Why 2030 cramps our imaginations

This is article 2 of 4 in What the Future Wants from Us series. Here is article 1.

From the perspective of 2037, if you can imagine yourself there for a moment, the "great deadline panic" of 2028 and 2029 already reads like deep history. Leaders frozen in the oncoming headlights, acutely aware they would miss targets they had declared in public. Some did not much care, arguing the numbers had been set by long-departed predecessors. But others fretted that the failure would further corrode citizen, voter, consumer and investor trust—as, in the event, it often did.

It had already become blindingly clear that the Sustainable Development Goals would fall well short. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2026 confirmed it with four years still on the clock. Li Junhua, then UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, put it plainly at the time: of the 139 targets for which reliable historical trends could be computed, only 36 per cent were on track or making moderate progress. Nearly half were moving too slowly. Fifteen per cent had slipped below their 2015 baseline.

Progress, yes. But nowhere near the promises made in the peak period of public commitments. And that's why I conclude that we are going to relax at least some of our deadlines.

Why the 2037 horizon trumps 2030

Why? Well, recall Amara's Law. We tend to overestimate a technology's effects in the short run but underestimate them in the long run. The same holds true for the devoutly prayed-for sustainability transition. In headline form, that's the case for resetting our collective clock.

And the date is not arbitrary. 2037 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future, the report that gave "sustainable development" its modern meaning. Which is perhaps the natural moment to ask what half a century of effort has delivered.

Looking back from that same 2037 perspective, the late 2020s turned out to be the low point of what some saw as a giant economic and political U-bend. A time when stressed, interconnected systems—climate, energy, finance, food, supply chains, information—behaved less like machines than ecosystems, prone to sudden, cascading shifts.

It was a time of Swans, "Black Swans" in Nassim Taleb's terminology, that is rare, high-impact events, obvious only in hindsight. But also of Grey Swans, which had been obvious for quite some time, but still surprised many. And then there were the Green Swans—my mirror-image term for exponential, positive, self-reinforcing breakthroughs that flip systems toward regeneration.

In search of pointers to the future, let's look at the mysterious case of the vanishing Chief Sustainability Officer, or CSO, and at the long-standing challenge of embedding more radical people, with insurgent mindsets, in incumbent organizations.

The vanishing CSO

The Chief Sustainability Officer role emerged in the new century's first decade—the title usually traced to DuPont's Linda Fisher, appointed around 2004—with roots in the environment, health-and-safety and corporate-responsibility functions of the 1980s and '90s. It spread fast as net-zero pledges, ESG ratings, disclosure rules and supply-chain checks multiplied, until 79 per cent of large companies had one by 2025.

Then came the turn. With the ESG recession, political pushback and cost-cutting, the Weinreb Group's 2026 tracker showed the number of US CSOs falling for the first time in fifteen years, and average seniority declining with it. Many still in post reported experiencing burnout.

By the 2030s, many core responsibilities had moved outward—to the CFO, who now routinely priced climate risk, and to chief risk, legal and economics officers. This left the empty corner office genuinely ambiguous from the viewpoint of 2037. It could mean sustainability had finally become everyone's job. Or it could mean quiet abandonment. From outside the building, the two look pretty much identical.

Tempered, not broken

Underneath the question of what job description and office are needed sits a harder one. How do you plant radical ideas, and radical individuals, inside established institutions without the idea or the person being absorbed, burned out or otherwise lost along the way? Remember the parable of new wine in old bottles?

We now know a good deal about this. The main label, tempered radical, comes from Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully: people who feel connected to their organization but disagree with some of its values, and so push for change gradually, through small wins rather than open revolt. A close cousin is the social intrapreneur, making the case for social or environmental innovation in the company's own language—an idea that travelled through SustainAbility's 2008 field guide, a project I co-led with Maggie Brenneke, and through the later work of David Grayson and colleagues.

Such people are disproportionately valuable and disproportionately at risk. The classic failure modes are burnout, cynicism, co-option, and unnoticed exits that take hard-won tacit knowledge out the door. Isolation is the common thread. Many we have spoken to over the years describe it as being in a minority of one.

What helps them last is unglamorous and well-evidenced: peer networks that normalize the struggle; senior sponsorship, so nobody faces every fight alone; legitimacy and framing skills; a real mandate with protected time and a small budget; career paths where challenging the institution advances a career rather than ending it. You cannot simply hire radicals and expect results—you must build an enabling system around them.

Early respondents to our 2026 Routes to Transformation survey made one further distinction I keep returning to. Asked what "radical" should now mean, some redefined it: not a dramatic break from the system, they said, but the hard, realistic work of changing it from inside. Radicalism measured by how much it transforms an institution, not by how loudly it opposes one. My sense, though, is that this is internal radicalism—whereas what we increasingly need is external radicalism, reinventing markets and, ultimately, politics.

The advisory board's take

Again, there are disagreements. Léa makes the accountability case well. "A named officer can be held to account. A responsibility 'shared across the C-suite' can end up being held by no one. I don't want the office preserved for its own sake—I want the duty to outlast the office. Absorb the job if you must. But write down who owns it and make the outcomes blindingly clear, or you haven't embedded it. You've buried it."

Kwame pushes back. "In my markets we never had the luxury of a separate sustainability office. It was in the business, or it was nothing." Hiving the work off into a titled role always looked to him like a Global North indulgence, and the vanishing CSO reads as the rest of the world catching up. His test is financial, and the sharpest in the session. "I care about one thing—whether the money follows the mandate. Move the work to the CFO and fund it, and you've made it real. Move it there and starve it, and you've just hidden your retreat."

Maya admits to some confusion. "If they're moving the work to the CFO because they mean it, fine. If they're moving it there so nobody must answer for it, that's a layoff with a nicer press release. I've stopped assuming I can tell which." On the support systems meant to keep insiders alive: "A mentorship scheme and a wellness app is not support. It's a sedative. Give me protected time, a small budget and a boss who takes the blows when I push, and I'll stay and get this right."

Chair Seven

Ingrid, 41, executive-search partner

The seventh seat this time goes to someone who reads this market for a living. Ingrid has spent fifteen years placing sustainability leaders, and is now a partner in a firm that folded its own sustainability practice into the wider industrial team in 2026—a detail she offers unprompted, as the whole story in miniature.

"I can tell you almost to the quarter when the CSO started vanishing," she says. "It's when the mandate stopped arriving as a stand-alone search and started appearing as three lines inside the CFO's spec, and the COO's, and the general counsel's. In 2019 I ran twelve dedicated group-level searches a year. Last year, three—two of them at a lower band than the person leaving."

She is precise where the rest of us only gesture. "The difference between mainstreaming and abandonment is visible in the document. Absorption means the responsibilities appear in the other job descriptions, with budget and a reporting line. Abandonment means they appear nowhere, and everyone smiles and calls it 'shared'."

She places the tempered radicals too. "They're the candidates who interview badly for the wrong reasons—they tell you what is broken. Fifteen years ago I coached that out of them. Now I look for it, because the clients who last are the ones who hire them. But the pattern after that is grim: eighteen to thirty months, then promotion out of the work, or an exit. The ones who survive have a sponsor at the top who owns the risk. Not a network. Not a charter. A named executive who provides air cover."

In summary

The gist of what the panel members say is: absorb the work into finance, risk, operations and the board by all means—that was always the goal—but write down who owns it, fund it, and lodge the long-horizon parts somewhere that can think in decades. Do that, and the vanishing CSO is a sign that the underlying idea finally grew up. Do it to make the responsibility disappear, and you have not mainstreamed sustainability. You have sidelined it and called the empty office progress.

These four posts are spinouts from my ongoing work on the Green Paper, 2037: The Sustainability Outlook, launching in October 2026, with a White Paper to follow in January 2027. The opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Next in this series: Build Fast And Write The Rules. A story about Asia, smart regulation, and AI—and whose standards we will be living under in 2037 (due on 22-09-2026). Then, finally, Who—Or What—Still Can't Vote? (due on 29-09-2026¹).

This article is also published on John Elkington's Substack. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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