Skills for the Future: Sustainability – Katie

Sustainability is fast becoming a fundamental skill for the future of food and farming – not just for those in dedicated sustainability roles, but for anyone working across the supply chain. From understanding environmental impact to managing risk and building resilient businesses, sustainability thinking now underpins many of the decisions shaping our industry.

In this Skills for the Future blog, MDS Trainee Katie Russell shares how developing sustainability skills during her final secondment has helped her take a whole-system view of the supply chain, turning complex challenges into practical, proportionate action.

Why Sustainability Skills Matter

Sustainability is no longer a specialist topic or a “nice to have” – it is fast becoming a core professional skill. Simply put, sustainability is about understanding impact, whether environmental, social, or economic, and taking a whole-system view of how decisions made at one point in the supply chain influence outcomes elsewhere. This can include assessing supplier practices, understand energy and water use, or reviewing how on-site processes contribute to food waste. Developing this perspective builds strong analytical and critical thinking skills, as it requires moving beyond short-term fixes and instead considering long-term consequences and trade-offs. Finally, building strong relationships across the business is critical; trust and collaboration are what ultimately enable sustainability projects to deliver lasting impact.

Learning sustainability in practice

I am currently on my final secondment at Global Pacific working as a Sustainability Manager. My key responsibilities include managing ESG policies and processes spanning human rights due diligence, packaging, and environmental impact. The secondment has provided valuable exposure to different stages of the supply chain. As part of this, I had the opportunity to visit stone fruit suppliers in Italy, including both farms and packhouses, which gave me first-hand insight into primary production, packing operations, and how sustainability, technical, and ethical requirements are applied in practice. This on-the-ground experience strengthened my understanding of supply chain complexity and reinforced the importance of proportionate, practical sustainability solutions.

From insight to impact

Sustainability plays a growing role in managing risk and future-proofing the business. Regulatory expectations, customer requirements, and climate-related pressures are all increasing, and organisations that understand and anticipate these changes are better positioned to respond. Through my role, I have developed a stronger awareness of emerging risks and the importance of proactive planning, rather than reactive compliance. A key example of this has been my involvement in developing an environmental risk assessment that feeds into our overall supplier risk framework. This project strengthened my understanding of how environmental considerations such as water use, climate vulnerability, and local regulatory context can be translated into practical risk scoring, helping the business to identify higher-risk suppliers earlier and target engagement efforts more effectively.

My advice

For anyone curious about getting involved in sustainability or similar projects, my advice would be to focus on building transferable skills. I would also encourage people to seek out opportunities to work across departments, ask questions, and get exposure to different parts of the supply chain. Developing a broad understanding of how decisions are made and where impacts occur will make you more effective in driving meaningful, practical change.

Katie’s experience highlights how sustainability is no longer about box-ticking or compliance alone. It is about curiosity, collaboration and the ability to see how decisions made in one area can have far-reaching impacts elsewhere.

As part of our Skills for the Future series, this blog shows how MDS Trainees are building the skills needed to support a more resilient, responsible food and farming industry, both now and in the years ahead.