Doctoral honouree focuses on sustainable development

 Long before corporations added responsibility and sustainability to their agendas, Antonia Ax:son Johnson began seeking ways to bridge the worlds of science and business for a sustainable future.

Ax:son Johnson’s socially- and environmentally-conscious work as head of the Axel Johnson Group and founder of the Antonia Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Sustainable Development is being recognized by KTH Royal Institute of Technology. On November 15, she will receive an honorary doctoral degree along with eminent scientists from North America and Great Britain: Dame Ann P. Dowling from Cambridge University; Romas Kazlauskas from University of Minnesota; Paras N. Prasad from State University of New York at Buffalo; and Vikram Krishnamurthy from University of British Columbia.

The university’s citation stated: “With a genuine interest in both people and the environment, (Ax:son Johnson) advocates for responsible business in partnership with the surrounding community and its scientific and research institutions.”

The honour has special significance for Ax:son Johnson. “My father was a very proud mining engineer from KTH, so to me the university has held a special place in the academic world,” she says.

The Johnson Group’s holdings include a wide variety of retail and wholesale businesses, as well as real estate, water treatment systems and environmental enterprises such as wood reclamation. All of these build sustainability into their growth plans.

Ax:son Johnson sees businesses as agents of positive change in society. “As business people and employees we have a personal responsibility to understand how we can encourage a change towards greater environmental, social and value sustainability,” she says.

She says that by partnering with science, corporations can apply the “comprehensive and intellectual perspective of research” to the kind of results-oriented enterprises that business people excel at.

“Corporate people can change while politicians discuss. Companies can act while institutions deliberate,” she says.

Ax:son Johnson’s involvement in sustainability started in the late 1980s when she was invited to join a group of 40 global business leaders, the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, who had been asked to submit recommendations to the UN Earth Summit in Rio on issues of environment and sustainable development.

In 1993, Ax:son Johnson started the Antonia Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Sustainable Development, which promotes scientific research on sustainable development and finding practical applications for it.

Working in areas that impact on its own businesses, the foundation initiates and runs projects and collaborates with other initiatives aimed at sustainable development, which Johnson defines as the confluence of “economy, ecology, empathy, aesthetics and ethics”.

“Our methods have been to bring together the best minds and the most imaginative people within science with practitioners such as businessmen, writers, farmers or journalists, and in those meetings we aim to generate new ideas and solutions for sustainable development,” she says. 

The foundation arranges seminars, workshops and round table talks in which a diverse assortment of experts collectively addresses a problem. Past events arranged by the Foundation have included engaging material scientists with the fashion and packaging industry, and toxicologists with the beauty industry. KTH’s Biomime Centre has collaborated with the Foundation to host an exchange on how biology can provide inspiration for new textile materials.

The fruitful debate and discussion often becomes internalised in the Johnson Group’s own companies. Åhléns department stores, for example, provide customers with a Good Choice guide that highlights sustainable products in fashion, beauty, home textiles, toys and office materials, such as TENCEL (lyocell), a textile fibre made from renewable FSC-labelled raw material with minimal environmental impact.

Nevertheless, Ax:son Johnson sees even further expansion of sustainable principles in business.  “Sustainability issues were at one time so anonymous,” she says. “Today they are a natural part of everyday life. But the limitations of the commitment to sustainability within companies and the people in them, must continually be stretched, tried, reviewed and reformed.”

David Callahan

Snapshot: Antonia Ax:son Johnson

Born in New York City and educated at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Ax:son Johnson is the great granddaughter of the Johnson Group’s founder, Axel Johnson. She received her Master’s Degree in Psychology from Stockholm University before taking over as head of Axel Johnson Group in 1982.

Besides her role as Chairman of Axel Johnson, as well as of Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation she is also Vice Chairman of Nordstjernan and director of Axel Johnson Inc., AxFast, Axfood, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Welfare, Mekonomen, NCC, and others. She has also until recently been Vice Mayor of Upplands Väsby municipality. 

In her own words:

“My personal mission as owner of a family company has been marked by the dizzying rate of change in my lifetime from my childhood with its slow, secure, sustainable idyll to the modern, complex and interlinked where speed and consumption inhibit sustainability. It is here we have our playing field as owners of a family company.”

Axel Johnson Group in brief

The Axel Johnson Group comprises four companies: the U.S. company Axel Johnson Inc., the holding company AltoCumulus, the Swedish real estate company AxFast AB, and Axel Johnson AB, a Sweden-based company that builds and develops trade and service businesses in the European market, with a focus on the Nordic countries.