The 20th
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March 14 & 15, 2025
at UNESCO • Paris

The NORSYS group, a Digital Services company, has granted nature a seat and voting rights in its board of directors, making it the first company in Europe to give nature such a role. How will this be implemented, and what are the expected impacts on the group’s governance?

NORSYS : NORSYS has indeed decided to give nature the essential place it deserves: as a constituent part at the heart of governance for a livable future. Specifically, this new governance is organized around three major decisions.

First, the company has decided to grant nature a seat on its board of directors, meaning a position at the table of shareholders and sovereign power. This seat will be entrusted to an external personality: Frantz Gault, who has been reflecting on these new governance models since 2020 and recently published “La nature au travail” (EPFL). This innovation will allow the representative of nature to have a voting right, and in some cases, a veto right, on any project that may have an environmental impact.

Next, NORSYS has decided to appoint other representatives of nature in its various decision-making bodies: the ethics board, mission committee, works council (CSE), and the steering committee of the permaenterprise model. These representatives will be brought together in a High Council for Nature, which will play a role of coordination, influence, and anticipation within the group. Co-chaired by Frantz Gault and Thomas Breuzard, this committee will be able to issue alerts and opinions, recommend studies, and make proposals to the board of directors.

Finally, in its desire to involve employees in the company’s evolution, NORSYS plans to expand the role of the works council (CSE). It is particularly expected to be given new responsibilities related to nature preservation and a role in overseeing the actions taken by NORSYS in ecology.

You hope to serve as a model for other European companies and beyond. Do you think the business world is ready for this capitalistic revolution?

The business world is undoubtedly not yet mature enough, but planning and anticipating, rather than suffering the consequences, is becoming urgent. And the modalities we propose are accessible to all companies, without necessarily touching the capital, as is the case with the High Council for Nature!

This is actually a necessity. Half of the global GDP and 72% of European companies directly depend on nature, as highlighted in a recent study by the European Central Bank. Yet neither the economic nor the political world integrates nature seriously into their functioning and governance.

Companies therefore have a choice: take responsibility, act in line with the challenges of the 21st century, and defend the principle of strong sustainability to maintain natural capital at a constant level, or let the situation deteriorate, wait for hypothetical future laws, and risk putting themselves in danger.

However, current events cannot be ignored. The scale of the tragic events in Valencia, to take just one example, shows that nature has a major impact, with enormous costs for both the economy and humanity. Nature is already a stakeholder with which companies must deal. Rather than just "measuring" it, as the CSRD invites us to do, we believe it is more useful to listen to it, give it a voice, and anticipate future reciprocal impacts.

The group is also the creator of the permaenterprise model, which reimagines business development around a dynamic similar to permaculture. What are the results of this model, and how does it work in practice?

This governance is indeed directly aligned with the permaenterprise model we have created and deployed over the past four years. This development model is inspired by the issue raised by permaculture: how to survive in a world whose development is based on dwindling resources? By inventing a new model that aims to achieve efficient production that is useful to humans without harming the planet, using resources in a sober and even regenerative way, and sharing wealth equitably. In short, a model viable for a livable future.

We have therefore placed these principles at the heart of our strategy, and our results are revealing: three times less turnover than our competitors, three times fewer GHG emissions, stable growth and profitability even during crises… And the dozens of companies of various sizes and sectors that have adopted the permaenterprise model testify to multiple and quickly tangible benefits: ethical innovations, a distinctive and attractive employer brand, increased employee engagement, better efficiency in steering strategy, and convergence of business and CSR…