Sustainability is often portrayed as being in retreat.
Political uncertainty has increased. Reporting rules are changing. Some companies have reduced the visibility of climate language. Cost pressures remain high. Global conflicts and trade disruption are reshaping investment priorities.
Yet the view from inside major companies is more nuanced.
A new World Economic Forum survey of 103 chief sustainability officers finds that 63% expect sustainability progress to hold steady or accelerate during the next year.
Over the medium term, respondents identified a stronger business case and more affordable, applicable technologies as the main factors likely to accelerate progress.
The survey’s most important conclusion is not about optimism.
It is about operating model.
Sustainability is moving more deeply into commercial, operational and investment decisions. Climate, nature, energy, supply-chain resilience, AI, regulation and finance are no longer separate workstreams managed only through annual reporting.
They are increasingly part of how companies decide where to invest, what to procure, how to manage risk and how to protect long-term value.
For chief sustainability officers, this changes the role.
The task is no longer simply to disclose performance.
It is to help the organisation make better decisions.
From reporting function to decision function
For much of the last decade, corporate sustainability focused on targets, reports, ratings, frameworks and stakeholder communications.
Those activities remain important. Businesses still need credible disclosures, reliable data, governance and transparent claims.
But reporting is not the end goal.
A sustainability report describes what has happened. A decision-support system helps determine what happens next.
The difference is significant.
A reporting-focused sustainability function may calculate emissions once a year.
A decision-focused sustainability function helps procurement teams compare suppliers, supports finance teams assessing capital expenditure, informs property decisions, identifies climate-risk exposure and tests the resilience of the operating model.
That means sustainability data needs to be timely, traceable, decision-relevant and connected to financial and operational information.
For example:
A procurement director needs carbon and supply-chain data before signing a contract.
A facilities team needs energy and water data before approving building upgrades.
A CFO needs climate-risk information when assessing investment and insurance decisions.
A product team needs lifecycle evidence before making sustainability claims.
A board needs transition and resilience metrics before approving strategic plans.
In each case, the value of sustainability information depends on whether it is available at the point of decision.
The commercial case is becoming clearer
The World Economic Forum survey suggests that chief sustainability officers increasingly see commercial momentum as a central driver of progress.
That matters because sustainability programmes are more durable when they create business value.
The value can take different forms:
Lower energy and resource costs
Greater resilience to climate disruption
Better access to finance and insurance
Stronger supplier relationships
Compliance with customer and procurement requirements
Improved product design and circularity
New market opportunities
Reduced regulatory and greenwashing risk
Greater ability to attract and retain talent
Stronger licence to operate
Not every sustainability investment will deliver a short-term financial return.
Some actions are necessary to manage regulatory, climate or reputational risk. Others are investments in long-term resilience.
But the strongest strategies make the financial implications visible.
They connect sustainability outcomes to revenue, cost, risk, capital access, resilience and asset value.
Policy uncertainty does not remove business exposure
The survey also identifies policy uncertainty, short-term pressures and geopolitical volatility as factors making progress more uneven across regions and sectors.
This is an important point.
Companies may face uncertainty about the timing or detail of disclosure rules. But their physical, commercial and supply-chain exposure does not pause while regulation evolves.
A manufacturer may still face carbon costs, material volatility and customer data requests.
A retailer may still face supply disruption from extreme weather and agricultural stress.
A property investor may still face heat, flooding, insurance and building-performance risks.
A technology company may still face electricity, water and infrastructure constraints as AI demand grows.
Policy uncertainty can make planning harder.
It does not make sustainability issues less material.
The response should not be to abandon progress. It should be to build flexible systems that support decisions under different regulatory and market scenarios.
The AI opportunity and trade-off
The World Economic Forum report also identifies AI as a source of new execution capability, while recognising its resource trade-offs.
AI can support sustainability through:
Energy forecasting and demand optimisation
Asset maintenance and operational efficiency
Supply-chain mapping
Climate-risk analysis
Detection of methane emissions
More efficient product and material design
Carbon-data processing and quality control
Scenario modelling and decision support
At the same time, AI increases demand for data centres, electricity, water, grid connections and construction materials.
This creates an important leadership test.
Companies should not ask only how AI can make sustainability work faster.
They should also ask what infrastructure, energy and resource impacts their use of AI creates—and how those impacts will be managed.
The best strategy is not “AI for sustainability” in isolation.
It is sustainable AI deployment: using technology to improve decisions while accounting honestly for its physical footprint.
Adaptation is becoming capital allocation
One of the strongest themes in the survey is that climate adaptation is becoming a core question of resilience and capital allocation.
This is a significant shift.
For years, corporate climate strategies centred mainly on emissions reduction. That remains essential.
But more companies are now recognising that heat, flooding, drought, wildfire, water stress and supply disruption can affect facilities, people, logistics, materials, insurance and finance today.
Adaptation therefore needs to move from the risk register into investment plans.
A useful sequence is:
Physical-risk assessment→financial exposure→investment case→delivery plan→performance monitoring
This means identifying which assets and supply chains are exposed, estimating the potential costs of disruption, evaluating resilience investments and assigning ownership for delivery.
The result is a more integrated form of climate strategy.
What a decision-ready sustainability function looks like
A sustainability function becomes decision ready when it can provide relevant evidence across the business.
Business decision | Sustainability evidence needed |
|---|---|
Capital investment | Carbon impact, resilience benefits, lifecycle cost, regulatory exposure |
Procurement | Supplier emissions, material traceability, circularity, social and nature risk |
Product development | Lifecycle footprint, material composition, repairability, end-of-life options |
Property and infrastructure | Energy, water, flood, heat, wildfire and whole-life-carbon data |
Finance and insurance | Physical climate exposure, transition risk, scenario analysis and controls |
Corporate communications | Evidence for public claims, methodology, boundaries and governance |
Board oversight | Targets, delivery performance, trade-offs, strategic risks and accountability |
This does not require every company to build a large central sustainability team.
It requires clarity about data ownership, decision rights, evidence quality and collaboration between sustainability, finance, operations, procurement, legal, technology and the board.
The leadership challenge
The World Economic Forum survey suggests that the transition remains uneven.
That is likely to continue.
Some sectors will move quickly because technology is available, customer demand is strong or regulation is clear. Others will face harder trade-offs, higher costs and longer infrastructure cycles.
The companies most likely to make sustained progress will be those that avoid treating sustainability as a separate corporate function.
They will integrate it into how the business allocates capital, designs products, buys materials, manages assets, plans for disruption and communicates with the market.
Sustainability is not becoming easier.
It is becoming more central to business judgement.
The organisations that build the right evidence, governance and decision processes now will be better placed to compete through uncertainty—not despite it.