From ESG 1.0 to ESG 2.0: Sustainable Square at Oman Sustainability Week

How can we blend financials & non-financials and price ESG? This is the question sitting behind boardroom conversations right now, and one very few organisations have a precise answer to.

At Oman Sustainability Week, our Group CEO, Monaem Ben Lellahom, delivered two sessions addressing this question directly.

ESG 2.0 – Where Sustainability Meets Capital Markets and Becomes Financial Strategy

Held at the Muscat Stock Exchange booth, the first session focused on a key acknowledgment: ESG risk is already priced into valuations, cost of capital, and lending decisions. The gap between knowing this and acting on it is where most organisations sit today.

The reason most organisations are not capturing the upside is structural. ESG data was built for the wrong audience. It was designed for ratings agencies, NGOs, and regulators. The people making capital decisions need something different: financial quantification, cash-flow linkage, peer comparability, and outputs usable at the moment of pricing.

ESG 2.0 is built on this logic. The central framework presented was a four-step translation: ESG issue to financial signal, signal to quantified business risk, risk to dollar impact on earnings or valuation, and dollar impact to investor narrative.

Every ESG metric has a home inside a profit and loss statement, the task is building the strategy to get it there.
This is where ESG stops being a narrative and starts moving money.

ESG at a Crossroads – The Sustainability Recalibration

The second session, at the Asyad Group, examined where ESG stands as a discipline and where the organisations leading on it are headed.

It opened with an important fact: we’ve been seeing years of significant turbulence in ESG. A surge in global regulation followed by compliance fatigue, rising assurance costs, and a wave of greenwashing enforcement, has pushed many organisations to step back.

The GCC has followed a different path, positioning itself as a region building structural ESG infrastructure, not dismantling it. Early adopters in the region are already seeing the returns: access to green finance, stronger investor positioning, and a competitive edge in capital markets.

This is the transition from ESG 1.0 to ESG 2.0, from compliance-led, narrative-heavy, financially disconnected, to outcome-driven, CFO-owned, auditable, and priced by capital markets.

The organisations making the shift now are ahead. The organisations still operating in ESG 1.0 are carrying a risk they may not yet be pricing.
Which one is yours?

The Bottomline

ESG that cannot be priced will not survive the current environment. ESG that can, that is financially material, auditable, board-governed, and outcome-driven, creates competitive advantage.

This is the work Sustainable Square does. We help organisations move from where they are to where ESG 2.0 requires them to be.

Oman Sustainability Week reminded us that the region has both the intent and the infrastructure to lead on this. The organisations we met during the week are asking exactly the right questions. The answers are available, the work is what remains.

Learn how Sustainable Square can help you in your transition to ESG 2.0

Read more about Sustainable Square’s sessions at Oman Sustainability Week