What the CSO becomes

This is article 3 of 4 in The New Age of Sustainability series. Here is article 3.

Yes, there is a future for the chief sustainability officer. But it is not the job most CSOs were hired to do, and the shake-out of existing people in the role will run for years yet. Still, the data points to several possible future paths, and they remain choices rather than a fate.

What is clear is that a central part of the current CSO role will be under growing pressure. The disclosure-facing role, the CSO as the person who owns the report, the ratings submissions and the frameworks, is the role our 610 experts price at just 15%, the lowest of all 64 interventions tested. Machine-to-machine reporting is already arriving, with AI playing a central role. So key elements of that job are not coming back.

Three futures

Here, in staccato language, are some of the key options we already see evolving:

• The integrator. Owns no levers, but connects the people who do, including risk management, strategic procurement, treasury, mergers and acquisitions, and legal counsel. High influence, limited budget, and completely dead without executive sponsorship. Influence without ownership is harder than owning the agenda, and most CSOs were not trained, selected or resourced for it.
• The absorbed. Migrates into finance and enterprise risk. This is the likeliest path. It gives up the licence to argue for change and takes, in exchange, a job the company will always need. In disrupted times, risk becomes the integrating discipline. Physical, geopolitical, supply, liability and transition risk increasingly converge, and someone has to hold them in one frame. Chief risk officers could become the natural home of much of what the CSO used to do.
• The transition strategist. Relocates to where capital is allocated, and products are evolved and launched. Potentially, this role offers the highest leverage of the three, and yet we see the fewest people currently equipped for it.

Whichever path may be taken, the job itself is likely to split in two.

Enable: translate regulation into procurement language, build the carbon-price case the CFO can take to the board, sequence the work, arbitrate between functions that have never had to coordinate, and carry the memory of what has already been tried.

And keep others honest: the failure modes of the new theory include compliance minimalism, liability management mistaken for harm reduction, prices set too low to bite, and due-diligence clauses that push risk onto suppliers instead of removing it.

Someone has to ask whether the outcome changed, not whether the box was ticked. That second half is not decorative. It is the difference between a hardened agenda and a well-documented, softer one.

An agenda carried by tax officials, supervisors and litigators alone could be powerful but also politically brittle, with no public constituency to defend it when the wind changes. Building that constituency, inside the company, across the sector and beyond it, is work no CFO or general counsel is going to do. So we have very much not seen the back of the sustainability function.

The context this lands in

Let’s take a quick look at four sectors and four different problems. According to our 2026 survey:

Business is expected to lead and yet seen not to be delivering. Expert ratings of private-sector contribution fell in 2025 to their lowest since tracking began in 2012, recovering only to 19% this year. Recognition of examples of corporate leadership sticks to the same short list year after year, a sign the field is not gaining traction.

Ask yourself what the mainstream sustainability movement actually knows about Palantir, SpaceX, BYD, CATL or ICBC. The impending shift will take us from reporting to collective market-shaping, and from a separate function to commercial goals owned across the team. Integration within companies is the highest-rated corporate lever at 70%, which implies the eventual absence of a separate function, or a rapid evolution in what that function does.

Finance has the sharpest message in the survey. Impact investing lost ten points, the largest fall anywhere, to 63%. Paradoxically, meanwhile, mainstream ESG integration rose nine points, also to 63%. The message is not to do less in capital markets; it is to stop siloing it in a separate product line.

Institutional investors are rated excellent by just 14%. The role that matters most here is the prudential supervisor: a technocratic mandate insulated from electoral backlash, working through capital requirements and stress testing rather than persuasion. A very small number of people, in short, potentially with disproportionate leverage.

Government looks like a story of collapse but is not. National governments score just 8% excellent, but they have scored between 5% and 9% for fourteen straight years. That is a constant, not a crisis. What has changed is where capacity and energy are seen to sit. Cities are the only actor in fourteen years whose rating has trended steadily upward, reaching 27%. If we want experimentation and innovation that serves billions of people, this is probably where the biggest opportunities for movement can now be found.

Education is the sector still most trusted, with academia and research rated 46% excellent, second only to NGOs. But business schools and universities can have a profound impact on how tomorrow’s leaders think and, through executive coaching, on influencing today’s leaders.

Interestingly, the challenge of getting nature, people and skills onto the same books as money, counting them as assets a company can build up or destroy, rates 66%. So, to take just one example, answering that challenge clearly belongs in the accountancy, actuarial and legal syllabi. In the process, it can reach far more decision-makers than any MBA.

Standalone degrees producing reporting specialists are training graduates for a market priced at 15%. Worth pondering. And the paradox worth ending on: as the agenda hardens and non-sustainability roles pick up the strain, there may be more demand for sustainability education, not less, just designed and delivered differently.

The final piece in this series explores the question of whether 2030 or 2037 is the better time horizon for our sustainability ambitions and efforts.

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