Dr. Beliz B. Tecirli, Sustainability and ESG Executive in Saudi Arabia
There is no shortage of sustainability ambition in the corporate world today. Net zero commitments, ESG frameworks, biodiversity pledges, circular economy strategies, boardrooms across the globe have become fluent in the language of sustainability. What remains far less common is the ability to translate that ambition into operational reality.
Having spent the better part of two decades building sustainability programs across some of the world’s largest energy companies and most ambitious infrastructure development projects, I have come to believe that the single most important factor in closing the gap between ambition and execution is governance. Not strategy, not communication, not technical capability, but the structures, systems and accountability frameworks that give sustainability real institutional weight inside an organization.
The Ambition Trap
When organizations approach sustainability the same way they approach PR and positioning — crafting a compelling narrative, publishing a report, setting a target date and considering the strategy complete — they miss the most important step: Building the internal architecture that makes delivery structurally possible.
Sustainability ambition without governance is aspiration. And aspiration, however sincerely held, does not reduce emissions, protect ecosystems or make supply chains more resilient. Delivery does.
The organizations that consistently close the gap between what they say and what they do tend to share a set of common characteristics. They have clear accountability structures, not vague ownership spread across multiple functions, but named individuals with specific mandates and real decision rights. They have data systems that capture what actually matters rather than what is easiest to count. And they have governance bodies, committees, boards and working groups with the authority to make trade-offs when sustainability objectives conflict with cost or timeline pressures.
That last point is critical. Sustainability will always, at some point, compete with other business priorities. The organizations that have genuinely embedded it are the ones that have decided in advance how those trade-offs will be made, and who will make them.
Embed Early or Pay Later
One of the most consistent lessons I have drawn from working across large-scale projects and initiatives is this: the cost of embedding sustainability early is generally significantly less than the cost of retrofitting it later.
When sustainability governance, data systems and accountability structures are designed from inception, they become part of how an organization naturally operates. Decisions about materials, construction methods, resource use and environmental impact are made with sustainability considerations already in the room. When sustainability is added after the fact, those decisions have already been taken. The organization is left managing consequences rather than shaping outcomes.
This is particularly true in development contexts where physical infrastructure, operational systems and community impacts are being established simultaneously. The early years of a project or organization’s life are when the most consequential sustainability decisions are made, often before the public or investor conversation about them has even begun. Getting them right from the start is not just good practice. It is the only approach that genuinely works at scale.
The Execution Architecture
In my work across large-scale infrastructure and development projects, including senior sustainability roles at Saudi Aramco (one of the world’s largest integrated energy and chemicals companies) and ADNOC (the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, and another of the world’s most significant energy producers), I have come to think of sustainability delivery as building an operating system. Not a strategy document, not a set of policies, but a living architecture of governance, data, processes, accountability and disclosure readiness that gives sustainability institutional weight inside an organization.
This operating system has several interconnected components. The first is governance design: establishing the committees, reporting lines and decision-making authorities that determine how sustainability considerations enter every significant organizational decision. Without this, sustainability remains advisory rather than structural.
The second is materiality: understanding with precision which environmental and social topics are genuinely significant to the organization’s long-term performance and stakeholder relationships, and focusing resources accordingly rather than attempting to address everything at once.
The third is data infrastructure: designing the systems that collect, verify and report sustainability performance in a way that is credible, consistent and decision-useful. This is unglamorous work. It is also the foundation on which everything else depends. You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and you cannot improve what you will not honestly account for.
The fourth is disclosure readiness: building the systems and discipline to translate sustainability performance into language that is useful to the full range of stakeholders who depend on it, including investors, financial institutions, regulators, supply chain partners and the communities in which an organization operates. Disclosure readiness is not simply a reporting exercise. It is a discipline that sharpens internal thinking, strengthens data integrity and prepares an organization to communicate its performance credibly when the time comes. Building that readiness from within, before external pressure demands it, is one of the most valuable investments a sustainability function can make.
The Scale Challenge
Scale introduces its own set of complications, and this is something I encounter directly working within one of the most ambitious large-scale development projects anywhere in the world. At this scale, one of the most underappreciated challenges is that different assets and components of the same project are developing at fundamentally different paces. Some areas are operational. Others are in active construction. Others still exist only at the planning and design stage. Each requires a different sustainability approach, different data systems and different governance responses, all running simultaneously within a single organizational framework.
The frameworks developed for established corporations do not always translate cleanly into these contexts. Materiality assessments designed for operational businesses, scope accounting systems that assume existing supply chains, reporting templates built around historical performance — all of these require significant adaptation when the operating reality is changing faster than the governance structures can keep pace.
The Role of Technology
In these environments, technology becomes not just useful but essential. Digital platforms that aggregate sustainability data across multiple assets and geographies in real time, AI-assisted monitoring systems for environmental performance, automated reporting tools that reduce the lag between performance and disclosure readiness… these are not peripheral enhancements. They are core infrastructure for sustainability execution at scale.
But technology’s role extends further than data management. It can actively support regulatory compliance, flagging gaps before they become liabilities and ensuring that evolving standards are built into operational processes rather than retrofitted after the fact. It can drive the adoption of more sustainable materials and construction techniques by enabling faster, more informed comparisons between alternatives at the point of decision. It can support resource management by providing real-time visibility into energy, water and waste flows across complex operations, enabling timely interventions that reduce both environmental impact and cost.
Used well, technology does not replace sustainability judgment. It gives that judgment better information to work with, faster and more accurately. In large-scale development contexts where dozens of decisions are being made simultaneously across multiple workstreams, that speed and quality of information can be the difference between sustainability commitments that hold and ones that quietly erode under operational or financial pressure.
Sustainability Is Everyone’s Business
Perhaps the most important thing I have learned during my career is that sustainability cannot be owned by a sustainability team alone. It has to be owned by the business.
This sounds straightforward. In practice, it is one of the hardest things to achieve. Sustainability functions can design the governance, build the systems, develop the frameworks and produce the reports. What they cannot do is make the daily operational decisions that determine whether sustainability performance actually improves. Those decisions are made by procurement teams choosing suppliers, by project managers setting timelines, by finance teams allocating budgets, and by engineers selecting materials. Unless those individuals understand why sustainability matters to their specific work and feel genuinely accountable for it, the most sophisticated sustainability operating model in the world will underdeliver.
Even the most capable and committed sustainability teams cannot substitute for business ownership. Building that ownership takes time, however. It requires sustained engagement, repeated demonstration of why sustainability matters to operational and commercial outcomes, and the patience to bring people along rather than simply issuing requirements. It is cultural work as much as technical work. And it is, in my experience, the dimension of sustainability execution that is most consistently underestimated.
The Leadership Dimension
None of this is possible without leadership that treats sustainability as a genuine organizational priority rather than a reputational matter. The sustainability professionals who are most effective at moving organizations from ambition to execution are rarely the ones with the deepest technical expertise in the organization’s core industry, whether that is energy, construction, manufacturing or development. Instead, they are the ones who understand how organizations actually make decisions, who can build relationships across functions, and who have the credibility and persistence to hold the line when short-term pressures push against long-term commitments.
Execution, ultimately, is a leadership challenge as much as a technical one. The ambition is already there. The question that matters is whether the organization is genuinely built to deliver it.
About the Author
Dr. Beliz B. Tecirli is a Sustainability and ESG Executive with over two decades of experience building sustainability governance, ESG operating models and materiality frameworks across large-scale organizations in the energy and development sectors. She has held senior sustainability roles at Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s largest integrated energy and chemicals companies, and ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. She currently serves as Director of Corporate Sustainability at a giga-project in Saudi Arabia. She holds a PhD from University College London, is a Senior Fellow of the Global Cultural Districts Network, and has published with Aramco World magazine. A champion of diversity and the talent development of women in sustainability and leadership, she is a sought-after speaker on sustainability governance, ESG execution and next-generation city development.
