André Hoffmann has spent years arguing that business must move beyond its focus on short-term profit and help to build “sustainable prosperity” as the vice-chairman of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche and co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees.
It’s a cause he has backed beyond the world of business, too, across decades of philanthropy and leadership in environmental and conservation nonprofits, including a ten-year stint as vice-president of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
In his 2024 book, The New Nature of Business, co-authored with journalist Peter Vanham, Hoffmann made the case for companies to account for their effects on nature and society – to put the cost to the planet on the balance sheet, as he likes to say.
But much has changed since. Speaking to Dialogue Earth, Hoffmann says the world has become “even more short term”, with war, deglobalisation, and authoritarian politics pulling against collective action.
In a wide-ranging interview, he warns that climate resilience must shape long-term planning, describes calls to burn more fossil fuels from within the US administration as “pretty terrifying stuff”, and warns that a big financial crisis in the next few years is “not impossible at all.”
The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
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If I talk about nature in a boardroom, people say “oh, he just likes birds or trees”. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about sustainable prosperity, which means a circular economy, which means reuse, which means sufficiency.
André Hoffmann, board of trustees co-chair, World Economic Forum
Dialogue Earth: Since you published your book, in late 2024, we’ve seen conflict, increased trade tensions, political swings and a corporate retreat from environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments. Has this had an impact on your vision for a “new nature” of business?
André Hoffmann: That’s an interesting way to open this conversation. Certain things come out reinforced by the current situation, others a little bit less emphasised. The world has become even more short-term. Most of the businesses described in the book as working for sustainable prosperity have changed or adapted their strategies, and are navigating the current seas in a slightly different way.
The short term is winning again. But the thing I would change in the book’s vision, if I were to take into account the last couple of years, is to put much more emphasis onto social capital: how can we move away from “me, me, me” to the “we”, to the “us”?
Countries can see a crisis like the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz as evidence for the case for renewables. Or they can turn to short-termism on energy, however dirty. How to convince governments that renewables are the way to go, even if there is short-term cost?
I think the answer is one word – resilience. The idea that we are dependent on imported gas either from Russia, or now the US, for producing simple goods we need in our daily life is something that should spur memories of what happened during Covid: we were all suddenly incredibly dependent on a couple of economic actors in a way which did not allow us to think long term. In corporate thinking, to put some resilience in is key to what is going to happen now.
Many global ESG efforts were made through the 2010s, in particular in Europe and the US. There has been progress in China, too, in building regulations around this. But in a world that is, perhaps, “deglobalising”, connections across nations are fraying. Do you think the principles of your “new nature of business” can endure, and also translate to countries of the Global South?
I think the rebuilding of national boundaries is very much intended to split the problem in several places. But what we try to talk about is to do it together. The splitting up of big blocs into small constituent parties, of course, is in the interests of autocrats.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Washington DC, and the people I talked to in government were telling us very openly, “I’m sorry, we don’t want the European project to succeed, so we’re going to make sure we can do everything we can to break up the European Union because it will be too strong a bloc.” The new nature of business is about purposeful industry which helps us to create prosperity in a sustainable way. It’s not going to happen if we just pitch each other against each other.
Around us, there is constant conflict – Sudan, Gaza, Iran. War has no ESG strategy, and it is successfully balkanising interests. What is the environmental case to stop conflict?
There’s a school of thought, which I really don’t like, that says it must get worse before it gets better. I would prefer us to be more proactive than this. The risk that comes with international relationships, is how are we ever going to stop war if we cannot define it?
War is no longer pitching two armies together. It is something that happens constantly. Russian robots trying to do something; disruptions in payment systems between Singapore and China. These things are happening all the time. We see in Europe the extent to which two economies are focused on this – I mean, 40 per cent of Russia’s GDP is on armament; Ukraine, probably more. If we were to think in ESG criteria, if you talk about social capital, we are going to need different incentives, because the incentive now is just destroying the neighbour, and that cannot be the right way to look forward.
But I cannot at the moment see an international code that would settle the impact that war has on countries. The big wars of the moment have been done against every legal consideration. So this is not looking good.
You now lead Davos. There are COPs for climate, biodiversity and more – collections of stakeholders trying to come together to think of solutions. But what do agreements mean when multilateralism is weakening? When Donald Trump can, one fine day, say we are pulling out of the Paris agreement?
Our theme this year at Davos was “the spirit of dialogue.” We want to talk about growth because of the debt issue. We want to talk about livelihoods and the world of work. We want to talk about innovation, and we have to talk about geopolitics. We’re trying to put all this into the context of planetary boundaries.
Right now, we are spending more than the planet can give us, and that is a road to nowhere. The idea of having that dialogue on the table in Davos becomes even more important. How do you lead Davos? Clearly, the agenda we’ve discussed since the beginning – this idea of saying we need to act collectively – is in danger. How can you trust the government who bombs the people they’re negotiating peace with? How can you trust a government which does this with every international treaty? How can you trust a world order where might is right?
Since your book was released, there has been a lot of scrutiny on artificial intelligence and its potential environmental and social impacts. Many have fears about its impact on employment and work too. Do you see AI as an industry that can still fit within your vision of a new nature of business?
First, we need to measure the impact that AI can have on the system. The US stock exchange is at a historical high on the back of six or seven AI-adjacent companies. Half the countries on the planet are in some sort of conflict, and the US stock exchange is at a historical high. There is a disconnect there which we are going to have to deal with. I mean, the likelihood of a big financial crisis in the next three to six years strikes me as not impossible at all.
The idea of using AI to make more sense of the flood of data we are generating every day could be fantastically useful. But at the same time, there are consequences of its systemic use. It could be very dangerous for jobs, but for all sorts of other things. Education – what’s the point of going to school if you have everything at your fingertips anyway? How do you create an education system which allows people to use information in the right way rather than just acquiring it?
The new nature of business means doing something for sustainable prosperity, and if we want to do that in a way that really benefits the system, we should not refrain from using any tools. AI seems to be a tool just as good as another. We should not throw it away, but it has to be controlled and regulated.
There is a lot of concern about environmental impacts. Do you think that is central enough in discussions that you see at Davos and other multilateral forums?
“Well, the last one I attended, we had a senior member of the US administration addressing us and saying we need to provide more, and we need to burn more, fossil fuels. T
his is pretty terrifying stuff. You can see the pressure under which he probably is. But that’s no excuse. It’s the example of the bathtub [for fossil fuel use]. You go into a bathroom and the tub is overflowing. What do you do? Do you turn off the tap or mop up the floor? What they are telling us in the US now is that you turn the tap on a bit more, because then you’ll be much better at mopping up the floor.”
You talk in the book of your family’s pharmaceutical company, Roche, having a purpose to “do now what the patient needs next”. If we take nature, climate and the environment as our patient, what is the most vital action to take now?
We are not talking about the environment and nature because we love it, or because it’s beautiful. What should drive us here is humanity. The best way to do that is to include the cost of nature in the balance sheet. If we realise that nature is not limitless and that it has a price, I think we are going to get on in a better way. If you look at a tree and put value on it, a tree is worth its weight in wood.
But it’s so much more than that because it’s alive. It’s connected to the rest of the forest. It’s part of an ecosystem. At the moment, all our economy is purely extractive. But if nature could stand its ground and be recognised as of value, we would be in a very different place.
This is all taking place in an information battle over environment and climate. How do you win this? How do you convince people that environmental change is around them now, particularly when fossil fuel lobbies are pouring money into disinformation?
We need to find something that is understood by all. The idea of going deeper and deeper into the science has not helped us. We need to make it more accessible. Maybe there is something we can learn from the populist movement – this notion of “what’s in it for me?” How can I translate the environmental crisis to my own person? That might be a way of getting there.
If I talk about nature in a boardroom, people say “oh, he just likes birds or trees”. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about sustainable prosperity, which means a circular economy, which means reuse, which means sufficiency. The communication battle will be won if you can convince your reader – our readers, collectively – that it is not something that concerns somebody else, but it is our concern, and we can do something at an individual level as well.
This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons licence.
