Saori Dubourg has traveled a lot in the world. She worked for BASF for more than a quarter of a century and was a member of the board for many years. There were countries, like Pakistan, she said at the SZ sustainability summit in Munich, where after a long day of negotiations, women sat at one end of the table and men at the other. At the airport, Dubourg thought how lucky it was, “really great” that she was born on a continent – Europe – and in Germany, where many things are taken for granted. In Germany there is a pronounced culture of complaints, says Dubourg. She hopes that “we will roll up our sleeves from time to time and stand up for Europe, because there are many values that are worth fighting for, unfortunately not everywhere. Economic strength is a basic requirement for democracy.” She gets a lot of applause for this sentence.
But Dubourg is worried about this strength, about the competitive power of Europe and Germany in the world. “We have several tectonic shifts in the world,” says Dubourg. She points to climate change, Covid, geopolitics, including but not limited to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. “We are moving from an age of globalization into an age of resource use,” says Dubourg. In the past, many business models were based on making as much volume as possible. That doesn’t work anymore. Dubourg also gives an example. It used to be about selling as many crop protection products as possible, today it’s still about the product, but also about digital services for more resource-saving use.
One of the central questions for Dubourg is how Germany secures its energy supply. As a former BASF manager, she knows all too well what role energy plays in our existence. The basic industry needs a lot of energy and for decades that came cheaply from natural gas and oil. After differences of opinion about the group’s strategy, Dubourg left the chemical group within a few days in February 2023. She left early, her contract would have run until 2025. She has spent her entire professional life at BASF. She got to know the company as an intern, and in 1996 she started in marketing after studying business administration. She was for BASF in the USA, Japan and Singapore. After the rather abrupt exit from BASF last February, things had gone quiet around Dubourg, although she was never a lute. She speaks quietly, carefully and firmly, like now on the stage in the Munich Urban Colab at the sustainability summit. It is not enough to just consider the availability of energy, but also the costs. Dubourg urges cooperation with other countries. “The energy mix is the license to operate,” says Dubourg.
Another concern: bureaucracy. Dubourg doesn’t actually want to completely condemn the EU Commission’s Green Deal, but then she sounds like it’s just well-intentioned, but not really well done. And with the Inflation Reduction Act, with which the USA specifically promotes sustainable energies and technology, the Green Deal cannot keep up, so Dubourg sounds. The Inflation Reduction Act enables industry to earn money with the business models it supports, but the Green Deal does not provide such incentives. Instead of setting incentives, too much is regulated. Dubourg also names Germany’s opportunities in international competition: Innovations, because there are many great companies in Germany with many great sustainable solutions. The only question is “whether we still want to innovate”. Dubourg would like to be more open to technology: “We can get even better there.” If the energy mix is the operating license, innovations are the freestyle. Everything she says sounds like urgent matters.
For years, Dubourg has been pushing for a new way of measuring corporate profitability. Ecological factors such as water consumption, CO₂ emissions and social factors such as human capital should also be included. The way of keeping the books dates back to the 15th century. The Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli described double-entry bookkeeping. “He was a very clever man,” says Dubourg, “but back then there was no climate change and no digitization. She is concerned with the topic of sustainability. She is a member of the Council for Sustainable Development, which advises the federal government. She sits on the steering committee of the G7 Impact Taskforce and on the Board of Trustees of the Wittenberg Center for Global Ethics.
Like Dubourg, the Taskforce believes that economies today are failing to meet the needs of people and the planet. There is, as it says on the homepage of the initiative formed in 2021, a “blatant gap” between the words and actions of systems that want to bring prosperity and climate protection for everyone. In the Value Balancing Alliance, Dubourg advocates the introduction of uniform reporting standards that better reflect the value of the economy for society. It would be the combination of business and macroeconomic variables. According to her, if a company invests today to reduce environmental pollution, the measures are included in the balance sheet in the form of costs, and the impact on the environment is ignored. “I’m really for competition,” says Dubourg, “but not for methods. We have far too many different reporting standards at the moment.”