sense in each context — or build the central incentives (procurement requirements, capital allocation criteria, performance metrics) that make it happen regardless of local motivation.