Not long ago, sustainability lived in a separate report written by a separate team. That’s changing. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability criteria are now built into portfolio decisions, especially in Europe and in infrastructure, where a project’s footprint and its community effects can decide whether it gets approved at all.

If your organization is in the United States, you might be tempted to treat this as someone else’s concern. We’d think twice. Many U.S. companies have European operations, customers, or suppliers, and those relationships bring the expectations with them. Even without that, the questions are good ones to ask of any investment.

Put it in the selection process

The practical place to start is the scoring model you already use to choose and rank projects. Most portfolios score on strategic fit, financial return, risk, and cost. Add a small number of sustainability criteria next to them, such as energy use, supply chain exposure, or community impact. Keep it to a few. A model with 20 new criteria will be ignored.

Weight them honestly. If a criterion can never change the ranking, it’s decoration. Test your model by asking whether any real project would have scored differently with it.

Measure through the lifecycle

Approval is the easy moment. A project promises lower emissions in the business case, then spends two years making decisions that quietly erode that promise: a cheaper material, a different vendor, a scope cut. Track the sustainability measures at the same checkpoints as cost and schedule, and report them at the same steering committee. Picture a regional utility building a new facility: if the carbon estimate is reviewed only at approval, nobody notices when a design change moves it.

Avoid box-ticking

The risk with any new criterion is that it turns into a form. You’ll recognize it when every project scores “medium” and nobody can say why. Counter this by asking a project team to explain the trade-off in plain language. What did you choose, what did it cost, and what did it save? If the explanation is vague, the score probably is too.

Also be careful with data. Estimates are fine at the start, but say they’re estimates, and replace them with measured figures as the project proceeds.

A starting point

You don’t need a transformation program. Take your current scoring model and your next quarterly portfolio review. Add three sustainability criteria, apply them to the projects under review, and see which rankings change. Then talk about why. That conversation is where the real value is, and it will tell you whether your criteria are doing any work. If you’d like a second opinion on the design, we’re happy to look at it with you.