We need to look beyond sustainability.

As renowned historian and philosopher Thomas Berry wrote in The Dream Of The Earth, “The most difficult transition to make is from an anthropocentric to a biocentric norm of progress. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress. Any progress of the human at the expense of the larger life community must ultimately lead to a diminishment of human life itself.”

Sustainability is the heart and soul of what we do at the Katingan Mentaya Project, but I believe we should go beyond sustainability by restoring what has been damaged or lost. In short, we need to build a new “restorative economy”.

The advent of industrialisation has led to sustainable farming practices being replaced with unsustainable ones like chemical fertilisers and slash-and-burn agriculture. To combat this, we started an agro-ecology school to reintroduce local wisdom about sustainable farming that had eroded over years. Nature can help us if we take care of it.  For example, using organic fertilisers and the cover crops method helps to manage soil erosion, pests and diseases, while increasing soil quality and biodiversity.

We can empower local communities through carbon finance.

One hundred per cent of the Katingan Mentaya Project’s staff is Indonesian, and about eighty per cent are local community members. The project provides vocational training and has allocated more than a thousand microfinance loans for small business development. It has also helped modernise sanitation facilities and create more efficient supply chains.

Crucially, we also show local farmers that sustainable farming incorporating the latest technology can offer considerable financial rewards and improve their quality of life. For example, instead of just producing fish, an ongoing project involves helping farmers to extract albumin, a high-value pharmaceutical product, from snakehead fish.

As another example, we were aware that the coconut farmers surrounding our concession used to harvest fresh and dried coconuts every three months, which doesn’t earn them much. When Unilever approached us six years ago, saying they had to import the coconut sugar required to produce a brand of sweet soy sauce they’d recently acquired, we realised there was an opportunity to help the coconut farmers. We calculated that if a farmer produced coconut sugar versus just harvesting coconuts on one hectare of land, he could earn up to the equivalent of S$400 (or about US$291), versus just S$60 (US$44). This required vocational training, so we started a training centre. From the initial batch of just two farmers, we now have a few hundred producing a much higher-quality, higher-value product from their crops.

Climate and social impact will become the new measures of profitability.

As CEOs and investors, we typically use metrics that make sense to us, like cash flows or sales comparables. But one thing we have yet to measure properly is impact, whether it’s impact on the community or climate change. I’m certain that impact is on a path to profitability because the world is moving in that direction, and value propositions are changing.

My one piece of advice for leaders is to not get too caught up in the past and traditional metrics—if I’d looked at my company purely from a profit perspective, I don’t think we would have survived beyond three years.

For too long we’ve thought of nature as something we own, but the pandemic has shown us that humans are only a small part of the universe. We need to see ourselves as caretakers of the Earth and protect it for future generations. That’s how we survive.

Dharsono Hartono is the CEO of PT Rimba Makmur Utama, an Indonesia-based company that is developing the Katingan Mentaya Project. Following a Masters in Financial Engineering from Cornell University, Dharsono worked for multinational companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and JP Morgan, handling merger acquisition, debt management and financing and raising capital.

This piece is part of a collaboration between Tatler Asia and Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO), a global leadership community of chief executives, which counts more than thirty thousand individuals from 142 countries among its members.