What’s next for corporate sustainability

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1. The clock of climate change containment risks being put 30 years back by old and new climate denialists

It was no surprise that the new US administration led by President Trump has decided to pull out, again, the United States from the United Nations’ Paris agreement on Jan 20th, 2025, a few hours after his inauguration as President. Donald Trump has consistently remained highly skeptical on the risks of climate change, and his preference for the US-based oil, gas and coal industries over those of renewable power and electric cars, both increasingly dominated by Chinese firms, exacerbated his opposition to climate-friendly investments and regulation.

The surprise was, perhaps, in the speed and scale of imitation that the new attitude of the US government has stimulated, pushing other politicians, especially in Europe, private institutions (like Blackrock) and an increasing number of voices in the public debate to call for a pause, a review or a total U-turn in climate strategies.

After two decades in which Europe, and more recently the United States, have led the global fight to climate change, and at the same time when China is dramatically accelerating its investments, western countries are seeing a growing desire to stop it all.  

While straight climate denialism is still alive and well (especially in United States), a new form of neo-denialism is gaining ground, especially in Europe. It is supported by people saying that man-made climate change is indeed there but the investments and solutions that may address the problem are too costly, have lots of problems of their own and need to be paused. 

These days almost every piece of news appears to vindicate the arguments of climate neo-deniers. Blackout in Spain? Blame renewables, forgetting similar events in 2003 in New York and Italy, when wind power was minimal and solar non-existent. Trump leaving Paris agreement? We should do the same, not to pay US share of the costs of global transition. Is energy in Europe expensive? Blame Green Deal, not the dependency on Russian gas. Do you want zero-carbon energy? Forget wind and solar, the answer is 20 years away (maybe) with low-cost, next generation modular nuclear reactors; better again nuclear fusion. Are European auto OEMs in dire straits?  Blame electric cars, particularly Chinese ones, forgetting the chronic overcapacity of an industry with dwindling internal market and shrinking competitiveness abroad.

So, the mantra these days of climate neo-deniers goes like this “Climate strategies don’t work, let’s restart them from scratch, going for tomorrow’s technologies like carbon capture and (hopefully) low-cost nuclear” and “EU regulation should pause and protect European companies from rising energy costs and Chinese competition”

But climate change does not wait for us. The costs of addressing climate change are highly disputed and the debate whether those costs are higher or lower than the costs caused by not addressing them properly produces wildly different estimates according to various economic studies (from $ 3.5 Trillion per year to 9.2 Trillion). But one thing is clear: allowing emissions to grow will make the costs of climate change grow as well, almost exponentially. Missing the 1.5 °C target, an unavoidable prospect, given today’s emission trajectory, will not make the problem go away, it will just pile up the costs of inaction. The more we wait, the more it will cost us. And we will have, eventually to stop emitting, while having suffered from the protracted and much higher costs of a hotter planet. It is like having a leakage in a pipe in your house. Not repairing it soon will not save money, only make the damage grow. In our book “the great hypocrisies on climate against the bureaucrats of sustainability and the new denialists of climate change”, we have described why the current backlash against sustainability is also the making of its supporters. 

With different angles in the US and Europe.

2. In the US a political backlash against “woke”, fueled by ambiguities in corporate sustainability, is giving new arguments to climate deniers 

Political opposition against climate action in America has always been rooted in a profound disbelief about its benefits, compared to what climate skeptics see as concrete and intolerable costs. “Climate change is a scam”, claimed Donald Trump in his first presidency, and that view was echoed in his more recent dubbing the climate provisions of IRA “the Great Green Scam”.  

The fight against climate change has always been opposed by the republican politicians. Climate change contrarianism is a well-organized movement recently analyzed by the magazine Scientific Reports. With the help of artificial intelligence, it scrutinized 300,000 documents and 174 million words about climate change contrarianism. The result? denials and skepticism are still widely rooted in a large part of the American society, while they are minimal in other western societies, such as Germany, the UK and Canada. The most common arguments: “it is not happening “, It is not human made”, “there are no solutions”.

This position would have become increasingly untenable in the face of growing evidence of climate change effects, were it not for a new angle of attack on climate that has been provided by a poisonous combination of political extremism, intellectual ambiguity on sustainable capitalism and corporate opportunism. All these elements were amply present in the broad movement in support of sustainability that experienced a rapid surge in the 2015-2022 period only to receive a sequence of setbacks in the following 3 years. They allowed climate and sustainability critics to decry a conspiration by left – wing elites controlling mainstream media, academia and finance to use the power of cultural and business institutions to impose their extremist “woke” agenda, contrary to the interests and opinions of ordinary Americans. 

Corporate opportunism, inspiring thousands of initiatives who got quickly the attribute of “greenwashing” and the less familiar “pinkwashing”, for superficial but heavily publicized projects purported to promote inclusion of women, LGBT and racial minorities in corporate hierarchy and society in general, was already evident in the inflation of the so called “green finance” numbers. It was claimed in 2021 that such investments had reached the astonishing level of 35 trillion, because asset managers had started to use the label of “green” for every security pertaining to companies having some form of sustainability targets, including those selling oil and gas, while the truly “green” investments, such as renewables, have been estimated to be only three trillions.

Disaffection by investors to green and sustainable finance was starting to be seen already in 2023, when net inflows of US funds into sustainable funds turned negative. But the hypocrisy was laid bare three years later by the about-face of dozens of companies after the American presidential elections of 2024. 

Corporations were quick to adjust to the new political perspective. Financial institutions, led by Blackrock, are leaving the climate alliances. Meta, Walmart and many other companies are closing “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) programs. Sustainability departments are being dismantled Many corporates have been quick to jettison the entire sustainability activity lumping together climate initiatives with other efforts to preserve biodiversity, protect local communities, enhance inclusion of women and minorities, all under the ESG banner.

Much of this was not a big loss. Several initiatives addressed problems that were too charged politically and mostly irrelevant for companies, like most of the discussions about gender self-determination and how many types of toilets offices should have. They should have been left to the public debate and government institutions to decide. The S of ESG led to several initiatives that addressed problems that were too charged politically. It was the case for Disney, that publicly criticized a controversial decree on education by Republican Governor Ron De Santis and saw some of the privileges it enjoyed in its Florida Theme parks revoked by his administration. It happened also in UK when Coutts Bank, a private banking subsidiary of NatWest, refused to continue serving Nigel Farage, declaring his views “incompatible with the bank’s values on sustainability” and provoking a major controversy that ultimately led to the resignation of the bank’s CEO.

 Other efforts were aimed at issues in which the company could have only a marginal impact. This activity was of course duly reported with hundreds of measures of performance. The disclosure effort was accompanied by statements about how “sustainable” all this activity was, implying that progress on these issues was inevitable and should be everyone’s objective. The inevitability of dire consequences of inaction on these topics was of course a political statement, not a scientific one as is the case for climate, so claiming that companies active in sustainability were pursuing “woke capitalism” was an easy target. 

The biggest vulnerability, however, was in the ideological ambiguity of supporters of corporate sustainability in academia and think-tanks. The claim in support of a sustainable action is that the long-term benefits of it far exceed its costs. The problem is “benefits to whom?”. Supporters often claimed that shareholders benefited as well, but evidence in that sense has remained inconclusive. This would not have been a problem: many corporate activities pursued ostensibly in the interest of shareholders, like M&A, fail to show statistical evidence of their benefits. The problem was the much-repeated claim that pursuing shareholder benefit should not be the primary objective of management. The theory of “stakeholder value” or “shared value” by Porter and Kramer was at the center of this idea.

Statements like “shareholder value is yesterday’s idea”, pronounced in books that were at the same time extolling the virtue of sustainability in increasing value to shareholders have pushed the concept further, putting corporate sustainability on shaky grounds. Because its opponents asked who gave the mandate to managers, boards and asset managers to pursue interests that were not in the economic benefit of shareholders and investors. And accused them of pursuing their own political agenda.

The turn to ideological extremism of many climate activists, on issues ranging from Palestine to criticism of western history and culture was the third ingredient of the cocktail Activists for environment have always been associated to left-wing ideologies, and the same could be said of activists for civil rights, defense of workers and other causes supported by companies under the “S” banner. The new element was the association of large corporations, traditionally more aligned with conservative politics, with these causes and their left-wing, sometimes radical, supporters.    

Climate change, along with the rest of the sustainability agenda, became “woke”. And the risk that the child of energy transition will be thrown out with the dirty water of politically charged ESG agendas has become real in the US.

Meanwhile in Europe we are witnessing very different reasons behind the growing rejection of the idea of corporate sustainability. 

3. In Europe over-regulation and high energy costs are stoking arguments against climate action

Rejection of sustainability is also happening in Europe, with a different angle. Social capitalism was rooted in the European corporate landscape many years before the advent of sustainability and ESG. Criticism in Europe is not against woke capitalism but over-regulation by EU authorities, resulting in a growing list of disclosure obligations for companies, nightmarish regulation for financial institutions. Such excesses are being blamed every day by politicians and companies, large and small, and their associations. 

But problems of climate regulation in Europe run deeper than that.

The current architecture of European climate regulation, the so-called “Green Deal”, has major problems. The purpose of promoting electric cars has led to punitive regulations against European car makers, who have been forced to develop new electric products, after a long period of underinvestment, by the phase out of internal combustion model envisaged by 2035. This, plus fines applied to car makers that were selling too many CO2 emitting cars, should have created a booming market for electric vehicles. Unfortunately, the producers’ push was not associated with enough consumer pull. The purely “market driven” model for recharging infrastructure (that assumes that charge stations have to pay for their investment by mark up in power prices), with little or no investment from the states, has created enormous divergence between markets in northern Europe, where buoyant demand for electric cars has sustained development of recharge infrastructure, and those in southern European countries, where both demand and infrastructure have languished. 

Criticism is also mounting against the cornerstone of European energy transition, the European Trading Scheme (ETS) for CO2 certificates. It has worked well to accelerate development of renewable power generation in Europe, now providing over 40% of EU power but it may not work effectively to decarbonize other sectors. The expected increase of the cost to acquire CO2 certificates is not sufficient to increase further the speed of development of renewable power plants (limited by slow permitting, not economics), while extremely high costs of low-carbon solutions are not fostering green investments in the so called “hard-to-abate” sectors of the industry. Hydrogen-based smelting of iron-ore costs a lot more than the coal-based process currently used in blasting furnaces and no investments are made in it despite penalties for CO2 emissions.  

So, fossil fuels, charged with the growing costs of emissions, remain the marginal source of electricity and power prices increase. This is, paradoxically, reducing incentives to switch to electric power, in industrial uses, cars and electric heating. 

European institutions planned to address the loss of competitivity of European industry stemming from growing energy costs by imposing the so-called “border adjustment”, i.e. tariffs to imported goods from other countries not affected by CO2 limitations. This idea may protect European industry if other countries rapidly follow suit in imposing similar limitations to CO2 but will make it totally uncompetitive if the divergence in energy cost persists.

The regulation of the car industry has been another major source of criticism of the European Green Deal. The prospect of forbidding the sale in Europe of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) cars, i.e. those running with gasoline or diesel fuel, coupled with fines for automakers if the average CO2 emission of their sales mix is not progressively reduced, was deemed an effective incentive to European car makers to develop and sell new electric models. As far as product development was concerned, it worked, because every European car manufacturer developed a new range of electric cars, each investing billions. Sales, though, were not effectively stimulated across the entire continent with Nordic countries shifting to electric models massively, but southern ones mostly shunning them. Regulatory push without consumer pull has been ineffective.

In some markets, like Italy, where most vehicles are parked on the road, the lack of public charging infrastructure is a significant problem. Installing public charging is made difficult by permitting issues on public soil, and the small fleet of electric cars creates a chicken-and-egg problem to pay back for the investment in recharging. The scarcity of recharge points combines with the cost of electricity, the highest in Europe, to make recharging their car an off-putting issue for prospective buyers.

In this way EU regulation, all stick and no carrot towards car producers, combined with chronic overcapacity, a shrinking domestic market and inability of European car makers to compete effectively in China, once a key export market for them, has created a crisis. 

The solution, for many European industrialists and politicians, is just one: scrap any provision in favor of electric mobility and block Chinese imports. It looks tremendously shortsighted, though, because a return to a past made only of ICE cars will not cure overcapacity, nor adverse demographics, nor competitiveness outside Europe, where market growth is. Climate impact will be probably the last of problems for EU car makers.  

3. Climate adaptation is mostly forgotten 

In the meantime, both supporters and detractors of corporate sustainability have forgotten, or at least pushed on the side of the public debate, the issue of adaptation of businesses and societies to temperatures that are now rising significantly beyond the 1.5 C target. True climate denialists claim there is nothing to adapt to, as President Trump did, blaming the massive damage of California wildfires on poor maintenance (“not enough water in the fire hydrants!”). Adaptation is often left in the background also by environmental activists who have their focus on the objective of getting rid of fossil fuels. Some see the risk that adaptation objectives may encourage moral hazard of continuing with current emissions. 

Neo denialists, who claim that climate change is indeed a problem but accuse mitigation efforts of being ineffective, extoll the virtues of adaptation instead, but fail to make specific proposals. A true, comprehensive, adaptation agenda is still far away.

Adaptation can be extremely costly. Protecting coastal properties from sea surges involves massive investments. Providing generalized indoor climatization in poor, already hot countries is generally beyond the means of their economies. But other, lower cost solutions exist. They include better satellite and AI-based monitoring (Israel is pioneering it against wildfires) and simple, water-saving irrigation techniques in agriculture. The latter are not adopted by farmers, who lack the economic incentive of doing so because of very low water prices even in areas of water distress. The situation is particularly outrageous in Europe where the agricultural sector receives massive public subsidies but lacks plans to cut its carbon emissions and water usage in any meaningful way.

Market-based solutions, involving property insurance, have been resisted by policy makers willing to assuage their voters desire to limit the rise of insurance costs, driving insurers away from the riskiest areas in the US. Climate and disaster property insurance in several European countries are adopted very little and a growing debate exists on how the states should become the reinsurers of climate disasters

The essential first step for at least starting to address the adaptation problem, which is to draft regional adaptation scenarios (for different temperature increases, say 2 to 4 degrees above pre-industrial level) with their economic impact, is still not there. The International Energy Agency has made a similar effort for mitigation and decarbonization investments already a few years ago. Adaptation is still lacking its champion. 

 4. Climate action must go back to the roots of its early success: effective interaction between policies, corporate innovation and society

The massive acceleration of productivity that have reduced almost 30-fold the cost of solar panels in twenty years, has sustained the boom of renewables and transformed electric cars into successful products has been made possible by a virtuous interaction among three constituents: the civil society, states and private enterprises that together cooperated in a virtuous cycle interaction we have called the “triangle of sustainability”. Civil society, led by scientists and climate activists, pushed the states to adopt (and announce) new policies, that have created the incentive for companies to innovate and change their business models. Innovation and scale of private investment has made renewables cheaper, accelerating the consensus on the way forward and the agreement on more ambitious targets. Wind and solar power, a niche technology only 20 years ago, have become the main recipients of global investments in energy. Capital expenditure in renewable energy surpassed investments in fossil fuels for the first time in 2023.   

To successfully address climate change, activists, policy makers and corporations should put back in use the triangle.

Starting with policy makers, at the top of out triangle, who need to design a new set of policies for a world where multilateral organizations such as United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) have lost their grip under the attacks on the Trump Administration and the indifference of almost everybody else.

 “Green deals” need to evolve into “smart deals” leveraging arbitrage opportunities between areas where decarbonization costs little per each ton of CO2 removed (such as many Asian countries like China, India and Indonesia) and areas where costs are higher but have ample resources to invest, like Europe. 

The effectiveness of the European Trading Scheme (ETS) in fostering renewable investments in European power generation can in this way be extended to other countries. While CO2 (and electricity) prices in Europe risk an unsustainable surge if the number of available certificates is reduced according to the provision of the current “Green Deal”, allowing investors in renewables in other countries to participate to the European market can accelerate worldwide decarbonization, since reducing CO2 emissions in India and China costs a lot less than in Europe. It can also limit the cost of CO2 and power for European consumers in the next years, when fossil fuel will remain the marginal source of power generation in European markets and contribute to solving the financing problem of renewable investments in less developed countries. It was tried in the early years of our century, with the so called “clean development scheme” of the Kyoto protocol, but it failed, because countries allowed to sell certificates of CO2 “reductions” were not reducing their emissions at all, because they had no CO2 limits in place. The ensuing flood of worthless certificates in Europe depressed the price of certificates and made the market mechanism to incentivize renewable energy totally ineffective until the clean development scheme was phased out in 2012. Now that many countries are setting their CO2 reduction targets, it can be put back in place on firmer grounds.  

On the regulation of its auto industry, European Union can also do a lot better than the current “Green Deal”, with no need to try to put back the climate clock. Contrary to power generation, an industry that is naturally domestic, Europe cannot regulate the global car industry. It is not clear which way and how fast the inevitable global transition towards low carbon cars will occur: whether everything will eventually become electric, favored by massive improvements in battery capacity and costs, or a market segment will remain for ICE cars. Whichever way it goes, three things are clear and should require the right rules and incentives for European industry and consumers not to suffer unnecessary harm:

1. Support the inevitable growth of electric cars by investing in public charge infrastructure ahead of market development and streamlining permitting of charge points in public spaces

2. Provide the necessary relief for an industry (car makers and their value chain) in need of restructuring: avoiding the usual beggar-thy-neighbor temptation of supporting domestic players in each nation at the expense of others, favor cross-Europe mergers, subsidize plant closure, provide social support packages and retraining for workers.

3. Help hopeful survivors to make a transition towards a software-driven business model. Electric cars have much less mechanical parts and mechanical engineering, compensated by more software to optimize battery usage. The transition towards a much more software-intensive business model is not limited to electrification and involves autonomous driving, in-vehicle infotainment and product development and manufacturing processes assisted by AI. European OEMs have already made painful mistakes (VW in autonomous drive investments) but the industry needs to keep trying, and public investment in support of this transition looks like having a better chance of success than trying to stop the climate and technology clocks at the same time.    

The second vertex of the triangle - civil society -also needs to change. Particularly the climate activists. Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future movement played a unique role in the early 2010s by attracting attention to the climate emergency. The appeal she had went largely beyond the environmentalist movement because she reminded everyone that the climate crisis was damaging younger generations more than anyone else. But she completely lost credibility with politically moderate audiences when she added to the criticism of politicians for not acting quickly enough on climate (the famous “Blah, blah, blah!”) a rejection of western democracies and the support of a terrorist organizations such as Hamas. Activists need to become less moved by extreme ideologies and become more able to engage ordinary citizens, often attracted by the arguments of the neo-denialists. 

Another change of mindset is essential among a broader group in civil society, possibly representing most of it, and including both climate skeptics and environment-friendly individuals: they should both stop looking at the fight against climate change as a zero-sum game with economic growth. It is the view that prevails among the denialists and neo-denialists: fighting climate change is foolish because it is too costly. On the opposite side of the climate debate there is often a similar assumption when people say: “our current economic model is unsustainable, we should stop pursuing endless growth”.

The idea is wrong because it postulates the existence of a scenario in which humanity can continue its economic growth and wreck the climate, to be chosen (or refused) as an alternative to another one in which we curb our growth to spend on climate protection. 

The first scenario simply does not exist. Wrecking climate will wreck our economy as well: agriculture, which has taken thousands of years to adapt to our climate, will be made a lot less productive; housing and infrastructure will be damaged, the lives of billions of individuals living in areas that will become too hot to be inhabited will be upended. Hence, the choice is really to spend money now to fight and adapt to climate change or to spend more money later. In the meantime, innovation and productivity growth and, hopefully, the right policies will make climate investment fully affordable for the world economy. 

Of course, the affordability will not be for every country, and poor ones will face costs that will be difficult to bear, especially in adaptation. But the zero-sum mentality will only make things worse because waiting (as advocated by denialists) will make the adaptation expense grow, and slow down rich countries’ growth (as imagined by anti-growth environmentalists) will make finding resources for foreign aid even more politically difficult.

In addition to that, there is also a widespread overestimate of the economic costs of the transition to a decarbonized economy This happens because investments in new, low-carbon technologies, initially costlier than existing ones based on fossil fuels, get cheaper as innovation, scale and experience accumulate. It has happened in renewable power, now at grid parity in many areas of the world and may soon happen to batteries and heat pumps. 

The third vertex in the sustainability triangle is made by corporations and businesses in general, and they also must change.

5. Companies should reinvent corporate sustainability and ESG, rediscovering shareholder value and the true meaning of the “sustainability” word  

Corporations must profoundly change their attitude towards climate change. They must look at it through the lenses of opportunity and innovation, not the lens of compliance. They should adopt the mentality of successful startups, asking themselves what are the needs that their clients and their business model will have in the future, when the world discovers that addressing climate change is no longer optional. In this way, they can create true value for their shareholders, not “balancing” it with the supposed value for other stakeholders they are struggling to measure in their sustainability reports.

A few innovators and leaders have done it. Tesla has become the world’s most valuable car maker by proving that electric cars can be a sexy product. Two European utilities, Iberdrola from Spain and Enel from Italy, have preserved shareholder value by betting earlier and more aggressively than their competitors from France and Germany on renewable generation and getting rid of most of their fossil generation. The CEO of Enel Franco Tatò created a renewable division, Enel Green Power, back in 1999, but the division became the growth engine of Enel only in 2014, when its former chief, Francesco Starace, took the helm of the company. 

Similar opportunities exist in many other industries.

In many sectors of the economy, from cement to air transport, there are still no zero-emission solutions that can work on an industrial scale. In sectors where they do exist, such as road transport, heating and electricity generation, the cost of adopting them for poor countries is unsustainable. Agriculture is responsible for a quarter of global emissions and has not even begun to reduce them.  Risk management processes of insurance companies will need profound rethinking because of the skyrocketing costs of claims generated by the adaptation process to global warming 

Innovation is flourishing all over the world to face mitigation and adaptation challenges. Thousands of companies are already working on new technologies. 

Corporations willing to participate in this opportunity must take a hard look at their ESG processes. Many topics beyond climate in the Environmental areas (the E), or in the “social” (S) areas, need to be critically revisited. Companies must ask themselves whether addressing those issues will truly make a difference in how sustainable they are. In the literal, pre-ESG sense of the word, which means that addressing the topic can make a difference in whether the company’s survival and prosperity is at risk. 

This is the case for climate, since the consequences of a non-mitigated global climate crisis can upend almost every business. The energy and automotive value chains will face a revolution. Some products (like boilers of coal-fired power plants or car mufflers) will disappear, and suppliers of all other parts will face customers with different business models, often coming from different geographies. Property insurers need to learn to use AI and satellite technology to better predict the costs they will incur for climate-related events, such as fires or floods, and improve their pricing in underwriting. Food and apparel suppliers will have to assess the risks of climate for the agricultural commodities they use, from cocoa to coffee, from cotton to wool, and diversify away from those that are at risk. Investors in data centers and the entire technology sector should be concerned not only by energy supply (they have been doing it for years), but also by water consumption. Water used in cooling is currently too cheap to justify a business case for its recycling, but things may change and put business continuity at risk.  

The other “E” and “S” dimensions may lead to similar situations on a company-by-company basis. Facilities operating in countries with lax environmental regulations may be shut down if their impact on the local environment gets into the radar of local authorities, often because of protests by local communities. Consumers around the world may boycott brands with suppliers operating with inhumane or dangerous working conditions, like the case of Nike’s crisis about underpaid child labor of its suppliers. 

When this is the case the E and the S have a true strategic dimension, but most ESG processes are not capturing it. Because they measure and monitor too many variables, so boards and management lose focus. But also, and more critically, because they are driven by quantitative improvement targets that are set across the company, such as reducing the total amount of waste produced, or water consumed, or pollutants released. So, they measure improvement in the total, which is typically made by somewhat improving almost every process and facility. The strategic issue, that should be addressed by totally eradicating the truly risky practices, often stays there.  

When this is not the case, these dimensions should be analyzed as opportunities to improve the business, by saving costs (like reducing water usage), enhancing the company’s brand reputation (with environment or socially conscious customers) or improving the attractiveness to key talent, like women, who may not like an environment too “full of masculine energy”. Management should stop using the sustainability word for them, because no real threat is posed to the survival of a business. 

The change on the G is simple, but profound. Boards should reaffirm that their mission is to create shareholder value, which is a different thing from short-term profits. They should ask management for strategies to take advantage of potential disruptions in both climate mitigation and adaptation. They should identify, if they exist, the handful of other environmental or social issues that could seriously endanger the company’s survival, and ask for a serious risk mitigation strategy, not a long list of improvements to show how responsible they are in E, S and G, that will only cause accusations of hypocrisy to be added to the charges they will face should a crisis occur.

The current political backlash against climate policies and corporate sustainability can be an unprecedented opportunity to make climate-conscious policy makers, corporate executives and opinion leaders to make climate action more effective, pragmatic and successful.

It is a crisis we should not waste.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.