3 A Pentland Centre Research & Impact Digest, 2025 The Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business seeks to enable business to understand, act upon, and further sustainability outcomes. The Centre does this by assembling a network that: • attracts and supports colleagues who are motivated to advance the Centre’s vision and enables them to have more substantial outcomes and impacts; • creates points of connection for knowledge to be exchanged between academic and practice contexts so that the best ideas (wherever they come from) are shared, refined and advanced; and • supports innovation and provides inspiration for businesses and scholars to progress sustainability in business faster and with greater confidence. These outcomes are critically dependent upon core funding provided by the Rubin Foundation Charitable Trust, which underpins Centre operations and for which we are very grateful. After ten years of co-investment between the Trust and Lancaster University, the Pentland Centre is in good health, with 138 members spread across 30 operational units supported by three professional services colleagues and a director whose job is to co-ordinate and energise the network. As the Centre has grown, we have arranged its work around thematic areas: the Knowledge and Action Hubs. Knowledge and Action Hubs The Business and Biodiversity Hub is developing the underpinning understanding of business nature/biodiversity impacts, dependencies, risks and opportunities, building on longstanding relationships with the Lancaster Environment Centre. This work focuses on business-led nature restoration and the regulatory demands for value-relevant data on nature/biodiversity interactions, often linked to investors and capital markets. Modern Slavery, Justice and Complex Supply Chains is an area where Lancaster University Management School (LUMS) has long had research and practice capability. This Hub has focused on mapping diverse research expertise and meeting potential partners for impact and engagement. As demands for due diligence in supply chains become more pressing for business and regulatory reasons, this Hub will be well placed to contribute to conceptual and practice insights. People and the Ocean is a multi-disciplinary Hub involving colleagues from natural, organisational and political sciences. This Hub has undertaken a mapping exercise to identify and locate ‘blue’ businesses in the Lancashire region in order to better understand who might be partners for research and engagement going forward. A new Hub is planned to start in mid-2025 on Waste and Circular Economy, building on a large research grant (co-led by Pentland Centre members) on Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives. Further waste and circular economy research funding has been obtained and the new Hub’s activities will be synergistic with this work. Underpinning the Hubs is an academic and practice focus on how Transition and Transformation arises. This is a cross-cutting capability where applied research, business development, knowledge transfer partnerships and local business engagement events are organised. While these are specific areas of focus and investment, the Centre will continue to support all its members to pursue work that they find meaningful while also being alert to new areas of collective expertise that can be further supported. Alongside this activity, we are very pleased to have developed a podcast presence (in the form of Transforming Tomorrow) over the last 12-15 months, growing an international audience. We have highlighted where podcasts cover the topics we feature in this publication throughout the pages. I hope you enjoy reading about the development of the Centre’s research and impact profile in the pages that follow. Please get in touch with individual researchers or myself if you wish to discuss how we might work more closely together. Professor Jan Bebbington (Director, Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business) Foreword How to read this report: This report includes a celebration of work undertaken over the past 10 years, as well as current projects. On pages 6-9 we outline Centre work from the first five years. Pages 10-15 showcase founding work on themes that remain part of the Centre’s work: historical and current activities are highlighted together. From page 16 onwards, we focus on Centre members’ current activities. The final section, from page 22, looks at how the Centre interacts with other work in Lancaster University and the Management School.
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