List of most influential people in The Netherlands shows few sustainability leaders

8 december 2009

It’s the time of the year again where news media publish annual overviews and lists to remind us of this year’s important events and influential people. One such list has become the key directory of who’s who, the Top 200 of most influential people in the Netherlands, published by De Volkskrant on December 5. Earlier this year, another newspaper, Trouw, had put together a list of the top 100 Dutch Sustainability Leaders. This list came out in the spring and was presented as a list of the future.

So let’s compare these two lists. If the sustainability leaders were ranked among the most influential people, the Netherlands would truly be a leader in sustainability and be preparing itself for the future. But if the most influential people are not on the sustainability list, it’s business as usual.

So guess what? Sadly, the only thing in common between the top 100 of the Trouw and of De Volkskrant lists is the low percentage of women, 18 and 15 respectively. But the names are 90 percent different. Of the top 100 sustainability leaders, only ten make it to De Volkskrant list, and can generally be found on lower places (with the exception of number 19 Mr. Rinnooy Kan, who’s the number one on De Volkskrant list). The (shared) number one of the sustainability list, Mr. Winsemius, is not even on De Volkskrant list.

True, there is some overlap between both lists (in both cases, five people of the top twenty of each list appear on the other list) but with only 10 sustainability leaders among the 200 most influential people in The Netherlands, the conclusion is that more needs to be done. More influential people need to become sustainability leaders and more sustainability leaders need to become influential.

Let’s work on improvements for next year. Ideally, in a few years time, the two lists would merge into one, just as sustainability reports are increasingly merged into annual reports. But in the meantime, an annual increase of 10 percent overlap between the lists should be a target for The Netherlands.

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