Two pillars ESG misses, and why they matter
Standard ESG covers a lot of ground, but two areas rarely make it into mainstream reporting: societal health equity and responsible technology. Both are becoming material.
Societal health and health equity
Most ESG frameworks include employee wellbeing. Few extend to the health impact a business has on the communities it operates in, or on the users of its products. That gap gets exposed the moment a product is linked to a public health outcome, whether that is ultra-processed food, addictive digital design, or unsafe working conditions in a supplier facility.
Measuring health impact is harder than measuring emissions, but the direction of travel is clear: regulators, insurers, and institutional investors are starting to ask.
Responsible technologies and innovation
AI, automation, and data-heavy products create risks that older ESG frameworks were not built for: algorithmic bias, opaque decisions that affect people's livelihoods, energy-hungry model training, and data practices that erode user trust.
A business that ships technology without a considered stance on these questions is accumulating a category of risk that does not show up on a traditional sustainability scorecard, but that will show up in headlines, hiring, and enterprise sales cycles.
Why RBP includes both
RBP treats societal health equity and responsible technology as first-class pillars. Not because every business is exposed to them equally, but because ignoring them by default is how blind spots become crises.