About six in 10 executives believe they can achieve their corporate sustainability goals over the next year, according to a recent global survey commissioned by Honeywell International. But only about 16% think they'll do so primarily through technology-driven changes, such as upgrading or replacing existing systems with newer, more efficient or more sustainable technologies.

The vast majority of the 600 business leaders surveyed - 62% - expect to hit their short-term goals mainly by modifying or eliminating operational processes or business behaviors.

Sustainability has become an increasingly hot-button issue in recent years for companies looking to reduce their carbon emissions. The idea is that by making changes now, they will see a substantial return on investment later, spend less on energy and materials, and build up infrastructure resiliency to weather-related catastrophes. 

Successful sustainability efforts also require partnerships with suppliers and customers to create a circular economy, where business consortiums work to refurbish and recycle existing materials and products as long as possible.

With that backdrop, Honeywell recently launched a quarterly Environmental Sustainability Index to track key trends involving global efforts to mitigate climate change and bolster sustainability.

"Over the next decade, we expect sustainability to be further prioritized through not only policy, but increased investment by the world's leading companies to demonstrate the importance of sustainable practices, becoming a mandate from consumers, investors, and company boards around the world," said Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner of Futurum Research, which conducted the survey for Honeywell.

Organization's optimism on sustainability for this year and the coming 12 months.

That said, the business leaders remain less sanguine about success when asked about longer-term goals through 2030: Fewer than 40% of all organizations are extremely optimistic about hitting sustainability goals for 2030, and 24% are extremely pessimistic about achieving their 2030 goals for energy evolution and efficiency.

Honeywell, which sells home and commercial building heating and cooling technologies, committed in April 2021 to become carbon neutral in its operations and facilities by 2035 using a combination of energy-saving projects and a conversion to renewable energy. The company plans capital improvement projects at its sites and in its fleet of vehicles, and to use carbon credits where needed.

The initial Sustainability Index is based on responses from execs involved in sustainability; it found that 90% are generally optimistic about their efforts to focus on energy evolution and efficiency, emissions reduction, pollution prevention, and circularity/recycling.

More than 700 of the largest 2,000 publicly traded companies have made net-zero commitments of some kind, according to the Harvard Business Review. Two-thirds of the S&P 500 have committed to emission reduction goals and 60 of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050.

(Net zero refers to creating a balance between the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere and those taken out.)

The issue of sustainability has been bubbling up for a while. In July, global strategy consulting firm L.E.K. Consulting surveyed 400 senior decision-makers, with 28% of respondents from companies with revenues of$10 billion a year or more from a wide range of sectors.

Executives' approach to sustainability over the next 12 months.

More than half (51%) of those surveyed by L.E.K. Consulting said they're willing to trade off short-term financial performance to achieve long-term sustainability goals. But 58% reported their organizations can't agree on what the tradeoffs should be.

Mekala Krishnan, a partner with the McKinsey Global Institute, said thousands of companies have set net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets. While targets can be arbitrary, those considered 'science-based' are in line with what the latest climate science deems necessary to meet the goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement; that agreement aims to restrict the mean rise in global temperatures to 1.5